Live in the Air Age [Live]

Be Bop Deluxe | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (November 30, 2004)
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Live
• Label: Caroline
• ASIN: B000024H5Y
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Vinyl  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #18,964 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

1990 reissue of 1977 release for British rock act led by guitarist Bill Nelson. Standard jewel case.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Life in the PROGressive age!, July 24, 2005

By 

J. Thomas "jimmyjames8" (Out on the Lost Highway) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Live in the Air Age (Audio CD)

This is PROG rock at it's best. These guys rode the college radio air waves of 1977-78 along with Crack the Sky, Genesis, and Gentle Giant. Great hooks, guitars everywhere kind of sound, understandable but non-sensical lyrics, top notch musicianship. Along with Crack the Sky, BeBopDeluxe were the heaviest sounding prog rockers thanks to Bill Nelson's guitar histrionics. Great, Great, Great but you had to have been there. If you weren't, you might not get it. Anyway, minus a couple of songs, this is a greatest hits live package whether it was meant to be or not.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deluxe Be-Bop, March 31, 2005

By 

Lovblad (Geneva, Switzerland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Live in the Air Age (Audio CD)

This is probably Be-Bop Deluxe's best album. I boughtz it on impulse in the late 80's and back then was floored by the energy of the recordings. Here Bill Nelson clearly is at the crossroads between the art-rock found on the previous albums and the more new-wave approach he would embrace on his solo albums a few years later. While the sound on some of the original Be Bop Deluxe albums has aged somewhat, the live album is quite extraordinary. Take Shine which is simply fantastic jazz fusion or blaziing apostles with its hard rock approach...stunning.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lost treasure of the 1970s, March 7, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Live in the Air Age (Audio CD)

It took a while for this group to find its feet. Rotating personnel in the early days and a bit too much homage to Mr. Z. Stardust prevented Bill Nelson and his cohorts from really breaking out. By their brilliant 1976 album, Modern Music, they had worked out the bugs. Live! in the Air Age takes Be Bop Deluxe to a whole new level: Older material such as "Sister Seagull" and "Adventures in a Yorkshire Landscape" is so charged with energy that it charges out of the speakers in three well-defined dimensions, while obscurities such as "Shine" and "Mill Street Junction" reveal the new territories this great band had yet to conquer. Unfortunately, they made only one more album -- the synthesized wonderful new direction of "Drastic Plastic" in 1977 -- before punk and the touring treadmill convinced Nelson to opt for a more hermetic existence. (Sound-on-Sound by his Red Noise, and Quit Dreaming and Get on the Beam are brilliant slabs of entirely committed performance.) By now, Nelson has released as many albums as Zappa ever did, and the wander through the catalogue has its share of caveat emptor. But this album is five-star for both the Be Bop convert and the unfamiliar listener looking for an example of the great places the legacy of Hendrix left others to expand.