“There’s no point pretending it wasn’t recorded off the radio,” Jimmy Page old Mojo of Sunshine Woman, the previously unreleased Led Zeppelin track we’re premiering today. And indeed there isn’t. This is very much the sound familiar to those who spent their evenings poised over the pause button, searching for a stable signal. It’s muddy, imprecise and a far cry from the sonic clarity one associates with Zeppelin. But, still, it’s an unreleased song, from a lost BBC session, previously available only on bootlegs.
This recording is one of the new tracks added to the remastered reissue of the band’s album of BBC session recordings, released on 16 September as The Complete BBC Sessions, in the usual array of formats (CD, vinyl, knobs-and-whistles-laden box). And it comes from a session recorded for Alexis Korner’s World Service show in March 1969. Sunshine Woman, Page told Mojo, “was basically made up on the spot. It was pretty brave, bearing in mind the circumstances. We played it as if we were in rehearsals, starting it around the riff and then working it out. It shows that we were evolving pretty quickly.”
The tape of that session disappeared, and so it has only existed as a poor-quality bootleg. This version, Page insists, is the best recording you will ever find of what might be the last previously unheard complete Zeppelin song to get an official release. Have a listen, and tell us what you think.
