Hear Rolling Stones’ 1965 BBC Performance of ‘Satisfaction’

A new compilation will spotlight the Rolling Stones‘ many performances for the BBC in the early-to-mid–Sixties. One of the highlights of the album, titled On Air, is a version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” that the band recorded on September 18th, 1965, for the program Saturday Club – mere months after the single came out.

The track kicks off with Keith Richards’ iconic fuzzy guitar riff and showcases a looser groove than the studio version, as Mick Jagger plays around with crooning and shouting the song’s verses. The song also ends abruptly – the way the band would have to have done it live – rather than fading out as it does on the studio recording.

Elsewhere on the compilation, which features recordings the band made between 1963 and 1965, the band performs many more of their early singles, including “Come On,” “The Last Time” and the Lennon and McCartney–penned “I Wanna Be Your Man,” as well as a spate of Chuck Berry covers. Among the selections are eight songs the group never released commercially, and several of the tracks were debuts – performances before the official studio versions came out.

To improve the sound of the recordings, the album’s producers put the tapes through an “audio source separation process,” in which they de-mixed the recordings so that Abbey Road engineers could treat the instrumentation and vocals as unique tracks. This allowed them to rebuild the recordings and remix them to sound more modern.

The album, which comes out December 1st digitally and on CD and vinyl – as well as in a two-disc deluxe edition and colored vinyl version – is available for preorder. It follows the release of the coffee table book by Richard Havers, The Rolling Stones – on Air in the Sixties: TV and Radio History as It Happened, which tells the band’s story through their appearances on TV and radio.