From Dylan to Disco, Beyoncé to Bob Marley: Ranking of the 30 Best Live Albums of All Time! | music

30. Maze Featuring Frankie Beverly – Live in New Orleans (1981)

Already a star in Black America, Maze became the best band if you knew it among British underground soul fans thanks to Live in New Orleans. It summed up their appeal perfectly: smooth but not smooth, an amazingly tight band making relaxing, upbeat music, one great song after another.

29. Hawkwind – Space Rites (1973)

Live albums often feel like an afterthought or a nice-to-have addition rather than a pivotal part of a band’s career. But Space Ritual is the best way to experience Hawkwind’s unique blend of psychedelia, protopunk, electronica and Motorik krautrock-like repetition: advertised with the catchphrase ’88 minutes of brain damage’, it’s immersive, hypnotic and brilliant.

28. Portishead – Roseland NYC Live (1998)

Capturing a one-off concert featuring the standard Portishead decks/synthesizer/guitar lineup backed by strings, woodwinds and brass, Roseland NYC Live is magical. Rather than distorting their strange sound, the orchestra enhances it, the perfect setting for Beth Gibbons’ voice: the Mysterons’ dramatic climax is worth the price of admission alone.

27. Laura Nyro – Laura: Live at the Bottom Line (1989)

Recorded years after her commercial peak, Live at the Bottom Line nonetheless offers a perfect encapsulation of what made Laura Nyro special: it feels intimate and flexible, ranging across her career and musical styles from soul to gospel to jazz. Her voice sounds amazing. Whether it’s a classic or previously unreleased, the quality of the song never goes down.

26. Grateful Dead – Europe 72 (1972)

They didn’t invent the term American cosmic music, but no artist embodied it like the Grateful Dead in 1972, whose sound split between free-form exploration, earthy blues, and country rock. Filled with stunning, hitherto unreleased songs – He’s Gone, Brown-Eyed Women, Ramble on Rose – the Europe ’72 trio may be their greatest album.

25. Otis Redding – Live at the Whiskey a Go-Go: The Complete Recordings (2016)

Six CDs may appear De Troop But this is still the best way to hear Otis Redding live. He was placed in a rock venue trying to attract a white audience, and he did not change his style in the soul circuit but worked hard to win them over, with dramatic results.

Metallic KO is a mess: a low-quality recording of jokesters on their last legs – often out of tune and out of time – in front of a crowd so hostile you can hear the bottles smashing on the stage. But as a piece of rock mythology, an account of fierce defiance in the face of disaster, it is utterly captivating.

23. Sylvester – Living Proof (1979)

Disco wasn’t the genre that produced many great live albums, but then Sylvester wasn’t just a disco artist: his exhilarating performance at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House ran from You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) to versions of Billie Holiday’s Lover Man and the Beatles’ Blackbird, his voice stunning throughout.

22. Talking Heads – Stop Logic (1984)

The visuals are what everyone remembers from the movie Stop Make Sense: the big suit and the streaming box. The album obviously strips them away, but what’s left is still great: the vast majority of the songs here smoke out their studio incarnations, sounding variously more urgent, more joyful, more funky.

21. Iron Maiden – Living After Death (1985)

Hailed in some quarters as the greatest live metal album, Live After Death presents the sound of Maiden at the culmination of their mid-’80s imperial phase: everything you could want from a Maiden group of the era performed by a band firing on all cylinders, with Bruce Dickinson in full ringmaster mode.

20. Beyoncé – Homecoming: Live Album (2019)

A live album seems like a dying art in the 21st century, but this sparkling recording of Beyoncé’s band-assisted Coachella performance carries a real sense of event and stakes: it’s unlike anything else in her catalog.

19. Sam Cooke – Live concert at Harlem Square Club (1985)

There’s something very telling about the fact that Cooke’s label refused to release this 1963 recording at the time: it’s fast-paced, raw and incredibly intense, none of which fit with the smooth pop image they were trying to project for the singer – all of which makes for exciting listening today.

18. Depeche Mode – 101 (1989)

A perfect snapshot of the point at which Depeche Mode ascended from synth-pop hitmakers to alternative stars filling American stadiums, 101 also underscores why this happened: these familiar songs were skillfully tweaked and rearranged, made even more powerful in their live incarnations. Dave Gahan sounds imperious, as if he always expected to end up playing in front of 60,000 people.

17. Curtis Mayfield – Curtis/Live! (1971)

Mayfield was at his peak when he recorded Curtis/Live! In New York. You can tell: He moves effortlessly between Impressions classics and new solo material, the gentle optimism of People Get Ready and the cruel fatalism of If There’s a Hell Below We’re All Gonna Go, and the aching I’m Planning to Keep a Faithful, highly funky Check Out Your Mind.

16. Johnny Cash – At San Quentin (1969)

It would have been Folsom Prison in 1968, but San Quentin has, well, San Quentin, which the inmates force Cash to play twice. It should be impossible to get past the hype of second performance events, but Cash does, thanks to another ace in his pocket, the live debut of A Boy Named Sue.

15. Elton John – 11/17/70 (1971)

Recorded weeks after the start of his career at the Troubadour Club in Los Angeles and educational to anyone who only knows the hits, 11-17-70 offers the purest expression of his original vision for an Elton John band, a “power trio with piano” big on extended improvisation – even the ballads swing surprisingly powerfully.

14. Donny Hathaway – Live Concert (1972)

The rule of thumb is that a great live album should sound fundamentally different from the artist’s studio work. That’s true here: Hathaway’s voice is as great as ever, but his band sounds catchier, looser, and more prone to jamming. The audience seems to be in a daze the whole time: who can blame them?

13. Thin Lizzy – Live and Dangerous (1978)

You could argue that Live and Dangerous isn’t actually a live album – producer Tony Visconti claimed that 75% of it was re-recorded – but you’d have a much harder time arguing against its quality: it depicts Thin Lizzy at their pre-heroin peak, more powerful and effective than even their best studio albums.

12. Motorhead – No Sleep Till Hammersmith (1981)

Motörhead’s proposition achieved everything it set out to achieve with No Sleep ’til Hammersmith much to Lemmy’s wrath, but it’s understandable: it’s nasty, fast, brutal, raw and absolutely relentless, grabbing the listener by the throat from the moment Ace of Spades comes to life and refusing to let go for 40 minutes.

11. Joni Mitchell – Miles of Isles (1974)

Miles of Isles captures Mitchell at a moment of flux: at the peak of her fame, but on the cusp of pushing her music in broader, less commercial directions. It’s a process she may have begun at these shows, where she radically rearranges songs from her previous career in the company of an absolutely amazing band.

10. Bill Withers – Live Concert at Carnegie Hall (1973)

For a man who was still working in a factory 18 months before this album was recorded, Bill Withers sounds wonderfully relaxed and chatty on stage at New York’s Carnegie Hall: which has undoubtedly helped him put together a collection of songs as stunning as the 14 found here. It’s all great, but the Harlem/Cold Baloney climax is something else.

9. Bob Marley and the Wailers – Live! (1975)

Live albums can be a poor substitute for attending a concert, but Live! It is recorded in a way that makes you feel like you are actually in the crowd. The Wailers’ performance is obviously amazing, but the way the recording engages the audience and the atmosphere is almost on par. An unedited deluxe edition is the way to go.

8. Nina Simone – “Nuff Said!” (1968)

Nina Simone’s discography is full of astonishing live albums – from 1959’s At City Hall to 1976’s Live in Montreux – but nothing quite carries the emotional charge of Nouf Said’s recordings from the Westbury Music Gallery, three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King: a performance that alternates between sadness and anger.

7. The Who – Live in Leeds (1970)

Tommy sent his career into the stratosphere but – as always with The Who – caused an upheaval: the album was treated like high art, a reception that ignored the band’s brutal, incendiary side. The solution was to live in Leeds, where he made initial live recordings without songs from Tommy. This was as deep and explosive rock music as you could hope for.

6. Van Morrison – It’s Too Late to Stop Now, Volume One (1974)

More recently, Van Morrison’s reputation as a live performer has often centered on his irascible attitude. It’s never been like that: the performances here are fluid, unusual stuff, and the songs bend and shape in an instant to thrilling effect. Moreover, it is proof of the claim that he is the greatest white R&B singer of all time.

5. Aretha Franklin – Amazing Grace (1972)

If you want a secular live broadcast of Aretha, 1971’s Live at Fillmore West should be your first stop. But for emotional heft and astonishing vocal power, her gospel performance of Amazing Grace — recorded at her father’s church in Los Angeles — is absolutely unbeatable, regardless of your faith or not.

4. The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Live in Monterey (2007)

There’s stiff competition for the title of Jimi Hendrix’s best live album – not least from 1970s band Band of Gypsys – but Monterey comes out on top, thanks to the almost palpable crackle of excitement around the show that introduced Hendrix to America, not to mention the chaos of the band’s commentary-filled performance.

3. Bob Dylan – The Bootleg Series Volume 4: Bob Dylan Live Concert 1966, Royal Albert Hall Concert (1998)

Bob Dylan’s Manchester Free Trade Hall show (initially wrongly attributed to bootleg recordings as the Royal Albert Hall) may be the most famous concert in rock history. The story is incredibly familiar (“Judas!”) but what’s amazing is how powerful the recording is, even when you know what’s going to happen. Note: On Spotify, this doesn’t happen, because — wait for it — all the conversations between songs are done It has been edited.

2. James Brown – Live at the Apollo (1963)

Brown’s three Live at the Apollo albums are essential, but Volume One takes the prize: it’s atmospheric and electric, and captures the spirit of classic chitlin’ circuit, at once raw and incredibly tight. The screams and screams of the audience bombarding its eight tracks only add to the experience.

1. Jerry Lee Lewis – Live at the Star Club, Hamburg (1964)

Live at the Star Club is a poorly mixed recording of Jerry Lee Lewis in the upper parts of his body quite literally: his career has stalled and his performance sounds like a 40-minute advertisement for the alarmingly stimulant properties of amphetamines. The songs start at a dizzying pace and are repetitive acceleration; His backing band, the British band Nashville Teens, were about to hang on by the skin of their teeth. It should be a disaster. Instead, it’s almost indecently sexy, capturing the brutal essence of rock ‘n’ roll like no other. “It’s not an album,” commented a Rolling Stone review, “it’s a crime scene.” They had a point.