REVIEW: Faces—The BBC Session Recordings (2024)

A killer compilation of BBC performances that shows precisely why they were once John Peel's favourite band.

Had Rod Stewart not had a parallel solo career during his time with Faces, I can’t help but feel the band’s longer term legacy would have fared a lot better than it has. I always get the impression that a lot of people are surprised at how good Faces actually are, and aren’t really aware that Rod’s first batch of albums are pretty much Faces albums in all but name.

It was messy. Between late 1969 and about 1974 Rod and Faces had to alternate album releases. Although Rod was already in Faces by the time his first ‘solo’ LP came out, the backing band featured four of the five Faces. Only a month after its February 1970 UK release, the debut Faces album First Step followed. Three months after that followed Rod’s Gasoline Alley LP, this time featuring all of Faces, and to add to the comedy, a cover of My Way Of Giving, co-written by bassist Ronnie Lane, of course formerly of Small Faces. Five months, three albums, only one of them billed as Faces, but all three recorded with mostly the same band. Got it.

So when it came to Faces doing live performances on radio or normal gigs, there wasn’t a whole lot of point excluding Rod’s ‘solo’ songs, so they just chucked them all in—underlining what a nonsense the whole situation was in the first place. So breakout solo hits like Maggie May and Gasoline Alley rubbed shoulders with Stay With Me in a live setting, giving fans the kind of killer sets that weren’t fully reflected on the studio releases. Needless to say, had all of the ‘best’ songs been combined onto, say, one album a year, we’d be talking about some of the finest rock albums of the 1970s, or all-time if you want to be hyperbolic about it.

So this recent compilation of BBC Session recordings does a pretty decent job of smooshing together many of the 70/71 prime cuts onto a double LP. You get cracking studio renditions of Miss Judy’s Farm and Stay With Me from Faces 1971 smash A Nod Is a Wink To A Blind Horse, Maybe I’m Amazed and Had Me A Real Good Time from Faces’ other 1971 album Long Player, and a bunch from 1970’s First Step: Wicked Messenger, Devotion, Shake, Shudder, Shiver, Around The Plynth, Flying, and Pineapple And The Monkey. A lesser known rocking Faces instrumental b-side also makes an appearance: Oh Lord I’m Browned Off. I must confess this one was new to me.

Meanwhile, solo Rod material Country Comfort, Gasoline Alley and Maggie May make the cut, sounding suitably raucous in their Faces guise, and all the better for it. Both Faces and Rod albums had covers aplenty scattered across them (especially Rod’s, who presumably couldn’t pen enough originals in a year to fill an album, and also just loved having a go at besting other people’s songs.) So it’s no surprise to find a cover of Robert Johnson’s Love In Vain—itself recently covered more famously in 1969 by The Rolling Stones.

However, it’s worth noting that this Record Store Day-exclusive release is basically only the highlights reel for the main feature. Five months after this came out, in September 2024, Rhino served up a spectacular 8 disc CD box set—At The BBC (Complete BBC Concert & Session Recordings 1970-1973)—covering the full tranche of BBC session and live recordings, with everything from this set, as well as everything from 2023’s Record Store Day set Had Me A Real Good Time At The BBC—and a whole lot more besides. Even for long term fans with countless bootlegs, this was considered pretty revelatory stuff, with clean, crisp versions finally available 50-odd years after the fact.

Scanning down its 85 tracks, there’s a strong case for killer tracks like I Know I’m Losing You and Every Picture Tells A Story rather than the two versions of Wicked Messenger and an obscure instrumental that we get here. But that’s nit picking. Overall it does a grand job of shining a light on Faces supreme material featured on those first three albums, while interspersing primo Rod cuts to revive all those discussions of what the best combination of Rod & Faces would have worked best.