You've had the album. You've had the 'classical' reinterpretation of the album. Now you get the live album. The saving grace this time around is that the back catalogue has been rolled out to save the day.
It has to be said this vinyl version of "World Be Live" is a rather lavish package with plenty of attention to detail. As I ordered this limited edition coloured vinyl via PledgeMusic, my name in the credits and I also received an art print of the sleeve.
Two eighties classics "Oh L'amour" and "Ship of Fools" provide a good introduction and offer some initial reassurance. However, things go awry quite quickly. "I Love Saturday" is pretty awful: the introduction alone seems to move between at least three different keys. "Always" and "Turns the Love to Anger"
sound fragile and are a pale imitation of the studio recordings. A needless homage to Blondie comes in the form of "Atomic", which is mediocre in
execution but is strangely well received by the audience.
Contemporaneous material such as "Love You to the Sky" and "Take Me Out of Myself" sound very similar to their album versions and their reception is suitably lukewarm. "Sweet Summer Loving" is a poor song and this live version must have bored the crowd to tears. Favourites such as "Victim of Love", "Blue Savannah" and "Stop!" do carry some energy and prove to be the highlight of this album.
I didn't go to this tour as the parent album didn't inspire me to buy tickets. I've seen Erasure live many times over the years and this record does not replicate the experience at all. I don't expect (or want) live versions to mimic the original recording, but presenting them 'warts and all' can end up sounding, well, rubbish.
The mediocre result makes me ask the question, "Why release this album at all?" Well I think bands release live albums as a way of squeezing some profit from a costly tour and I guess this becomes even more pressing when the album it based on is not commercially successful. A nice looking record, but it has nothing between the ears. 2/5
