The Beatles Albums, The Beatles Live at the BBC

The Beatles Albums – The Beatles Live at the BBC   

Released in 1994 by Apple Records (in cooperation with BBC Enterprises, Ltd.), The Beatles, Live at the BBC is a digitally-remastered compilation album featuring a selection of “live-in-the-studio” Beatles performances originally aired on various BBC Light Programme radio shows between 1963 and 1965.  (The Light Programme radio station broadcast mainstream “light” entertainment and music from 1945 to 1967, when it became BBC Radio 2.)  Initially available on LP, cassette, and CD, this collection consists of 56 songs—30 never released by The Beatles–and 13 tracks of on-air chit-chat and banter.   

A veritable goldmine of forgotten studio sessions, lost performances, and home recordings of BBC broadcasts, Live at the BBC lets fans share in the music that first brought the Beatles to international attention.  (This collection is of particular interest to American fans not familiar with Beatles’ music prior to release of their original material.)  And while this is not the first such collection of Beatles BBC recordings to reach the public (one of the most popular, the 1971 bootleg Yellow Matter Custard), all earlier releases were low-quality, tinny, third-generation copies of home recordings.   

Selected from appearances spanning from Teenager’s Turn—Here We Go (March 7, 1962) to their special The Beatles Invite You to Take a Ticket to Ride (May 26, 1965), these 56 songs were singled-out from a total of 88 different tunes performed during 275 live (in-the-studio) performances aired on popular BBC radio shows like Top Gear, Saturday Club (10 appearances), Easy Beat, and their own, Pop Goes the Beatles (15 appearances).  In addition to 43 cover versions of some of the most popular tunes of the era (like Ray Charles’ “I Got a Woman,” Buddy Holly’s “Crying, Waiting, Hoping,” and Larry Williams’ “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”), fans get to hear live recorded performances of 13 Lennon-McCartney chart-toppers like “I Saw Her Standing There,”  “Can’t Buy Me Love,” and “I’m a Loser.”  Also included in this collection is “I’ll Be on My Way,” the only Lennon-McCartney composition The Beatles recorded for the BBC but never for their own use; the first of several tunes passed on to other artists—this one to singer Billy J. Kramer (with the Dakotas), another British act managed by Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein.   

Although The Beatles, Live at the BBC is a fine addition to any Beatles music library, its greatest worth to die-hard Beatlemaniacs may be the insight it provides into the diverse musical influences that helped shape the band into the Rock giants they became.  From the King-Goffin composition “Keep Your Hands Off My Baby” to the Bacharach-David tune “Baby It’s You,” the (Smokey) Robinson “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me” to the Kesler-Feathers “I Forgot to Remember to Forget,” it becomes evident that the Beatles drew from the most talented and prolific songwriters of the time—and ultimately, surpassed them all.   

While the remastered 2001 reissue of The Beatles, Live at the BBC is essentially unchanged from the original, fans should note that the November 2013 reissue features minor changes in both track listing and editing—most significantly, the addition of three new tracks.  Although the only musical change is the version of “From Us To You” used (end of Disc Two), between  Chuck Berry’s “Carol” and Buzz Cason’s “Soldier of Love [Lay Down Your Arms]” (Disc One, tracks #16 and #17), the 31-second snippet, “What is it, George?” has been sandwiched in, and “Have a Banana” (Disc Two, Track #3) has been fused with “A Hard Day’s Night” and replaced with “Ringo? Yep!”