“Our second group this evening is the excessively rowdy Faces,” promises John Peel, whose voice introduces this set of (almost) complete BBC sessions from the Faces. It’s an appropriate start. When the Faces released their debut single, “Flying”, the Beeb didn’t take them seriously. It took John Peel to step in as an early champion, recording their first BBC session in March 1970. Peel pops up throughout this 8CD/1Blu-ray box that has rescued almost every Faces BBC session from archives and private collections – there’s just one set of three songs missing, believed wiped. It includes the Faces playing outstanding versions of “You’re My Girl”, “Oh Lord I’m Browned Off”, “Stay With Me” and “Miss Judy’s Farm”, singing Christmas Carols and performing one infamous concert that was never actually broadcast.

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The box begins with 10 songs from John Peel’s Sunday Concert – one set of five songs recorded in July 1970 and another five from November – and by the time you reach the deranged cover of “Maybe I’m Amazed” from November that year, you can see what the BBC were worried about – and grateful that Peel had such sway. Those Sunday Concert sessions weren’t the first appearance by the Faces on the BBC. They came in March 1970, when the band recorded sessions for Top Gear and Dave Lee Travis in quick succession. These shorter studio sessions are on Discs 7 and 8, with the first six discs reserved for longer live sessions.

One of those Top Gear sessions sees the band play a great medley of “Around The Plynth” and “Gasoline Alley” – the latter of course being a Rod Stewart solo number that became assimilated into the Faces setlist. It isn’t the only Rod number the band would perform at the BBC: the set ends with a rousing rendition of “Maggie May” from October 1971 sans mandolin solo while Disc 4’s 13-song set recorded for John Peel’s Sunday Concert in February 1972 includes a rollicking “Every Picture Tells A Story” and three-song medley of “That’s All You Need/Country Honk/Gasoline Alley”.

This concert is classic Faces: unpolished, good times, well lubricated. There are moments on “Three-Button Hand Me Down” where it sounds like everything is about to fall apart, but then the band plunge straight into “Miss Judy’s Farm”, propelled by Ian McLagan’s thunderous boogie piano, and it’s all good again. The band tear through “Too Bad”, “(I Know) I’m Losing You” and “Stay With Me”, then sing short bursts of Frankie Vaughan’s “Give Me The Moonlight” and “Underneath The Arches” to the appreciative studio audience. Always up for a laugh, the Faces take part in a Christmas concert for John Peel on Disc 7, with Rod crooning “Away In The Manger” before the band, crew, Peel and Marc Bolan sing a medley of carols.

The Faces have never really been well served by live albums – Coast To Coast: Overture And Beginners came at the very end of their career, when Ronnie Lane had already departed. That makes the Sunday Concert shows and two longer In Concertdiscs (Disc Five and Disc Six) particularly welcome, as it presents the Faces in a live but controlled environment. Or relatively controlled, anyway. The first In Concert show at the BBC’s Paris Cinema in February 1973 was never broadcast because of exchanges between the band and a crowd that included record label hangers-on who’d had too much sherbet. The BBC invited the band back a couple of months later to do it all over again – some of these tracks featured on Rhino’s Five Guys Walk Into A Bar box.

Both shows are fabulous and chaotic, with the unbroadcast concert featuring terrific versions of “Memphis, Tennessee” and “You’re My Girl (I Don’t Want To Discuss It)” before Stewart announces that “(I Know) I’m Losing You” will be the last number because they want to get to the pub before it closes. The second Paris show is tighter, with a similar setlist, but this time including covers of Free’s “The Stealer” and Lennon’s “Jealous Guy” plus three additional ones from Ooh La La: “Borstal Boys”, “My Fault” and Ronnie Lane’s “If I’m On The Late Side”.

This is the first in a series of Faces reissues, which will include rarities and unreleased material. The sound quality is superb, and the accompanying booklet contains interviews with Rod Stewart, Ronnie Wood and Kenney Jones, all of whom have been involved in the process. “The Faces… still the best rock’n’roll band in the world for those of us who really care,” says Peel at the end of an electric “(I Know) I’m Losing You” from the Paris Cinema show. Take it from a man who knew.

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