More than afterthoughts

Live albums used to be an afterthought, an easy way for artists to please their often all-too-easily-pleased fans without having to go to the trouble of coming up with a dozen worthwhile new songs.

But with COVID restrictions putting a crimp in the concert business, live albums are becoming vital. Without them, some performers might lose that sense of real-time connectedness with their audiences altogether.

The British soft-pop songstress Rumer has joined the ranks of musicians refusing to let that crisis go to waste. In October 2020, she and a five-man band anchored by her keyboard-playing husband Rob Shirakbari turned in a resplendent livestreamed set at London’s otherwise empty Lafayette club.

The show’s audio portion is now available as Live from Lafayette (Cooking Vinyl). Latecomers to Rumer’s anachronistically dulcet voice (two-thirds Karen Carpenter, one-third Linda Ronstadt) and the fetching uses to which she puts it couldn’t ask for a better overview.

Five selections come from her 2020 album Nashville Tears, one from her 2015 EP Love Is the Answer (the Todd Rundgren–penned title cut, still the best-ever Christian pop song by a non-Christian songwriter), four from 2014’s Into Colour, one from 2012’s Boys Don’t Cry, and four from 2010’s Seasons of My Soul—all that’s missing are representative offerings from 2016’s This Girl’s in Love: A Bacharach & David Songbook and the 2012 album that she made as half of the Brazil-meets-the-’60s duo Stereo Venus, Close to the Sun.

In short, if Live From Lafayette doesn’t earn Rumer some long-overdue traction in the U.S., it’s hard to imagine what will.

Live recordings and stateside neglect also figure in Rollin’: The Albums 1976-1978, the new five-disc Steve Gibbons Band box from Esoteric Recordings.

Gibbons, now 80, hailed from Birmingham, England, and seemed poised in the ’70s for stardom. Besides the rough-and-tumble quality of the music that he was making at the time—an approximate combination of Rockpile, the Move, Mott the Hoople, Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen, and (according to some) Bob Seger—Gibbons and his band had ties to the Who, with whom they shared management and for whom they opened during that group’s 1976 tour, a gig that resulted in the live album Caught in the Act (Disc 3 in the Rollin’ box).

But, despite scoring a hit in England with a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Tulane” (from Rollin’ On [Disc 2]) and earning thumbs-up reviews, Gibbons’ band failed to click with U.S. deejays and other pop-music gatekeepers, who could be inexplicably deaf to the sounds exciting blue-collar Brits. (See also: Slade.)

Consequently, few American record buyers even knew that the group existed let alone that it recorded a second live album that superseded its first (BBC Radio One in Concert—17th November 1977 [Disc 5])—or that 1978’s Down in the Bunker (Disc 4) bulged with carefully observed, musically varied, slyly humorous, and subtly infectious songs.

In the Dylanesque “Big J.C.,” Jesus himself does a walk-on, dispersing a high-stakes card game simply by showing up.