I don’t know about you, but I always find that there’s nothing quite like a live album to reignite my passion for listening. Maybe it’s my millennial attention span, but as much as I love studio recordings, too often I find myself, twenty minutes in, thinking about what I’m going to cook for dinner tomorrow, or what I really should have said to my rude co-worker last week, or whether that person who coughed when I passed them in the supermarket on Sunday gave me the coronavirus.
But all that goes away when I put on a live album. Okay, often the sound isn’t quite as good, but there’s just something about them that fires your imagination, that makes you feel like you’re sitting there in the crowd watching that performance, and isn’t that what we’re all going for? That time-travelling, being-there feeling?
Anyway, I know there are a lot of live albums in other favourites threads, and I hope I’m not rocking the boat by making a new one, but if you want to, please feel free to use this as a place to post the ones that utterly transport you to another place and time. Maybe add if you’ve seen the band / performer yourself, or even if you were actually at the performance on the album!
I have always loved live albums. They often offer a glimpse of a band in the raw. Not that that is always a good thing :-). One album that immediately springs to mind is Michael Schenker Group’s “One Night at Budokan”. I really get a kick out of one track in particular; “Let Sleeping Dogs Lie”. It’s a classic Scorpionesque rock ballad, except Cozy Powell seems to only have an on/off-approach to his drumming and hammers the ■■■■ out of the song. It get’s a smile on my face every time I hear it. I miss that guy :-).
I have so many live albums from gigs we host and there is something in a live recording that cannot be beaten. It’s the energy of the evening perhaps, a song has to be performed with the musicians you have on the night, no extra padding. A shame I cannot share these, but we have released a few…
This one is out there
You may find this somewhere
Some more magic if you can find it.
Cherry Lee Mewis has a live album coming soon, some of which I believe was recorded at the last gig she played for us.
I remember listening to the live broadcast of this concert on my local 89X (Windsor / Detroit) radio station as a teenager and recording it live on cassette from the radio broadcast. Then months later, they released it as 3 separate CD singles that you could combine and get (almost) the whole concert. Sure there was a new song, Not For You (I think) missing from the release, along with their usual cover of Dead Boys’ Sonic Reducer during the 2nd (3rd?) encore, but whenever I listen to it, it still takes me back…
I find that ratings are deceiving and particularly so with an artist who has a solid fanbase. If they step out of their usual style, there is always a risk of a lot of avid fans being disgruntled. Alanis Morissette has always been good at exactly that :-). Consequently there is a fairly massive impact on the votes.
Earlier today I looked up the details of Duran Duran’s “Thank You” album and was fairly astonished at the low ratings it had and some very harsh reviews. I am not particularly crazy about Duran Duran but I always liked that specific album very much, probably because the covers are of bands that I really really like, and all are done with something between tongue in cheek and great respect. But it certainly doesn’t sound like a Duran Duran album. I guess (read: choose to believe) that those are the reasons for the poor ratings. Might be the case with Alanis too.
You really must, Steve Howlett used to run gigs in Norwich and is now (present circs accepted) doing house concerts. Check out our YouTube channel for some free live music to entertain you.
I was allowed especially to stay up and see it. My older brother was into music and my father was tolerant.
Funnily enough although I loved the show I was conditioned to expect perfect renditions by all the other shows so really didn’t like live shows at first.
I have an early bootleg vinyl copy which always sounded rather rough. It’s been officially released a few times now. I think one of the releases was more like the bootleg, with crowd interaction etc that the first (?) official release cleaned up. But, it’s the official release with that interaction that is the one to look out for. Very energetic performance in his angry ‘new wave’ days.
