Published on Mar 18, 2000
Live albums are always a dangerous thing for a musician to
tackle. On one hand, you’re faced with the difficulty of topping
the studio versions of the songs that you and your band made
popular with thousands of fans. On another hand, you have to try
and translate the power and energy of the live performance back
onto a piece of aluminum (or magnetic tape) and plastic and hope
the listener can visualize themselves in the front row of the
show.
Phil Collins has taken a lot of heat over the years for his 1990
concert release
Serious Hits… Live! In a sense, I can understand why
critics have had a field day with this release – after all, it
comes off sounding rather sterile, and there are times when it
sounds like the crowd noise is either being removed or spread on
the tracks with a trowel.
But when the final notes fade out, this release really isn’t as
bad as the reputation it’s been given. I mean, I’d much rather
listen to this than those robotic pieces of crap that Genesis
called
The Way We Walk — and I have yet to go back and review the
second volume.
The first half of
Serious Hits… Live! is the most difficult to get through,
as this is the portion that occasionally sounds like it could have
been recorded at a sound check and had audience noises dubbed in at
the start and finish. (I can’t remember the last concert I was at
where people were totally quiet during a song’s performance — I
mean to the point of hearing nothing but the music.) This is a
strike against Collins, and it leaves some of the performances
sounding bland and forced, like “Who Said I Would” and “One More
Night.”
What also makes this portion of the album more difficult is that
it’s loaded up with most of the heavy-duty material, like
“Something Happened On The Way To Heaven,” “Another Day In
Paradise,” “Do You Remember?” and “Separate Lives.” It might have
worked a little better had Collins balanced the darkness with the
light.
This is exactly what saves this album on the second half.
Collins creates a much happier-sounding atmosphere by striking that
balance. For each “Groovy Kind Of Love,” there’s a “Sussudio” or
“Easy Lover” (a number that works well even without the
contributions of Phillip Bailey) just around the corner waiting to
life your spirits. This half of the release is actually fun to
listen to – and you can hear the enjoyment of the crowd making
things that much better.
Your enjoyment of this album will depend on your view of
Collins’s four solo releases to that point. If you didn’t like the
more intospective mood of
…But Seriously, then
Serious Hits… Live! is not going to do a thing to change
your mind. If you go into the album looking for the happy, perky
songs that put Collins on the map as a solo act, it will be a bit
of a trying journey, but your patience will eventually be rewarded
in spades. If you just want to unwind with a live album, this
should do nicely.
It says something that Collins was able to top the live discs
from his former group… but
Serious Hits… Live! also was a warning sign of what was to
come for Genesis fans. It ain’t perfect, but it’s not the time bomb
that many people have labeled this album. Judge for yourself.