“There are few bands I’d rather see than the ,” John Peel once declared in his column. Such fandom wasn’t difficult to understand. Apart from their raw theatricality, EBB were an underground outfit who stood for the community, sounded like a wild British iteration of and saw music as an agent of social change.
Beginning with a spot on Peel’s radio show in January 1969, EBB recorded nine sessions and two shows for the BBC over a four-year period. This impressive set features all of those surviving appearances, documenting a group during a clamorous creative peak that spanned psych-weird debut and 1973’s more expansive . West Coast vibes predominate early on.
The trio – singer/guitarist Rob ‘Edgar’ Broughton, brother Steve on drums and bassist Arthur Grant – channel and Pearls Before Swine on and The two In Concert gigs are testament to the band’s dogged power Victor Unitt’s arrival as extra guitarist in 1970 brings a heavier element to songs like and the following year’s savagely distorted , by which point EBB were firmly established as socio-political activists who’d rather play for free than align themselves to music biz norms. “We’re trying to put idealism into practice,” Edgar explains to interviewer Brian Matthew. Aired in July 1971, the folk-leaning is an anti-pollution song way before it became a matter of national debate.
Got Mad is a percussive anti-war piece that rushes into an explosive finale. By 1972’s , recorded for , Broughton.
