Late DJ John Peel's name may be most closely associated with the emergence of punk and all that followed, but he was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Thin Lizzy.
"The story of my first meeting with Phil Lynott and the boys aboard a ferry, salt-caked smokestacks and the rest, between Dun Laoghaire and Holyhead, has been told too many times already," Peel wrote in the sleevenotes to 1994's Thin Lizzy compilation The Peel Sessions. "Suffice to say, Thin Lizzy were crossing to England for the first time aboard the same boat as myself, made contact and urged me to listen out for them.
"Throughout the first half of the seventies, they provided a welcome antidote to much of the pretentious hogwash that bedevilled the age."
This antidote included 11 sessions for Peel's BBC show, recorded between 1971 and 1977. And while many of the songs emerged on the 1995 collection and on 2011's expansive Thin Lizzy At The BBC box set, one of the sessions has never been released because the original tapes have never surfaced: the first recordings, taped at the BBC's Maida Vale studios in London for Peel's Top Gear show in late 1971.
Now those tracks have been discovered on an off-air reel-to-reel tape and uploaded to YouTube. The four tracks are Clifton Grange Hotel and Ray-Gun – both songs that appeared on Thin Lizzy's debut album, released in 1971 – plus Dublin (released as a single the same year) and The Rise And Dear Demise Of The Funky Nomadic Tribes, which would appear on the band's second album Shades Of A Blue Orphanage in 1972.
All four tracks are embedded in the playlist below.
