Encore!

became How the full immersion live album 2019’s best archival mode

FOR a record company aiming to fill a handsome boxset in the last decade, the place to look has not been the studio so much as among the ranks of ‘unofficial’ recordings. From Bowie’s Santa Monica Civic ’72 (2008) to Buzzcocks’ Time’s Up (2017), there’s been something to learn from the bootlegger about the best-quality live shows by their artists, and what might be worth reclaiming for the official canon.

Whether it speaks to our infinite capacity for documentary, a rise in completism, or an urge to programme our own path through our artists, 2019 has seen a spike in the verbatim file dump. This year, if you were no longer content to have your experience of the Rolling Thunder Revue framed by Dylan’s initial edit of the shows (Bootleg Series Vol 5) or his occasionally amusing quasi-documentary framing, then you could invest in 16 discs of The 1975 Live Recordings (admittedly a pretty reasonable £59), and hear all of the professionally recorded full shows by this extraordinary iteration of Bob Dylan.

If you can remember the 1960s, then you apparently weren’t there. Happily, anyone who attended Woodstock no longer has to conserve brain space for sets by Bert Sommer or Quill. The festival’s 50th anniversary was marked this year with a 38-disc set that forms an audio transcript of events on the only stage. It’s true – acknowledged by its inclusion – that Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 film or the original albums are possibly as much as you really need, but the fact that the original pressing of 1,969 copies has sold out at $800 a set suggests that a historic juncture has been reached: where ‘long tail’ low-volume record sales have risen to meet a group of retirees obsessive and affluent enough to be able to afford a sumptuous archiving of their youth.