Led Zeppelin - The Complete British Broadcasting Corporation Radio Session [4CD] (2006)

Empress Valley’s The Complete British Broadcasting Corporation Radio Sessions is the latest in a long line of releases, both official and unofficial, covering Zeppelin’s early radio career. Given their origins with the BBC the sound quality of these tapes has almost always been at least very good if not excellent covering the embryonic Zeppelin. Since the release of the BBC Sessions on Atlantic Records in 1998 there have not been many unofficial releases covering this material and this is the first all inclusive set.

The sound quality and presentation of the Empress Valley collection is across the board excellent and a worthy upgrade to all previous issues including the official release with some reservations discussed below. Empress Valley make the claim they use the pre-FM master recordings except for the March 19th Alexis Korner session, which comes from an “aircheck master” (i.e., it was taped off of a short wave broadcast).

This could be true since it does not sound as if they used the official or any other source. Compared to Jimmy Page’s own work on these tapes, Empress Valley sounds much more heavy and lively lending more vitality to these tapes like never before. Since the set runs in chronological order the first disc contains the four earliest and shortest sessions.