ON AIR - LIVE AT THE BBC VOLUME 2

"Beatles: On Air - Live at the BBC Volume 2" is a live double compilation album with 40 previously unreleased musical tracks and 23 speach pieces from the Beatles' 1963?1965 BBC Radio broadcasts. It was released on 11 November 2013, along with a remastered and repackaged Live at the BBC Volume 1.

The songs are essentially "live in studio" performances. Most of the tracks are songs taken from the Beatles production of 1963-64, plus cover versions of famous songs from the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Beatles performed for 52 BBC Radio programmes, since an appearance on the series Teenager's Turn?Here We Go, recorded on 7 March 1962, till a special "The Beatles Invite You to Take a Ticket to Ride", recorded on 26 May 1965. Total: 275 performances of 88 different songs, of which 36 songs never appeared on their studio albums.

Most of the songs performed on the compilation are taken from the Beatles' first four LPs "Please Please Me", "With the Beatles", "A Hard Day's Night" and "Beatles for Sale". Many of the other songs performed are the band's covers of early rock and roll classics by American artists such as Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, many of which were never recorded in a studio or released on a Beatles album.

The tracks for "Live at the BBC" were selected by George Martin who used two criteria: the quality of the sound and of the Beatles' performance. "I'm Talking About You" (Chuck Berry), "The Hippy Hippy Shake" (Romero), "Sure To Fall (In Love With You)", "Memphis Tennessee" (Chuck Berry), "Happy Birthday Dear Saturday Cluband" (Hill, Hill), and Beautiful Dreamer" (Foster-Keller-Goffin) had never been on a previous Beatles release. There are some irreverent and funny moments among the 23 speech tracks of in-studio conversation and banter with the late Brian Matthews presenter of radio's 'Saturday Club' and 'Easy Beat'.

This compilation replaces the production of the Beatles' bootlegs (even a 13-album bootleg series), very widespread in the seventies and eighties, and "The Complete BBC Sessions" (1993), a nine-CD box set released in Italy, where copyright protection for the broadcasts had expired (this set contained performances from 44 of the Beatles' 52 BBC appearances). ,

There are a lot of excellent performance, overall: "Boys", "Till There Was You", "Roll Over Beethoven", "I'll Get You" (better than the studio version), "Money", "This Boy" "Honey Dont" (much better than the studio version), "I'll Follow The Sun". In these recordings you can feel the grit, the energy, the enthusiasm of these four guys, who express themselves as the rock and roll rebels of the Fifties, with the experience consumed playing all night in Hamburg nightclubs.

Historical find. Rating: 8+. Four Stars.