Ten Years After – Recorded Live

Decent selection of recent tunes, and some catalog material. It's wide ranging enough to cover their history up to this point. The performances are standard for a TYA concert of this era too. Enough boogie, and a smattering of off the wall jamming. Avoid the CD reissue that omits "Hobbit", a crime in my book, since every '70s double live album required a drum solo.

This was the first ever record I bought with my own pocket money back in 1974 - I was 13. The only other LP I had at that time (X-mas present) was Led Zeppelin's first LP. I'd heard Alan Freeman (well-known UK DJ back in the day) play Help Me on his Radio One Saturday Show, which stunned me at the time, and I saw this double live TYA LP a couple of weeks later in the racks in WH Smith (UK high-street retail outlet), which had that song on it. I found the photos of the recording equipment interesting (I was into home-electronics at the time - nerdy kid - all that equipment and cables seemed like some fantasy dream-land) and so I bought the record with eager anticipation, and thinking, this is real rock music, not the sell-out glam rock and other popular crap you'd hear on day-time radio.

The two long, bluesy songs on here - Help Me, and the somewhat self-indulgent side 3 - were the ones I played the most - it was about the heaviest music I'd heard at that time, and I liked it because it was less flashy and a bit more down-to-earth than Deep Purple's Made In Japan double live - with the gold sleeve. I liked this more subdued and moody sleeve art. The Roger Dean fantasy sleeve art common at that time, or Hawkwind's Space Ritual, were always a love-hate thing, for me - but that's how it was in the Seventies. I always loved the still-cool-after-all-these-years artwork on this TYA record. The ambience of these later European gigs also seemed cool - not the Woodstock hippies and their freak flags and LSD - too much of a cliche now.

I gradually got most of the TYA studio records over the subsequent years in 1970s, but none of them had the heaviness of this live record. They sounded a bit lifeless in the studio - I never liked their studio records that much. Alvin Lee's guitar playing live was what blew me away back then - I'm still smitten these 50 years later by the sound of a shredding heavy guitar - nothing else compares for a musical adrenaline fix - and I've listened to an awful lot of rock music in the intervening 50 years.

By the early 1980s, this music seemed awfully dated, and I sold my copies of this and Made In Japan and other dinosaurs-of-the-Seventies rock bands - I'm sorry to say. You don't know what you have 'til it's gone. I'm tempted to buy this one again, just to see if I still like it as much as I once did, but it's like a first love that you remember with affection, but can never really go back to in time. Bevis Frond did a great song about that - Love Is - on his North Circular triple LP.

To summarize, if you're into 1970s blues-influenced rock guitarists/bands beyond the usual well-known suspects, and don't mind slightly dated retro rock sounds, give this record a listen.

Un des meilleurs live de l’époque. Un Masterpiece !
Je recommande +++!

The person I have has a single lyric insert and a BIG POSTER.

Ten Years After are an English blues rock band of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Ten Years After belonged to the occupation of Woodstock, the American music festival in August 1969.

Between 1968 and 1973 the band's eight albums reached the top 40 of the UK Albums Chart. Twelve albums scored in the US Billboard 200. Ten Years after brought hit songs from as I'm Going Home, Hear Me Calling, I'd Love to Change the World and Love Like a Man.