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"At The BBC" (2004)
This disc - track-for-track - appeared as the first CD in Black Flag's 2-CD set "The Lost BBC Sessions And Other Rare Trax" in 2005, however this managed to appear the year before, although in a seemingly limited release. The sleeve notes tell an amusing - if questionable - tale of Lionel Blair, a blocked toilet, and its fixing thereof. Cutting out the, er, rubbish the notes mention the existence of some 37 BBC Transcription discs of "Saturday Club" that were the origin of these priceless recordings which make up the entire catalogue of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates tracks from that show.
BBC Transcription Services often made their own recordings of radio shows for possible overseas sales, sometimes with edits to reduce the running time to accommodate the insertion of adverts by commercial stations (the BBC still refuses any question of taking adverts except for their own-brand stuff). In 1983, on the rear of the "Rarities" LP/CD Roger Dopson's suggestion was that they still existed, probably unaware that a vast multitude of archive recordings - from radio and television - had already bitten the dust, victims of the great 60's and 70's archive purge to clear swathes of storage space for new programmes.
Up until the early 1980's, existing domestic technology had not been advanced enough to give the general populace video recorders. Until this happened, the BBC could have been forgiven for thinking all these shelves were full of unsellable items, the vast majority of which had never been repeated since original transmission and were past their original agreements. Re-negotiation with the original artists was nigh-on impossible at a favourable rate for just a repeat, so into the skips and landfills they went, apart from a small sample - only two editions of "Oh Boy", the first and the last, survive for example. When the BBC realised the emergent video market was going to be big, it examined its empty shelves and began the painstaking task of tracing copies of otherwise non-existent programmes, and although some hard work and good fortune has turned a lot of gems up much will remain lost forever.
The entire CD runs to a mere 35 minutes, but this is forgivable for those of us who were not of an age to listen to the original broadcasts as they act as an invaluable indicator of how the group probably sounded onstage. Most - if not all - tracks recorded for the BBC were made in one take, only a complete disaster rendering a re-take necessary. The only other considerations were a quick run-through for balancing purposes and maybe a bit of EQ applied in the editing room while putting the show together (literally splicing the tapes together) for later broadcast later in the week. Only the final track, "Shakin' All Over" has a chunk missing in the middle but, as "Blakey" puts it, it seems the cat had been at it, but that's a small price to pay for having THAT track on the disc.
For more details of what's on the CD, see "The Lost BBC Sessions" 2-CD set referred to earlier.