With an institution like the BBC and its long-standing history of integrity on the British airwaves, one would expect a rather "stuffy" upper class old boys club with regards to new music and new musical trends. To the contrary, the BBC has always been at the forefront of new musical trends within Britain and one of their regular BBC Radio One broadcasts allowed bands studio time to re-record material for future broadcast over the British airwaves. Lately, the BBC has been opening the vaults so to speak and releasing some of their recordings that would otherwise be forgotten about. These older Motorhead recordings are the latest to surface from their archives. When labels were slamming doors in their faces, the BBC has always been supportive of Motorhead right from the beginning and it must've been their unique insight (or foresight) to see the potential and importance of Motorhead much before the rest of the world did.

With this new live CD entitled BBC Live and In Session, we get material from four different BBC sessions ranging from 1978 to 1986. For the John Peel In-Session segment, Motorhead re-recorded Keep Us On The Road (from the self-titled Motorhead album) as well as their version of the classic 60's anthem Louie, Louie and two tracks from Overkill; I'll Be Your Sister and Tear Ya Down. With a different production quality, this allowed the band the opportunity to "smooth out the edges" of the previous recordings of these songs and it works quite well. Session #2 was from a BBC Radio One broadcast of a concert at the Paris Theatre London in May of 1979. Despite the "tinny" production, it's a pretty solid live recording with such Overkill tracks as Stay Clean, No Class, I'll Be Your Sister, (I Won't) Pay Your Price, Capricorn and Limb From Limb as well as the B-side of Overkill, Too Late, Too Late and White Line Fever. Session #3 was originally recorded and broadcast for the David Jensen Radio Show in October of 1981 when the band was still riding high atop the success of Ace Of Spades. Of the six tracks featured here, 4 of them are from the Ace Of Spades album namely Fast And Loose, Live To Win, Bite The Bullet and The Chase Is Better Than The Catch. A solid recording, again the production quality is a bit softer than the originals and after playing these tracks so many times of the recent tour, it's great to see what a band would do to "fine tune" some of their songs if given a second chance to record them under different circumstances. The final session jumps ahead to the year 1986 and the Orgasmatron era of the band. Both Philthy Animal Taylor and Fast Eddy Clarke were now gone with drummer Pete Gill (ex-Saxon) and the twin guitar attack of Wurzel and Phil Campbell (who is still a member of the band even to this day) rounding out the line-up. This one's pretty much a live in the studio recording with the band ripping through Killed By Death, a creepy Orgasmatron, Doctor Rock, Deaf Forever and an even creepier spoken word version of Orgasmatron.

This is a pretty decent package with lots of variety and covers mainly the bands' heyday with the original line-up. There's not much live material around (including bootlegs) of the band during that time. The 1986 session sees a newer Motorhead and one that aside from Lemmy's voice, bears very little resemblance to the sound of the classic original line-up. One thing to note to those who already have the recent Sanctuary Records re-issues of Bomber, Overkill and Ace Of Spades. Most of the live material on the bonus CDs can be found on this CD as well. It's important to note that as buying this CD thinking that it's material that you don't already have could be misleading. Excerpts from these sessions appear as bonus tracks on those releases but the completes sessions are found on this release. Pretty much for die-hard Motorhead fans only, this gives us even more live material (as if we really need more!!) but in a different format as it contains both live in the studio recordings as well as live in concert. Even though the 1986 session is pretty solid, the older 1978-1981 sessions are definitely the highlights of this package.