The Rolling Stones

El Mocambo 1977 UNIVERSAL Licked Live In NYC MERCURY STUDIOS

Ya-yas out for the lads.

Considering the live adventures of the Rolling Stones got off to such a great start with 1970’s Get Yer Ya-Yas Out album (assuming we discount the laughable Got Live If You Want It from the scream-drenched 60s), their subsequent live albums have mostly failed to do the band justice, mostly because recordings were doctored to sound like what the band thought people wanted to hear. No wonder the bootleggers did such good business, chucking out unadulterated mixing-desk tapes. For years the most collectable Stones album was Brussels Affair from their 1973 tour, which highlighted the telepathic peak between Keith Richards and Mick Taylor. The Stones eventually took it in-house in 2011.

Things have got better since the penny dropped. Four tracks from the El Mocambo Club in Toronto in March 1977 were originally plastered on to the lacklustre Love You Live in an attempt to kick some life into the album. It didn’t, and the gig became better known for Richards’s heroin bust when he arrived in Canada.

The two-CD set of the complete show (8/10) has been remixed by Bob Clearmountain, who has ditched the overdubs (overdubs on a club gig? What were they thinking?) and some ‘unwoke’ Jagger jokes, although he has kept an exchange between Jagger and Ronnie Wood as they wonder which song Richards is going to play next – “I dunno, he keeps changing guitars”. The sound is ragged at times (they hadn’t played in seven months), but it’s real. That’s Keith in the right speaker and Ron in the left. And while you can quibble about the number of songs from Black And Blue (their then latest album), when they show their roots on Route 66, Mannish Boy, Crackin’ Up, Around And Around, Worried Life Blues and Little Red Rooster you can’t argue.

Licked Live In NYC (8/10) is from a restored 2003 TV special from Madison Square Garden that features the Rolling Stones Big Band – two keyboard players, a four-piece horn section and three backing singers. So the sound is big but not glossy. Jagger is playing for the TV as much as for the audience in front of him. “It’s great to see you here looking beautiful tonight, all dressed up,” he tells them after a spirited If You Can’t Rock Me.

“You think you’re on TV or something?”

Amid the cavalcade of hits there are some special treats such as Don’t Stop (recently recorded for a 40th-anniversary compilation), Monkey Man (resurrected from Let It Bleed) and Sheryl Crow as the Honky Tonk Woman.

Hugh Fielder

Dire Straits

Money For Nothing UMC/EMI Mark Knopfler gleams on remastered hits ’n’ bits.

Released around the time of the very peak of Dire Straits’ popularity, Money For Nothing hasn’t aged a day since 1988. Only 1991’s uneventful On Every Street was released after it, and little on that warrants a rejig of their chart-topping debut compilation for this remaster. Indeed, such a full-career overview served only to unbalance 1998’s more comprehensive Sultans Of Swing:

The Very Best Of Dire Straits, like a comic continuing the joke long after the punch line.

In trying to open the ears of Brothers In Arms newcomers to Mark Knopfler’s origins as the ultimate pub-rock virtuoso, however, Money For Nothing made the opposite error. Overweighting early-album grumblers such as Down To The Waterline and Where Do You Think You’re Going? at the expense of the livelier Lady Writer and Making Movies dazzlers like Skateaway and Hand In Hand, it made the band’s early work feel far greyer than it was. And being limited to just 12 tracks meant omitting Love Over Gold and taking a superficial trolley dash around the Aladdin’s cave of Brothers In Arms.

Which is not to say it isn’t a joy. Knopfler’s god-like skills gleam in the unmuddied detail of Romeo & Juliet and Tunnel Of Love. Brothers In Arms and the fado-flecked Private Investigations are master classes of understated melancholy drama. And it’s as much fun to revisit 1983’s incongruous jive party EP track Twisting By The Pool as it is moving to take a 13-minute live tour of the ambition and hardship on display down Telegraph Road.