weej wrote:

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What an odd thing to appear all of a sudden.
Did the band / Island / Fire need to give their permission to get it released?

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 Some of these TV/Radio broadcasts exist in a strange netherworld of legality. Witness, for example, the recent glut of early Bob Dylan performances from radio/bedrooms/hotels/someones garden shed that have been released. The same record company have recently released a Happy Mondays gig on CD as well. The CD is alright and all but wouldn't a DVD of the FILMED performance be much better?

This is presumably from Elm Street Media (http://elmstreetmedia.com/itvconcerts.html) who surfaced a couple of years ago, informing us all that they'd bought the ITV concert archive, including the Class of '91/Stage One programme. I had a chat with one of the people behind the company at the time, and it transpired that he had also been the producer of the original show. The plan at the time was that they were going to release a CD+DVD set, with the full concert in audio, and the 22 minutes of video that were broadcast (they had a DAT of the whole thing, but the video master didn't have the three songs that weren't shown on TV).

I asked him about the New Sessions programme and he hadn't heard of it, and was going to look into whether they had access to that with a view to possibly including it as part of the release. There was also some vague possibility that a TV company in Japan that they sold the programme to might have video of the complete Class of '91 concert. Don't know what came of any of that though.

Initial thoughts:

Basically, I think it sounds great. The sound quality is excellent, although maybe a bit too clean - very little crowd noise, echo, reverb etc.

Jarvis and the rest of the band sound on good form, despite Jarvis commenting he'd only arrived 20 minutes before, because he'd been to a stag party in Liverpool the previous night.

Space has an ab-libbed spoken word introduction from Jarvis, like most other recordings from that time. There's also a very early rendition of Babies: musically it doesn't sound much different, but the lyrics are unfinished. From an initial listen the lyric "I saw your cousin Dave" sticks in my head.

I initially thought the recording was largely unedited, but it occurs to me the comment made about the barrier in front of the stage is missing. On the TV recording it goes something like: "I'm a bit disappointed nobody's tried to storm this little barrier here... it's the first time we've had one of those... You could have a crèche down there... bring your kiddies along" etc. I'm not sure why they would have wanted to edit that bit out. Thankfully most of Jarvis' comments between songs haven't been removed.