ALBUM REVIEW : The Beatles, the Beeb, the Best : **** THE BEATLES “Live at the BBC”; <i> Capitol</i>

If you loved the rowdy audio postulations of the movie “Back Beat,” or even if you didn’t, here’s the real deal: The 1962-65 Beatles, in the process of becoming the world’s greatest original pop band, still getting over being one of the world’s coolest bar bands.

In this 56-song set of recordings made for BBC radio are 30 tunes they never cut for commercial release: 29 rock classics, plus the Lennon-McCartney “I’ll Be on My Way” (written for Liverpool homeboy Billy J. Kramer). That means far more John-as-Chuck-Berry or Paul the Little Richard wanna-be than the canon previously could bear, plus nods to still more forebears and contemporaries, from “I Forgot to Remember to Forget” to “Soldier of Love.”

Of the 26 that do have official studio counterparts--split between more non-originals and familiar early-Beatle compositions--some are close enough to serve mainly as a reminder that, yes, Virginia, there was a pre-overdubbing era when bands sounded the same “live” as not. Others are markedly rawer, and a few are improvements, like a revved-up “Slow Down” and an “I Wanna Be Your Man” with a much more randy Ringo vocal.

Given that the lads cut 90 different songs in 288 versions for BBC radio, the faithful will debate some of compiler George Martin’s narrowing-down. As with Prince’s “Black Album,” die-hard collectors already own all this material and then some in similar-quality bootleg form (including an exhaustive, unauthorized nine-CD box set released last year).

For them, is there any reason to pick up Capitol’s condensed official release? You bet: Martin’s selections are generally savvy, the pacing is tight, the 13 interview extracts are quick and silly enough to add to the giddy air, and the non-chronological sequence helps disperse primitive recordings amid the pristinely preserved.

And for the vast majority who’ve never heard this, this isn’t just historical artifact time, it’s a two-hour twist party; at the risk of sounding unduly consumerist, every home with a rug to cut ought to have one.

* New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor) to four (excellent).