Live at the BBC (Beatles album)

Recording The Beatles performed for 52 BBC Radio programmes, beginning with an appearance on the series ''Teenager's Turn—Here We Go, recorded on 7 March 1962, and ending with the special The Beatles Invite You to Take a Ticket to Ride, recorded on 26 May 1965. 47 of their BBC appearances occurred in 1963 and 1964, including 10 on Saturday Club and 15 on their own weekly series Pop Go the Beatles'', which began in June 1963. As the Beatles had not accumulated many original songs by this time, the majority of their BBC performances consisted of cover versions, drawing on the repertoire that they had developed for their early stage act. In total, 275 performances of 88 different songs were broadcast, of which 36 songs never appeared on their studio albums. Several of the programmes aired live, but most were recorded days (or occasionally weeks) ahead of the broadcast date. Earlier collections and presentations The first collection of Beatles BBC performances was the bootleg album Yellow Matter Custard, issued in 1971, consisting of 14 songs that were probably off-air home recordings made during the original radio broadcasts. Some additional performances with similar "tinny" sound appeared on other bootlegs in the following years; then in 1980, the bootleg The Beatles Broadcasts was released featuring 18 BBC songs with superior sound quality. The more comprehensive series ''The Beeb's Lost Beatles Tapes'' was broadcast by BBC Radio 1 in 1988 as 14 half-hour episodes. When gathering material for that series, only a small number of original tapes were found; many more performances were obtained from vinyl recordings of the programmes that the BBC Transcription Department had made to distribute to BBC stations around the world. the set contained performances from 44 of the Beatles' 52 BBC appearances, including many complete shows. Compilation and release An official Beatles BBC album was being planned as early as 1982, and it was reported that "EMI was preparing an album" of the BBC material by late 1991. To supplement the archive he had partially rebuilt for ''The Beeb's Lost Beatles Tapes'', BBC Radio producer Kevin Howlett sought out additional sources, such as tapes kept by people involved in the original sessions; others had contacted him after the series aired to inform him of their own home recordings of additional broadcasts. In all, 56 songs were chosen for the album, along with some banter among the group and the hosts. Abbey Road engineer Peter Mew used audio manipulation software to reduce noise, repair minor drop-outs and equalise to a more consistent sound from one track to the next. The resulting sound quality was considered generally better than the best equivalent bootlegged versions available at the time, although a small number of tracks were noted as exceptions. Live at the BBC was released on 30 November 1994 in the UK (Apple/Parlophone PCSP 726), and on 6 December 1994 in the United States (Apple/Capitol CDP 7243-8-31796-2-6). The track listing on the back of the CD case inadvertently included the word "Top" at the start of the song title "So How Come (No One Loves Me)"; the listing was corrected for the 2001 reissue. When "Baby It's You" was released as a single in March 1995, it contained three other BBC songs that were not included in the album, two of which would eventually be found on volume two. 2013 remaster The 11 November 2013 remastered reissue features a number of minor changes. The reissue includes two additional speech tracks, "What is it, George?" (track 17 on disc 1), and "Ringo? Yep!" (track 3 on disc 2), and one additional song, the closing version of "From Us To You" at the end of disc 2. The opening version of “From Us To You” has announcer speech over the music, which was not present in the original version. The reissue removes the crossfades between tracks, providing clean starts and endings for each track except one, the crowd noise between Some Other Guy and Thank You Girl. The speech track "Have a Banana!" from the original version was not separable from "A Hard Day's Night", so the song and speech were merged into a single track, though the last few seconds where Ringo is actually offered a banana was cut out. ==Reception==