We recently became aquatinted with Aussie company OpenLIVE, who have created an affordable tool that allows musicians to easily and reliably record their performances in high def sound.

Naturally this lead us to the debate, what are the best live recordings? Obviously we couldn’t come to any sort of reasonable agreement, so we instead decided to take a different approach, focusing on what artists’ live recordings we believed were stronger, had more emotion, that were more real than their studio output.

There are some glaring omissions we’ll get out of the way, the likes of The Who at Leeds, Nirvana’s Unplugged and Johnny Cash’s Folsom are all obvious strokes of genius, however we decided to focus on our favourite live records, obeying only one important rule: the recordings had to be legit, none of this sneaky bootleg business.

Join us as we visit our favourite live albums that proved the band were so much better onstage than they ever were in the studio.

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