Next week The The release The Comeback Special, a 24-track live album documenting the band’s concert at the Royal Albert Hall in June 2018. Meanwhile, Steely Dan’s last man standing, Donald Fagen, has just released two live albums recorded in 2019.
Their musical qualities notwithstanding, these releases feel like relics from a lost world. Much like the fondue set, the live album is much reduced from its 1970s and 1980s heyday, when a pretty blonde sideman-turned-solo artist called Peter Frampton could somehow shift eight million copies of the anodyne Frampton Comes Alive!
The stand-alone contemporary live album is now an endangered species; MTV’s Unplugged series in the 1990s offered a final down-home twist on the format. These days, in-concert releases tend to be ancient archival recordings, or else bundled into ‘deluxe’ versions of endlessly repackaged old studio albums.
On Live at Leeds, The Who slashed and burned in a way they never quite managed in the studio
The reasons for their decline are obvious.
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