Curved Air,
Studio 4,
Maida Vale,
London,
28 April 1970

Here's a previously missing piece from the BBC archives: Curved Air's very first session for John Peel's "Top Gear". Peel had seen the band at the Pop Proms at the Roadhouse in April 1970 and was so impressed by their performance that he invited them to make an appearance on his show. A contrast clause is needed here, because whoever compiled the official releases of Curved Air's BBC sessions clearly didn't do proper research: generally, most of the information printed in those booklets is inaccurate, with many bogus attributions.

On "Live at the BBC" (later re-released as "Airwaves"), there's a session that includes "It Happened Today", "Propositions", and "Vivaldi", mislisted as being this one. That's wrong info: it's actually the second session the band recorded, for the Mike Harding Show on 10th November 1970, as reported in Ken Garner's book "In Session Tonight". By then, the band had also undergone a line-up change, with Ian Eyre replacing Robert Martin on bass. As you can see, the two sessions have different setlists, except for one shared song. The booklet for "Airwaves" adds further confusion by mixing the tracklists of both sessions, listing "Screw" and "Hide and Seek" as being part of the same batch of recordings. Again, once and for all: those are two completely different sessions, recorded in different BBC studios, for different radio shows, and with different line-ups. They also come from different moments in the band's timeline: this session was recorded in April, three months before the "Air Conditioning" studio sessions began in July 1970. The Harding session was recorded in November, just after the album had been released. The only song in common, "Vivaldi", is also much different from the version recorded at the second session: it's a shorter take and sounds a bit rushed by comparison (4 minutes vs 6), possibly because the band hadn't yet turned it into their signature live tour-de-force. The version recorded in this session, for example, has yet to include the short vocal section in the middle. Anyway, it's worth noting that the second session's date has been corrected to 10th November when it was re-released on the deluxe edition of "Air Conditioning" (but still misidentified as coming from John Peel's show).

Now that that is out of the way: this is a very good session and, if I'm not mistaken, the earliest available recording of the band and the only unofficial one featuring Martin on bass. Even at this early stage, the band sounds tight and very confident about their material. "Hide and Seek", in particular, feels like the centerpiece of the session.

This session became somewhat famous for being one of the earliest (if not the first) attempts to record a BBC session in stereo. Producer John Walters recorded the band in mono, while engineer Bob Conduct split the signal to another room, where it was simultaneously recorded in stereo using a mobile desk. However, when the band decided to do overdubs, the stereo engineers had to apply them in real time, in sync with Conduct, which proved impossible. As a result, the plan was abandoned. It eventually aired on "Top Gear" on 09 May 1970, and was repeated two months later, on 25 July. After that, it wasn't preserved in the archives: the master tape was wiped and it remained unavailable for 50 years, with no known off-air recordings. That changed in 2020, when three reel to reel tapes were acquired and digitized by our friend Tim of the Peel Wiki. The first was tantalizing but frustrating: a poor-sounding, distorted fragment of the 09 May show, including only "Vivaldi" from the Curved Air session. However, not too long after, unexpectedly, complete recordings of both the 09 May and 25 July shows surfaced, finally revealing the full session.

Tim kindly sent me the complete WAV files of both shows, and I was able to properly restore the material. Thankfully, both broadcasts sound very good and almost identical. The May broadcast was the one in better shape of the two, so that was used as the main source, with a few small patches from the July repeat: the start of "Vivaldi" (overlapped by the news theme in the original airing), the very beginning of "Hide and Seek" (talked over), and a short segment in the middle of that same song to fix a two-second dropout. I carefully matched the EQ on the patched sections, so they shouldn't be noticeable. I then re-EQ'd the whole thing for a more "organic" sound and speed corrected everything. I think the results are great, and this session can finally be heard in its full glory after all this time. If the file size looks too small, it's because these are mono files.

01 Screw [04:34]
02 Vivaldi [04:45]
03 Hide and Seek [06:16]
- Total time: 15:36

Sonja Kristina: lead vocals
Darryl Way: violin, bg. vocals
Francis Monkman: guitar, keyboards
Robert Martin: bass
Florian Pilkington-Miksa: drums

Original broadcasts recorded by: unknown
Reels acquired and transferred by: Tim Giebel (thanks!!)
Edited, speed corrected and eq-ed by: JacoZappa

Lineage: reel to reels of original broadcasts -> wav -> SF10 (speed corrected, edited, eq) -> flac

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