Franz Ferdinand are the latest in an increasingly long line of bands offering fans the chance to buy a recording of the gig they've just attended. As you shuffled out of Hammersmith Apollo on Monday night, £20 would have bought you a "deluxe double live album" of the show you'd just finished watching. Isn't technology great?
Well yes, but two things: isn't £20 a bit steep for a recording hastily burned from a soundboard and put into glossy packaging? And, more importantly, doesn't this undermine the fundamental pleasure of going to a gig: that at the end of the night we leave with our own version of what happened during those 90 minutes – a hazy, impressionistic sensation that in time allows us, if we desire, to construct a legend around it?
With few exceptions a great live experience won't be enhanced by hearing a recording of it after the event. Instead, it's likely to be brutally stripped of its romance. That's why live albums are almost always disappointing: the reality never matches the idealised memory. Most dedicated gig-goers understand that they have to wade through a lot of "meh" to get the good stuff, and it's those fleeting peaks that we reshape into a false memory of sustained greatness.
The few really good live albums – Van Morrison's It's Too Late to Stop Now, or Radiohead's I Might Be Wrong – are usually composites of several concerts or, as with Thin Lizzy's Live and Dangerous, shamelessly embroidered later in the studio. Unless the circumstances of the recording are truly extraordinary (Johnny Cash's At Folsom Prison or Nirvana's MTV Unplugged in New York) the special feeling from a gig just doesn't translate easily to tape. Good. That's why we go in the first place.
Many acts will view the trend of selling live recordings – overseen by companies like Live Here Now – as providing a viable revenue stream in the face of uncertain album sales, but I'm not so sure. Paying £20 in a fug of post-gig euphoria for something that will be played once and then filed away is a pricey reminder that gigs are all about experiencing first hand the precious "now" moment. How long before artists realise you can't buy that feeling retrospectively – and why would you want to?
