Prolapse - Mary Anne Hobbs sessions 17.12.97-24.03.98 Prolapse

After the sold out release of their Peel sessions, Prolapse return to Precious Recordings of London for an album featuring two blistering sessions recorded for Mary Anne Hobbs’s Breezeblock on BBC Radio 1.

Prolapse always like to do something special on their visits to Auntie, and these two live four-song outings (from 1997 and ’98) were no different in that respect. With both sessions aired completely live – one from the BBC’s legendary Maida Vale Studios, the other from Golders Green Hippodrome – they even made up two songs on the spot, namely ‘Golfer’s Elbow’ and ‘XA14 1997’. What were they thinking?

Neither of those recordings has ever been available before on vinyl, and they feature here as part of a collection that straddles ‘The Italian Flag’ and ‘Ghosts of Dead Aeroplanes’ albums. Let’s just say it’s eclectic: alongside favourites like ’T.C.R.’ and ‘Killing the Bland’, a song like ‘Return of Shoes’ has hardly ever been played live so this version is also something of a deep cut, rare gem or whatever you like to call it.

There’s a spontaneity here – possibly due to the band’s anxiety that these sessions were going out live to a sizeable audience, and what would happen if a guitar lead decided to stop working just before going on air?

Either way, the resulting sessions offer a taste of the late 90s band at full pelt, and as such this new release is a compellingly accurate snapshot of the band at that time.

They're still going strong, by the way. Fast forward to 2025 and ‘I Wonder When They’re Going to Destroy Your Face’, the first new Prolapse album of the millennium, was released on Tapete Records in August 2025; at the end of the year, they were voted number one in the Festive Fifty on Dandelion Radio with ‘On the Quarter Days’.

• Featuring some well-known Prolapse favourites, some rarities and some oddball offerings – plus sleeve notes from the band and previously unseen images – the LP is available in a limited edition of 600 copies. It is released to coincide with shows in Ipswich (The Church, Aug 6) and London (100 Club, Aug 7).

Includes unlimited streaming of PRELP 15: Prolapse – Mary Anne Hobbs sessions 97-98 via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.