The Yardbirds

The early sixties in Britain were explosive for Blues and R&B with bands such as The Rolling Stones, Bluesbreakers, Graham Bond Organization, Manfred Mann all making their inimitable mark in he clubs and pubs across the UK. The Yardbirds were the equal of any of the aforementioned, but because they concentrated so heavily on their live performances, they lost out in the charts.
Nevertheless, the BBC loved them and the second and third incarnations of the band featured constantly in shows such as ‘Saturday Club’, ‘Top Gear’, ‘Easy Beat’ as well as appearances on ‘The Ken Dodd Show’.
This compilation is everything that the band did on the BBC from 1965 to 1968.
Three of the discs have Jeff Beck on lead guitar while Jimmy Page is on the other. The earlier incarnation of the band, featuring Eric Clapton on lead guitar, were also prevalent on the BBC but no known recordings of the show that feature him still exist (the BBC were notorious for reusing tapes or destroying recordings that were not ‘up to the quality expected of the Corporation).

So, across the four discs you get some of the best British R&B of the period, with surprisingly good recording quality. If you think that most recording studios at the time were still working on 2 Track machines with engineers in white lab coats more interested in not overloading the recordings than actually capturing recordings, some of the material here is better than release quality. The mastering is superb with seemingly no processing in the sound.
It is a picture of three years of evolution of one of the most important bands of the day and one who eventually became Led Zeppelin.
The recordings show the gradual moves from playing Blues rooted in the Delta and Chicago to more contemporary psych tinged rock.
A lot of the music is repeated but because it is live, it represents the live performances that the band were touring and there are subtle differences in the different versions of, for example, ‘Heart Full Of Soul’.
It does come with an excellent booklet that charts the bands development very well.

It is an important release as well as some great music.