BBC Sessions is a compilation album featuring studio sessions and a live concert recorded by English rock group Led Zeppelin for the BBC. It was released on 17 November 1997, by Atlantic Records. Disc one consists of material from four different 1969 BBC sessions. Disc two contains most of the 1 April 1971 concert from the Paris Theatre in London. Disc three was only included in a limited run of album releases and features rare interviews from 1969, 1976/1977, and 1990. Countless bootlegs of these recordings circulated for years before the official release. This release was widely welcomed by Led Zeppelin fans as it was the first live release since The Song Remains the Same in 1976. Others have criticized the decision to edit some of the songs and drop others that were recorded for the BBC. Most notable are one session from 1969 which included the unreleased song "Sunshine Woman", and about seven minutes of the "Whole Lotta Love" medley from 1971. The album was re-released in September 2016 as The Complete BBC Sessions with further BBC recordings, including the "Sunshine Woman" session.

Track listing

Standard edition

The Complete Sessions edition – bonus disc

Nine recordings from a conglomerate of 1969 sessions, including "Dazed and Confused", "I Can't Quit You Baby", "You Shook Me" and "Sunshine Woman" along with two versions of both "Communication Breakdown" and "What Is and What Should Never Be" (recorded two years apart) were released on 16 September 2016, comprising a third disc of the previously two-disc BBC Sessions compilation. Eight of the nine songs were previously unreleased; "White Summer" was previously released in 1990 on the Led Zeppelin Boxed Set and the expanded 1993 reissue of Coda from The Complete Studio Recordings and Led Zeppelin Definitive Collection (2008) box sets. The lost March 1969 three-song session – by all accounts erased from its master tapes – appears on the disc sourced from a reputed AM radio recording. This session contains the oft-bootlegged, boogieing blues rocker "Sunshine Woman," a track that Zeppelin never formally released previously, and renditions of Willie Dixon's "I Can't Quit You Baby" and "You Shook Me."

Recording information

Personnel

Led Zeppelin Additional personnel

Charts

Certifications

Release history