"I think someone set my soul alight. Don't know what happened, but I don't think I got home tonight."
It is common to hear The Chameleons described as the greatest band of the eighties no one knows about. While it is true that they never found a level of success matching the quality of their work, such descriptions seem to attempt to mythologize them as something like the Big Star of the eighties, a band tragically ignored and thus sent down a path of self-destruction. What such revisionism overlooks is how consistently distinctive and uncompromising The Chameleons were. Unlike other purveyors of Post-Punk who took a decidedly commercial turn in the mid-eighties, The Chameleons traveled into even darker territory. Many consider their three studio albums over-produced, though truth be told, compared to other early to mid-eighties recordings, they don't sound dated at all. John Peel sessions, recorded live during several sessions for the BBC, presents the band in stripped down form (well, relatively speaking) and what the songs lose in aesthetic grandeur (compared to the studio versions), they gain in power, which makes this album easily their most direct and thus one of their best.
