Their Generation

Long before Roger Daltrey was thrilling us all with his marvellous vocal performance in Messiah 2000 (we want our £700,000 back) he was the distinguished lead singer with a popular beat combo called The Who. Alongside The Kinks, they may have been overshadowed a tad by The Beatles and The Stones, but in terms of sheer rock'n'rollness they never disappointed. Fittingly, they're the latest band to be "anthologised" by the BBC - after similar offerings by Led Zep, Hendrix and The Beatles.

It's difficult now, what with station-to-station musical dross becoming an inescapable fact of modern life, to understand just how important the BBC was in recording a pivotal decade in musical history. Back then, "needle time" was severely restricted and it was left to before-their-time (and might I add, never bettered) TV shows like Ready, Steady, Go; Easy Beat; the beautifully-titled Go Man Go! and The Joe Loss Pop Show to turn on and tune into for the crazy, farout sounds of the day.

The recently-released The Who: BBC Sessions gathers together an epic 26 tracks from the original modsters on a collection that is no mere nostalgia-fest. It's all too easy to pass up on these compilations, but contained within some of the tracks here is the thrilling, visceral sound of rock'n'roll music, played by a quartet which was as impassioned as it was gifted and delivered in a "straightup", swashbuckling style that has you wondering how you could have neglected them over the last few years.

It's the same sort of feeling, in ways, that you get from watching a film like Backbeat - that sheer, ridiculously overriding sense of "right here, right now" you only get from bands heading for the toppermost of the poppermost. Stretching the analogy beyond breaking point, the early tracks here are The Who's equivalent of the Cavern/Hamburg days. So go on and twist again, like you didn't last summer, to Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere; My Generation, the peerless Substitute and Pictures of Lily. Also well worth keeping an ear out for is the tangible sense of a band throwing off their r'n'b roots to mould their own soundscapes.

Linked together by the stentorian, received pronunciation links voice of a not very hep cat BBC presenter, a few odd cover versions are also thrown into the mix (James Brown's Just You And Me Darling and Eddie Holland's - as in Holland, Dozier, Holland - Leaving Here). All said, we could have done without the Roger Daltrey solo effort (See My Way) as well as John Entwhistle's Boris The Spider; and Pete Townsend's first foray into the pitiful rock-opera genre (A Quick One While He's Away) is really pushing it - more so, when you consider what came in its wake in that regard. Sad, though, to read from the liner notes that So Sad About Us (memorably covered by The Jam) didn't make it on to the album because of its poor sound quality.

The last third of the record is given over to songs culled from the, bizarrely enough, Dave Lee Travis (remember him? I choose not to) radio show and The Old Grey Whistle Test TV show. The latter tracks are largely culled from long-abandoned "concepts" the group unwisely dabbled in - Lifehouse and Long Live Rock.

While all this was happening, popular music had come in from the margins. The 1967 Marine Broadcasting Bill had outlawed pirates like Radio Caroline, the BBC introduced a "new, national pop network" to rival Radio Luxembourg and since then, you could argue that it has been a sorry descent into Classic Hits territory. Not that you'll ever hear these "classic hits" played on your radio. Hang the DJ - and the VJ while you're at it.

The Who: BBC Sessions is on the Polydor label.