Live at the BBC (Beatles album)

• 1. Introduction

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  Live at the BBC, the Beatles album released in 1994, gathers 56 songs and 13 tracks of spoken dialogue, all taken from radio shows of the early 1960s. For fans it ended a long drought. The last official Beatles release of unissued performances had been The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl in 1977. The last to include unheard songs was Let It Be, back in 1970.

  The recordings were not new. They had been floating around for years. So why did an official version take so long to appear? Where did the tapes come from, when the broadcaster that made the programmes had no habit of keeping them? And who decided which performances deserved to be heard again?

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• 2. Fifty-Two Programmes

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  On the 7th of March 1962, the Beatles recorded an appearance for a BBC radio series called Teenager's Turn - Here We Go. It was the first of 52 radio programmes they would make for the corporation. The last, a special titled The Beatles Invite You to Take a Ticket to Ride, was recorded on the 26th of May 1965.

  The busiest stretch came in 1963 and 1964, which together hold 47 of those appearances. Ten of them were for Saturday Club. Another 15 were for Pop Go the Beatles, a weekly series of their own that began in June 1963.

  Across all the broadcasts, listeners heard 275 performances covering 88 different songs. Most were cover versions. The band had written few songs of their own by then, so they drew on the repertoire from their early stage act, built around material from the late 1950s and early 1960s.

  The earliest broadcast on the album comes from Saturday Club on the 26th of January 1963, recorded four days before it aired.

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• 3. Mono and the Clock

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  The BBC's studios could not match the equipment at Abbey Road. They recorded in mono only, with no multitracking, and allowed just basic overdubbing. Time was tight, so the group could attempt few retakes of any song.

  A handful of programmes went out live. Most were taped days ahead, and sometimes weeks. That gap is why the album's songs count as studio performances played as though live, rather than recordings from a concert hall.

  The corporation did not usually archive the session tapes or the master tapes of the shows. Limited storage space was one reason. Contractual restrictions were another.

  The schedule shows how compressed the work could be. Tracks broadcast on the 6th, 13th and the 20th of August 1963 were all recorded on the 16th of July 1963.

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• 4. The Bootleg Trail

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  The first collection of Beatles radio sessions was a bootleg called Yellow Matter Custard, issued in 1971. Its 14 songs were probably off-air home recordings, taped by listeners during the original broadcasts. Other bootlegs in the following years carried more performances with the same thin, tinny sound. In 1980, a bootleg titled The Beatles Broadcasts offered 18 BBC songs in far better quality.

  The BBC, nicknamed the Beeb, marked the 20th anniversary of the group's first appearance in 1982. It aired a two-hour radio special, The Beatles at the Beeb, that mixed performances with interviews. When the show was syndicated abroad, it grew to three hours.

  In 1988, BBC Radio 1 broadcast a more thorough series, The Beeb's Lost Beatles Tapes, in 14 half-hour episodes. Researchers found only a small number of original tapes. Many more performances came from vinyl copies of the programmes, which the BBC Transcription Department had pressed for stations around the world.

  By then, a 13-album bootleg series, also called The Beatles at the Beeb, had appeared. In 1993, a nine-CD box set called The Complete BBC Sessions surpassed it. Great Dane released it in Italy, where copyright protection for the broadcasts had expired. It held performances from 44 of the 52 appearances, including many complete shows. That left eight appearances without any presence in the set.

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• 5. Martin's Choices

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  By late 1991, a report said that EMI was preparing an album of the BBC material, and an official release had been discussed as early as 1982. The work of assembling sources fell largely to Kevin Howlett, a BBC Radio producer. He had already partly rebuilt an archive for The Beeb's Lost Beatles Tapes.

  Howlett searched for more. He tracked down tapes kept by people who had taken part in the original sessions. After his series aired, other listeners contacted him about home recordings of further broadcasts. Remaining gaps were filled with recordings from bootlegs.

  From this pool, longtime Beatles producer George Martin chose the tracks. He weighed the quality of the sound and the quality of the playing. His special interest was the 36 songs the Beatles never performed on their official releases. Thirty of them made the album.

  Three of the six rejected songs came from 1962, and none of the 1962 recordings was judged good enough for commercial release. They were Roy Orbison's "Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream)", the Coasters' arrangement of "Bésame Mucho", and Joe Brown's "A Picture of You". Pete Best was on drums for all three.

  Two more, from early 1963, were left out for poor sound. They were "Beautiful Dreamer", a Gerry Goffin and Jack Keller adaptation of a Stephen Foster song, and Chuck Berry's "I'm Talking About You". The sixth was Carl Perkins' "Lend Me Your Comb", from July 1963. Its sound was very good, so the reason for dropping it was unclear. People speculated it was being saved for later, and the following year it did appear on Anthology 1.

  Among the chosen songs was "I'll Be on My Way", a Buddy Holly-style ballad. It is the only Lennon-McCartney composition the Beatles recorded for the BBC with no studio version available. It was also the first of their compositions to be given away without the band trying to record it themselves. It went to Billy J. Kramer, another Brian Epstein client recording for Parlophone, who released it as the B-side of his cover of "Do You Want to Know a Secret".

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• 6. Sound and Release

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  Abbey Road engineer Peter Mew faced tapes from wildly different sources. He used audio manipulation software to reduce noise, repair minor drop-outs, and equalise the tracks so they sounded more consistent from one to the next. The result was generally judged better than the best bootleg equivalents then available. A small number of tracks were noted as exceptions.

  The album came out in the United Kingdom on the 30th of November 1994, on Apple and Parlophone. The United States followed on the 6th of December 1994, on Apple and Capitol.

  One slip made it onto the back of the CD case. The listing for "So How Come (No One Loves Me)" carried the extra word "Top" at the start of the title. The error was fixed for the 2001 reissue.

  In March 1995, "Baby It's You" was released as a single. It carried three other BBC songs that were not on the album. Two of those would eventually be found on a second BBC volume.

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• 7. Reception

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  In Canada, Live at the BBC debuted at number 1. In the United States it peaked at number 3 on the Billboard 200, and in the United Kingdom it reached number 1. It sold an estimated 8 million copies worldwide in its first year. It also placed in several other countries. It reached 5 in Finland and 3 in Italy, and it appeared on year-end charts in the Netherlands for 1994 and in Austria, Germany, Japan and the United States for 1995. Its year-end position on the US Billboard 200 was 46.

  Critics were divided. A reviewer for Time said the set held "few buried treasures" but called it, "as a time capsule", "invaluable". Another reviewer found it "worth hearing" yet a "quaint memento", in which the Beatles sound "scruffy and fairly tame".

  Anthony DeCurtis, writing for Rolling Stone, was warmer. He called the album "an exhilarating portrait of a band in the process of shaping its own voice and vision" and praised the "irresistible" spirit and energy of the playing.

  The album earned a Grammy nomination for Best Historical Album.

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• 8. The 2013 Remaster

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  On the 11th of November 2013, a remastered reissue of Live at the BBC arrived alongside On Air - Live at the BBC Volume 2, a second set of BBC Radio broadcasts. The two volumes were also released together as a double set.

  That second volume gave a home to songs that had been passed over in 1994. "Lend Me Your Comb", "Beautiful Dreamer" and "I'm Talking About You" all appear on it.

  The remaster made a number of small changes. It added two speech tracks, "What is it, George?" as track 17 on disc 1 and "Ringo? Yep!" as track 3 on disc 2. It also added one song, a closing version of "From Us To You" at the end of disc 2. The opening version now has announcer speech over the music, which the original release lacked.

  The crossfades between tracks were removed, so each track now starts and ends cleanly. The one exception is the crowd noise between "Some Other Guy" and "Thank You Girl".

  The original release had a speech track, "Have a Banana!", that could not be separated from "A Hard Day's Night". The two were merged into one track. The few closing seconds, in which Ringo is actually offered a banana, were cut.

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