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Nice synth work in this Joe Gibbs tune from 1977

That was a John Peel favorite - he played bits from it constantly. One time I remember him describing the album as sounding Medieval, which I thought was an evocative perception.

AN UNFINISHED LIST, WITH CATEGORIES Reputedly Great But When Would I Ever Ever Feel the Slightest Urge? The Who - Live at Leeds U2 - Under A Blood Red Sky: Live at Red Rocks Not Actually a Great Live Band and Here's the Proof The Smiths - Rank Befuddlingly Extraneous to Requirements Heaven...

that comes from the dubbiness doesnt' it - which I think the title "Prophecy" is alluding to as much as anything, roots reggae type Old Testament derived stuff dub is one of the ultimate palimpsestcape type musics... wavering traces of the immemorial.., the feeling that it's both ultra...

Fake live albums - Orgasm by John's Children Apparently what they did in the studio was so poor that manager Simon Napier-Bell had the bright idea of transplanting audience screams from The Beatles movie A Hard Day's Night

I was thinking about whether there was a mini-tradition of the Live Single. This is the one that sticks out as being a/ actually good b/ capturing the spirit of the genre, 2Tone being about dance music played by live bands c/ a huge triumph, one of their two number 1 singles - the other being...

Enough is as good as a feast, as me old mum says.

yeah the Dead are one of those rare examples where the studio albums are way way less important and valued than the live official releases - and then there's the massive fan economy of tapes the Dead compensate for lack of record sales by selling every kind Dead-insignia-ed merch imaginable -...

That's true - there's a lot of doctoring. One of the simple reasons there are a lot of live albums in the world is that they are much cheaper to make than studio albums. You take it off the board or you send round a mobile unit. Then there's some mixing and maybe some postproduction additions...

Good point, they are unleashed, certain kinds of bands.... I had no idea Urban Bushmen was live - guess I didn't look at the small print! It is very well recorded. Exceptions aside, like Allman Bros, I tend to think that it goes a bit like this: Jazz (at least until the Miles-Macero era...

His envisioning of the Field of Stones is breathtaking. > His sentences often feel gutsy and ornate and rich and delicious and a little decrepit. Steak tartare served on cracked bone china. Was wondering whether there is a Decrepit Nobility continuum.... Sir Henry at Rawlinson End, the...

Yes I'd heard that it's dwindling by the third installment. The second one is considered almost as good as the first, right? Was wondering if the TV series could possibly be any good. I will give it a go once I've got through all three of the books.

Live bootlegs show that fans - or some fans - really enjoy live albums. Ultra-fans will want bootlegs of every concert on a tour, even though the setlist is usually the same each time - and often the between-song banter is the same. There's that whole argument that the studio versions of the...

Interesting question. Deejaying is recorded music being "performed" by people who didn't make it - reinjecting a kind of liveness into it. In that sense, all my cherished, endlessly-replayed pirate tapes are sort of live albums - or live bootlegs. The MC element adds another layer of liveness...

Shamefully I've never listened to this, canonically central though it is. JB is a small doses thing for me at the best of times (I did once make it through a box set, but then I was reviewing), the idea of a whole concert of whoops and shattering soul-cries always seems exhausting before you've...

I have extravagantly reviewed almost all of those albums - some of them individually, back when you could only get things like Pangaea as Japanese imports, and later on for The Wire I did a whole bunch of them when Sony reissued them as deluxe CDs in the 2000s.... Praised them to the heavens, I...

I confess that I have never managed to make it all the way through Space Ritual .... in theory it's everything I want from music and "approve" of, but... I even have the gatefold vinyl version (a reissue of it, not an original).

Anyone into the Mervyn Peake trilogy? I had a second-hand Penguin copy of the first one for about 25 years - it was already yellowing when I picked it up, and it just got browner and browner and less appealing to handle. Eventually I chucked it out, unread. But then this summer I saw the whole...

Hip hop and dance music surely abolish the concept of the live album. Render it inapplicable. I mean, I'm sure there must be a Cypress Hill live album in existence, but... no one sensible wants a document of a live rap performance.

Actually I did hear one recently that I preferred to any of the studio records by the group - Santana's Lotus from 1974. It's actually pretty close to the Miles Davis albums of that era.