Pre-sale of the week is The Complete BBC Sessions by Led Zeppelin, out on 16 September.
Led Zeppelin’s upcoming remaster of 1997’s double-platinum BBC Sessions includes eight previously unheard songs. Titled The Complete BBC Sessions, the album will be available in deluxe CD and vinyl sets, as well as a super-deluxe box set.
The project collects Zeppelin live recordings made by BBC radio between 1969 and 1971, showing, according to Jimmy Page, “in graphic detail just how organic the group was. Led Zeppelin was a band that would change things around substantially each time it played. … We were becoming tighter and tighter, to the point of telepathy.”
Among the unreleased songs are three from a 1969 session that was previously thought to be lost after the BBC wiped from the archive: ‘Dazed and Confused’, ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’, ‘You Shook Me’ and the only recorded performance of ‘Sunshine Woman’. The session was taped by a fan from an AM radio broadcast in Europe and guitarist Page has worked on its restoration. This ‘lost session’ has been described as a ‘holy grail’ for Led Zep collectors. The other previously unheard items include two versions of both ‘Communication Breakdown’ and ‘What Is and What Should Never Be’. Recorded two years apart, the sessions are said to be substantially different in style.
We’d been on the road a lot by the time those sessions were recorded,” said John Paul Jones. “The albums were always the starting point of the music, and then we’d take it out and expand it on the road. Then we’d come straight off the road into those BBC studios.”
The deluxe CD edition includes the remastered original album on two discs, plus a third disc of unreleased audio. The deluxe vinyl box set contains the same audio spread over five LPs. The super-deluxe box set features the two-disc remaster; the third disc of new songs; the remastered vinyl; a high-def audio download card with all of the content; a 48-page book with photos of the band, the recording locations, BBC memorabilia and session information; and a high-quality print of the original album cover.
The first 20,000 copies of The Complete BBC Sessions will also be individually numbered.Click here for more details and to order your copy.