There may be a misconception regarding some of those BBC broadcasts in 78/77.
Not all of the broadcasts were Live In Concert types . Yes they did do some Live Concerts at Paris theatre , Golders Green , and other London venues , including Genesis at Knebworth . But the albums I've listed are from the Band's albums , supplied by their labels as requested by the BBC.
Those Discreet Masters would be retained by the labels , such as: Mercury , Vertigo , EMI/Harvest , EMI , and other labels , that are now mostly with UMG.
For the most part it was Tony Wilson (BBC engineer) who encoded these album tracks for The Alan Freeman Show , John Peel's Show and others . They are known as "Tony Wilson Quad Creations".
I believe he also did most of (if not all) , of the 77/78 Live Quad mixes and encoded those . Shows such as the first Live Rock broadcast in BBC MATRIX H of The Jack Bruce Band , broadcast at the start of the BBC quad experience, April 30th 1977 .
That show was introduced by Pete Drummond , with a short Matrix H test of your speakers by him saying HELLO , 4 times , once each individually with your 4 speakers , just prior to introducing the band.
BBC sessions do confuse a lot of people.
There are live concerts recorded by the BBC, which are usually an hour or maybe 2 x half hour. A lot of these were released on 'transcription discs' for the BBC to sell to broadcasters overseas. Some of those from the mid-1970s are in SQ quad. So some CD reissues may be in 'stealth quad'.
'Sessions' are sometimes live in the studio. They usually are these days. They are sometimes sessions from a private studio. But the vast majority between 1967 and 2004 were studio recordings made in house by the BBC - most often at their Maida Vale studios (quite close to Abbey Road, as it happens). When the Beeb made their quad experiments, some of the sessions were remixed into quad and it is those which seem to make up the majority of the unreleased studio quad tracks played by Alan Freeman. The tracks on the Alan Freeman Christmas Quad programme from 1977 are the best of those sessions up to that point.
See the Radio Times entry for an example programme here:
Alan Freeman - BBC Radio 1 England - 25 June 1977 - BBC Genome
Note that it mentions 'songs from their album'. This gives the impression that they are the album recordings. But note also that it says they are 'sessions'. So they are songs, but not recordings, from the album. (Just like if it was a live concert they would be 'songs from the album' but not the album recordings.) The actual recordings in this case are from the BBC John Peel session, produced by Tony Wilson [not the Factory Records supremo] and remixed by him into quad for the Alan Freeman show. Here are the details of the recording session:
BBC - Radio 1 - Keeping It Peel - 31/01/1977 Andy Fairweather-Low This is confirmed in the book In Session Tonight
In Session Tonight: The Complete Radio 1 Recordings. It says, "Repeated on Alan Freeman, 25/6/77 as 'Matrix H Quad Experiment'" This book was published by the BBC, using evidence direct from their archives.
I've heard the Alan Freeman Christmas Quad programme from 1977, and, for example, Shimmie Doo Wah Sae is noticeably different because there is no brass on the BBC recording.
All of this is not very important except that it shows, I hope, that the tracks played are not evidence of unreleased quad albums held by the record companies. I wish that they did imply lost albums.
I fully accept that there may be some non-BBC recordings broadcast by the BBC which imply a 'lost' quad album - it seems the Jethro Tull ones you cite are could well be that. But if you see a few tracks played by Alan Freeman in quad, it's probably worth comparing against the list of Peel sessions here:
BBC - Radio 1 - Keeping It Peel - Artists A-Z (Note that this only lists sessions for John Peel, so sessions for other DJs would not be listed. The book cited above lists all sessions up to 1992, though most are Peel anyway.) There will probably be a session a few weeks prior.
It will be four tracks only and if they do still exist they will most likely be in the BBC vaults.
