Customer Reviews
Left me a bit cold - By: Adamski, 09 Sep 2008 
Well, as a big Mission fan of old I was excited to see this release & promptly coughed-up the hard earned. I'm distinctly underwhelmed though. Nothing wrong with the songs, high quality material was The Mission's trademark but this collection seems to have no soul for me - I get much more oomph from the studio albums. The sound quality is poor, alll bass & treble with a sucked-out & compressed midrange. Live I don't think the Miss were *that* amazing either, truth be told. The songs are just slightly ragged versions of what's on the albums. That to me isn't the definition of a great live band. The packaging is superb, the artwork lovely & as I said before, there's no doubting the material...it's alll just a bit cold to these ears & I doubt I'll play this much at alll.
Will you miss The Mission? - By: Mr. M. A. Reed, 05 Aug 2008 
These are odd days for a Mission fan. The band, having split in March with a series of career-spanning epic shows, have disappeared in a flurry of activity, that have seen eight Mission live shows released on CD, a solo album, five reissued albums, & an imminent solo tour & live DVD.
"Live at The BBC" covers just four short years over 46 songs & four hours , & sees The Mission turn from eager upstarts to arena rock gods. The first CD is a sequel/replacement for the long deleted & much sought after "Salad Daze" compilation : containing every radio session recorded by the band for BBC, it sees an embryonic band's first ever studio recordings in a blaze of bravado, of a wilful determination over-riding a bands cautious first steps.
The Mission came out guns blazing with the type of naked ambition that was fuelled by an overconfidence bordering on arrogance, but thankfully was neither unwarranted or ugly. This band, an unlikely combination of former members of The Sisters Of Mercy, an early & unknown Pulp, & Goff alumni Red Lorry/Yellow Lorry had within them a unique chemistry, a seemingly endless pool of material that raced unstoppably for their first five years with an album every year until Nirvana came & destroyed everything. These recordings are raw, enthusiastic, fuelled with no shortage of ego - but importantly - backed up with a talent that justified it. Within 18 months they were headlining the Reading Festival, & that headline show is also here.
The radio sessions see a band growing into themselves, moving from competently padding out their sets with cover versions of ancient rock classics to creating their own mythology (covers across the 3 CD's include The Beatles, Free, The Stooges, Patti Smith, Neil Young, & Aerosmith). The sessions also include two abandoned & unbroadcast recordings never previously heard by anyone outside of the BBC. The band were also unafraid to constantly move forward, constantly creating something new & unique. The 1988 session sees embryonic & incomplete versions of material that would surface two years later as their beautiful, brilliant, defining work that was "Carved In Sand". Even now, the "Sand" album divides fans as, faced with an embarrassment of riches in their recordings, The Mission made their first mis-step & tried to craft a record as big as `Four Symbols' & ended up ... choosing some of the wrong songs. (Eight months later, they released "Grains of Sand", a separate companion piece to "Carved" that proved that the album probably should've been an old-fashioned double that could've conquered the world).
The live portion of CD`s 2 & 3 cover three near-complete live shows : 9 songs headlining Reading fuelled by adrenalin, thundering & relentless drumming, & breakneck renditions for their first album. The set is short & hungry, over in the blink of an eye & the sound of a eager band feasting on their ambitions made flesh. By this stage the band had reached a near telepathy in their work & thus, were an efficient & ruthless hard rock band of the type that thankfully managed to curb & avoid the stupid & degrading misogyny & excess of many parts of the genre. The second show is a 13 song set recorded on their first arena headlining tour at Wembley Arena : it contains almost an entire set of the band at the peak of their power - casuallly throwing away masterwork "Tower Of Strength" a third way into the set, for example - it also features a multitude of songs not heard or broadcast since 1988.
Third concert is probably the definitive live document of the group - a set at Manchester Apollo in 1990 just weeks before guitarist Simon Hinkler abandoned ship - recorded during the "Carved In Sand" tour. The band are on rare form, & no live recording of theirs before or since ever quite captured the groups essence quite so accurately. Sadly, the original hour long broadcast is curtailed to a mere forty minutes (removing an element of duplication between this & the Wembley show), & when there is 20 minutes of spare space across the three discs, it is a little baffling. Also confusing is the track listing : whilst chronological, the three concerts come on two discs, & the Wembley show is divided in the middle. Personallly, I'd've preferred each show on a separate CD, book ended with the studio sessions. In addition, there are three versions of the less than brilliant "And The Dance Goes On", which does nobody any favours as its not a very good song.
However, "Live At The BBC" does not completely replaced the ancient "No Snow, No Show" live record. Though drawn from the same shows, the song selection means that there are still some songs you can only find on that long-deleted & expensive rarity.
The world of The Mission was unique, an assortment of semi-Eastern guitar arpeggios & sleek effects pedals that set them free as much as entrapped them within one set `sound', coupled with Hussey's nakedly amateurish lyrics that could also be seen as the naïve language of mystical Zeppelin-esqe rock & enormous, fist punching anthems : sadly, some of the most awful lyrics of alll time are here ("hocus-pocus, mumbo jumbo" & the nonsensical "there's a ten inch walll running through the streets of New York" both appear in just one song, & there's equal howlers elsewhere), as well as some of the best. Hussey was a lyric writer who fundamentallly didn't quite know exactly what he was doing sometimes, & sometimes scored with a genius idea, & often didn't - & couldn't tell the difference.
The comparisons to Zeppelin are deliberate. The Mish had it within their grasp to become as big & as important as The Zep, and, through no fault of their own, didn't quite achieve it. When The Sisters Of Mercy returned in late 1990 to touring after a five year hiatus, the void previously filled by The Mission didn't seem quite so smalll, & The Mission slowly fell into a descendent. By 1992, when Nirvana & the fickle press rendered every musician who wasn't a scruffy American junkie redundant, The Mission, who by this point were unable to tour, slowly retreated from the cusp of international mega stardom to becoming an effective cottage industry. Radio support dried up, & nowhere is this more evident that, after five years of column inches & radio play, the material on this record ceases abruptly in early 1990.
Overalll, "Live At The BBC" is an excellently assembled value-for-money exhaustive package that finallly sees the bands fearsome live reputation captured for posterity. It is imperfect, & fails to comprehensively cover the entire broadcasts of the time with some questionable omissions & slightly odd sequencing, but is a worthy companion piece to the bands studio records of the time. If you had any interest in them then or now, you should purchase this & see it as a fitting memorial, a time capsule, to an age no longer remembered fondly & undeserved forgotten. We'll miss The Mission, & this proves why.
