The Romance of the Bootleg

After all this talk about modern digital recordings having to be perfectly remastered without a click or scratch out of place it was quite refreshing to come across this bootleg recording of a recent OMD concert obviously made from the audience with all the faults such a venture implies .. audience cheering, booing, people talking next to the mike, clapping too loud etc. Bliss! Takes you back to the days of the bootleg cassette picked up usually at record fairs and bought off dodgy looking geezers for extortionate prices. Ah those were the days...

And on the subjectof OMD live I finally got round to actually buying their 'Architecture & Morality and more' CD released earlier this year. About time we had a live OMD album really as they always had put on a great show, but fans like me have only ever been able to hear them via aforementioned bootlegs, the odd radio transmission or single tracks released a B sides. This official issue does not disappoint - all the Architecture and Morality tracks are there, most notably a re-vamped The New Stone Age performed with the energy and immediacy it deserves, plus a sound rendition of the sublime The Beginning & the End , although it's juxtaposition with If You Leave jars somewhat at least to these ears (it's the first OMD single I never bought..). Dreadful cover - artwork inside better.

Punters may be better off getting the DVD version which has all the tracks played on the night (the CD inexplicably omits Messages for one..). Speaking of which I would like to thank the anonymous Polish person who very kindly putthe DVD up on Rapidshare via a local forum. It took me the best part of a day to download all the files and decompress them, only to discover the the main concert part has no audio to it! The sensation of disappointment was similar to that of getting one of those dodgy bootlegs home and listening to it on your tape recorder only to find a crappy audience recording.... Plus ca change..

more links (hoping they'll get me more hits..):

OMD official site
OMD on play.com
Architecture & Morality, surprsingly a blog about architecture and morality