Back to the BBC Sessions tonight with a long-thought lost session Cream did for the Band Beat Program broadcast on November 21, 1966.

It's commonly been thought that the BBC wiped or otherwise destroyed much of the music from the 60's that filled the airwaves at the time. Much of it completely unique as the BBC had a ban on commercially available discs for a long time, which made it necessary for any band trying to get exposure or trying to promote a single, to perform it live or record a special BBC session in order to get it played. Subsequently, just about everyone who was anyone recorded at least one track for the BBC during those days.

There were always rumors of massive quantities of tapes being destroyed routinely. In fact, I had one friend who got an apprentice gig at the BBC in the "tape department" and his job was to run recorded tapes over massive magnets which wiped whatever was recorded on them clean and ready for re-use.

But it seems a lot hadn't been destroyed, and each month that goes by new discoveries of missing tapes or previously lost sessions are turning up either in the hands of private collectors or people connected in some way with the bands in question or in the archives at record companies.

Case in point; tonight's post. I have no idea what the origins of these recordings are; who owned them, how they got them or what they did with them all these years. But the important thing is, a historic set of sessions was somehow preserved, and for that, it's good news.

This Cream session comes from a program called Band Beat and it originally aired on November 21, 1966. Cream does three songs:

1. Strange Brew
2. Tales of Brave Ulysses
3. We're Going Wrong

Which just goes to show that nothing is ever lost, just wildly misplaced.