On April 1st, 1971, Led Zeppelin played a London concert that was recorded for broadcast on the BBC, but when the show aired, the band’s high-energy performance of early B side “Communication Breakdown” from that night was omitted. The track, which runs just under five minutes – twice as long as it did on 1969’s Led Zeppelin – will feature on the band’s newly expanded Complete BBC Sessions, when it comes out on September 16th.
The jammy performance features a wild guitar solo by Jimmy Page, in which he indulges jazz and rockabilly riffs as John Bonham pounds away at the drums. Robert Plant wails the title midway through the track before the band takes an unusual approach to the tune’s middle section, playing funk rhythms and blues licks as the singer scats before it all crescendos back into the bluesy main riff and the audience applauds and cheers.
Like Led Zeppelin’s deluxe catalogue reissues last year, The Complete BBC Sessions was remastered by Jimmy Page and contains a bonus disc of previously unreleased music; the set previously came out as a two-disc compilation in 1997. In addition to unaired recordings from the London gig – the rest of which still comprise the second disc – it includes versions of “What Is and What Should Never Be,” “Dazed and Confused” and another take on “Communication Breakdown.” It also features the song “Sunshine Woman,” a track the group never officially released, that they performed in 1969.
The compilation will be available in a variety of formats, including CD, vinyl and digital, and it will also come out in a super-deluxe edition with a 48-page book.