BE-BOP DELUXE: RADIOLAND DELUXE: BBC RADIO 1 LIVE IN CONCERT (1976-1978/1994)
1) Life In The Air Age; 2)
Sister Seagull; 3) Third Floor Heaven; 4) Blazing Apostles; 5) Maid In Heaven;
6) Kiss Of Light; 7) Adventures In A Yorkshire Landscape; 8) Fair Exchange; 9)
Ships In The Night; 10) Modern Music; 11) New Precision; 12) Superenigmatix;
13) Possession; 14) Dangerous Stranger; 15) Island Of The Dead; 16) Panic In
The World.
This is one of those BBC packages which
collects tracks that were actually played at theater venues in front of live
audiences and broadcast subsequently, so it does function as a «real» live
album, not «live in the studio», and is in some ways preferable to Live! In The Air Age. Most of the
tracks are also chronologically coherent, dating back to early 1976 (the Sunburst Finish era; tracks 1-4,
recorded at the Paris Theatre on the 15th of January) or late 1976 (the Modern Music era, recorded at the
Hammersmith Odeon on the 10th of October) — with a further six-track «appendix»
from a show at Golders Green Hippodrome on the 19th of January, 1978, represented
exclusively by numbers from Drastic
Plastic. (Note also that the whole package was originally released in 1994,
then remastered and re-released in 2002 under the somewhat less clumsy title of
Tremulous Antenna).
There is not really that much to say about the
whole thing, except that the sound quality is excellent — Nelson's vocals and
guitar blaze across the living room with as much power and clarity as you'd
expect from a well-produced studio recording — and that the band, as expected,
is precise and consistent throughout. The major problem is the same as with Live!: the songs just do not depart all
that much from the studio counterparts, or at least the departures do not jump
right out at the listener, and should rather be appreciated by long-term
hardcore fans. This is a particular concern for Drastic Plastic-era material, where Nelson was leaving less space for
improvisation and variation — not so much for the early stuff; in that respect,
as usual, ʽAdventures In A Yorkshire Landscapeʼ is the primary focus of
attraction, with Nelson and keyboardist Andy Clark taking turns to offer their
spontaneous bursts of inspiration to the listeners.
On the other hand, it may be interesting, for
instance, to hear the entire ʽModern Musicʼ suite performed without the cloak
of studio trickery, or ʽNew Precisionʼ without the «walking into the sea»
overdubs of splashing water, but with extra guitar and keyboard noises to suggest aquatic interference rather than
simply bring it over, or a slightly «lazier», but no less mind-blowing call of
the seagull at the end of ʽSister Seagullʼ... there, I have pretty much
exhausted the list of differences. But when all has been really said and done,
Radioland is basically just a way of
revisiting the different, but similar faces of this band one last time —
particularly since I have no problem whatsoever with the track selection (no
repeats, as is BBC's custom, and no mediocre material from the early Futurama days, bar the great concise
hits). Thumbs up.
Check "Radioland Deluxe" (CD) on Amazon
note that "Tremulous" was done from the master tapes, and that remaster has much better sound - not that the Windsongs were bad ...
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