“An undisputed king”: David Bowie’s favourite live album
Even though he was one of the best live performers in the world, even David Bowie would admit that the live album is a tricky beast to tame. Something seems to be built into us that makes us want it to be perfect when we make music. Wrong notes, vocal imperfections, anything off-beat, all of that has to go. Of course, as both punters and artists alike know, the beauty of the live performance is that it isn’t perfect. So, what’s the middle ground?
The definition of the perfect live album varies depending on who you’re speaking to. For many people, a live album should be as musically tight as a studio album but with a bit of added energy. Talking between songs and crowd roars, they’re all an added extra that should almost be a backing band to the music. Not everyone thinks this way, though.
Some people recognise that the live experience has the potential to be different from making music in a studio environment, and therefore, bands should try to take advantage of this distinctive difference. With a live album, they have a chance to showcase a different side of themselves, a side that really establishes them as musical geniuses.
If you were to ask Lenny Kaye, one of the best bands to bring the live album to life was the Grateful Dead. The fact that a lot of their live show was improvised, their live albums capture a particular moment in time that won’t be recreated again. Subsequently, it makes for an incredibly unique listening experience.
“A list of song titles would mean very little in terms of what actually goes on inside the album,” said Kaye, “The Dead in concert tends to use their regular material as a jumping-off point, as little frameworks that exist only for what can be built on top of them.”
He also said: “Live Dead also exhibits the group’s quite considerable ability in tying together different song threads, letting them pass naturally into one another, almost if they had been specially designed for such a move.”
David Bowie also had a different approach to what he determined was a good and a bad live album. For him, the performative aspect of music was one of the most alluring parts of it, and so live albums should be able to capture that live, energetic feel. One album that he found completely mesmerising in terms of the sound and the energy that was packed into the record’s run time was James Brown’s Live at the Apollo.
“My old schoolmate Geoff MacCormack brought this around to my house one afternoon, breathless and overexcited,” he said, “’You have never, in your life, heard anything like this’, he said. […] Two of the songs on this album, ‘Try Me’ and ‘Lose Someone’, became loose inspirations for Ziggy’s ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide’. Brown’s Apollo performance still stands for me as one of the most exciting live albums ever. Soul music now had an undisputed king.”
