Cocteau Twins – BBC Sessions

This version including
'John Peel Session January 1983'
needs a vinyl pressing!!

This double 'Cocteau Twins - BBC Sessions' needs a vinyl pressing indeed!!! Hopefully I'll live to see it.

When I was a teenager and got my hands on this, it was an easy way to expand my familiarity with the band's catalogue without buying one album at a time over several years.

I still have a warm spot for this entire collection. If nothing else, it is worth every penny just for the harrowing cover of "Strange Fruit". The Cocteau's version of the Billie Holiday classic is absolutely chilling!

This needs to be released on vinyl.. travesty it has not when so much other garbage has been mulitple times already.

It was a surprise to hear some of these BBC Sessions - particularly the Garlands and earliest pieces.

I remember buying Garlands when it first hit the scene. The remarkable thing about Garlands is the merging of gunfire-intensity percussion + pensive / sombre strings and Liz's forceful voice. [There's also something extraordinary about the relentless rhythm some of the tracks possess.] So, when I first played these session versions, which enhances some of the military percussion, I thought omg if the rest of the album is going to be like this, it is brilliant, as the resulting musical quality is closer to its post-punk origins.

However, that revelatory quality is not sustained throughout. Liz Fraser is exacting with her work and tracks didn’t change much later on. The album is certainly worth its price for the initial tracks, the thrill of a variant, compiling the tracks, and the ‘session history’, however, most of the tracks are better on the original albums.

There is a vinyl release titled The BBC Sessions which has only 12 songs on it. It's incredibly hard to find information on. Pressed by Swing Shift Records, but no catalogue number or date.

we need a vinyl boxset of these recordings!

I'm not a diehard Cocteau Twins fan, but many of these live versions to me are better, and SOUND better, than their studio counterparts. "Blind Deaf Dumb" for example has that high-pitch melody much quieter. In general there's more of a light industrial and less of a muddy ghostly etheral sound on many of these tracks. Good stuff.