40 Years

[Mario]

Originally Posted by sharksfan2000

Norton, it's actually a lot more complicated than that. A lot of the tracks from Show-Biz Blues and Vaudeville Years are not from BBC sessions, but are instead recording session out-takes or alternate takes of released tracks, i.e. "The Madge Sessions", "Do You Give A Damn For Me", "World In Harmony", and many others. So only a portion of the total tracks on those discs are actually from BBC sessions.

Where are the rest of them? Very good question...many have appeared on any number of bootlegs over the years, and as you'd expect from boots, the sound quality ranges from ok to poor. And many of these were originally taped straight from the radio broadcasts since you can hear the announcer talking over the beginning and/or end of some of these tracks. But even with these bootlegged tracks, there are still a lot of BBC session tracks that have never seen the light of day, and it's a good question as to whether we'll ever be able to hear many of those. Who knows whether they all even still exist and if so, what shape they're in...and then it would take someone with enough money to track them down, pay for licensing, compile them (and presumably clean up the sound as needed), and release them, and then have a reasonable expectation of at least recovering their expenses from sales.

Although most of us here would love to hear another BBC session collection, I don't know what the market for such a disc would be - anyone know how many copies of Live At the BBC were sold?

Actually Sanctuary Records planned a 3 cds boxset some years ago, with unreleased numbers, Martin wrote the sleeve notes for that, but nothing happened due to copyright reasons, BBC wasn't so keen to licence (hope in my English here) the tracks, I'm afraid!
Mario.