Review:

on 2011-02-21 CharlesMartel Said:

Bauhaus had a great live act and it is always good to hear a live album which recreates the essence of those performances as well as this. Usually, live performances come across better than the studio version. This one in fact sounds almost too perfect, leading me to suspect the presence of the dreaded studio overdub. As a result, this is almost like a compilation album of the best live performances, selected because they have had the best finishing touches applied to them.

In truth, the general statement about live albums made above holds for the first part of the extended CD, the original issue dating from 1982. It is a different picture with the extended version. I have to say that the quality tails off towards the end with the previously unissued material which is largely a big disappointment. Particularly poor is the cover of the Velvet Underground's "Waiting for the Man" on which Nico puts in a cameo appearance. Never the best track of the Velvet Underground's repertoire in my view, this cover is particularly poor with Nico adding very little and demonstrating that, in truth, she cannot sing. Having a sexy European voice might make her intriguing in America but it matters little when you are dealing with sexy Europeans it seems. As a result of these flaws, the album comes across as being overly long which is something of a shame.

The heart of the album though contains tracks recorded across Europe in 1981 and 1982. The quality of the recording, so often the downfall of live albums, is very good and the performances come close in places to recapturing the sound and atmosphere of the original studio recordings. The guitars are for the most part crisp and clean; the drums are suitably exactly the reverse; and Peter Murphy's voice carries with it those images of him sneering, leering, careering his way across stage like a demented bat.

Of the tracks themselves, "Terror Couple Kills Colonel" (always a favourite of mine) is a good example, but especially "Bela Lugosi's Dead" in some ways is an improvement on the original. For one thing, the vocals are clearer and Murphy's screeching carries with it a sense of not just impending doom, but also unbridled paranoia. It is always going to be hard to reproduce the quality of a classic of its time, the song that sparked the whole Goth thing, but this live version is at least as good as the original and in some ways even better.

The rest of the album captures the band at a high point in their career. After this, they tended to veer away from the moody and sinister post punk of their early years and towards a more pop sound in an attempt to crack the singles charts. Peter Murphy undoubtedly holds the whole thing together and this is demonstrated on several of the tracks, most notably "In the Flat Field" and "Rose Garden Funeral of Sores". In my view the one track where it doesn't work is "The Man with the X-Ray Eyes" - I just cannot get my head round this slowed down version. I can see what Murphy was trying to do, but it simply doesn't come off.

In short, this is a capable live album. Not the best but far from the worst, and one which provides a pretty good idea of what the so-called progenitors of Gothic music actually sounded like live.
Rating: 6/10