Long sleeves for the summer

So here I am, breaking my own sabbatical for a one-off post to basically publicise my own YouTube content. Shameless, right? But this is what happens when you have a sort out.

For combing through a box of old cables, adapters and other tech ephemera, I stumbled upon my first MP3 player, the rather splendid Sony NW-E005 (left). Basically a glorified USB stick with a headphone socket and a dot-matrix display. I fired it up to see what was on it and was unsurprised to find all the usual suspects. It's nearly 20 years old but, of course, my tastes haven't really changed, so there weren't too many surprises.

However, I did find three slightly rare Gene radio session tracks. As far as I'm aware, none of these ever had any kind of official release, and were previously only available on the bootleg Lost in the Fog, curated and made available as a digital download by Gene super-fan Lewis Slade. But sadly even Lewis's website is gone now, so I guess if you don't have the bootleg already, finding a copy is going to be hard. I know I downloaded it, so it's probably on an old laptop somewhere. But back then, these are the three tracks I recognised for their quality and rarity, enough to be the only three I put on my MP3 player. Which means that now, I can put them up on YouTube for everyone to enjoy (and I didn't want to wait another seven months for my sabbatical to end before I could broadcast that fact).

First up, well, I don't think there have been too many Take That songs on this blog over the years. But here's Gene covering Back For Good for Steve Lamacq back in January 2000, and having a good laugh doing so, by the sound of it.

And then there are two tracks recorded for Gideon Coe's 6 Music show in November 2004, just a few short weeks before the band's last ever gigs. It's not the whole band - Martin and Steve run through a beautiful acoustic Long Sleeves for the Summer ("one from the mid-Sixties"), and then Martin is accompanied by someone called Howard on piano for the sadly prophetic Let Me Move On. Enjoy.

And what do all the serious YouTubers say? "Don't forget to like, comment and subscribe!" Or do forget, you know. I'm even less prolific on YouTube than I am here.