Er is een interessant artikel verschenen met een interview met Tony Visconti, de producer van dit album. Het artikel is
op deze link te vinden, maar ingeval dit artikel plots niet meer beschikbaar zou worden, kopieer en plak ik hieronder even het (naar mijn mening) belangrijkste.
“I should have realized as soon as the tapes arrived that I was going to be in trouble. The band had recorded several shows in America and Europe, which in itself may not have been a problem. The difficulties started when I found the tape formats were different; some were recorded at the new fashionable 30 ips (inches per second) and the rest at 15 ips. Some used the Dolby A system, some didn’t, some used the AES frequency curve and some with the European CCIR curve. Without getting too technical this was a nightmare. “
The European concert was from Hammersmith Odeon, in London, from November 1976, during the Johnny the Fox tour, and the rest from the band’s recent Bad Reputation tour recorded in Seneca College Fieldhouse, Toronto, in October 1977.
According to Visconti, “When we listened to the tapes they were very definitely a little to rough to do straightforward mixing as originally planned. Phil begged to be able to fix a few vocals by dropping in a few lines in each song. It proved almost impossible to match the microphone characteristics on each track. The vocal tracks also had a lot of drums and guitar leakage, noticeably missing when Phil would re-sing a line in an acoustically dry studio. Rather than endless hours of trying to match the sound we found it easier to have Phil simply re-sing everything! “
“Things then got even more complicated. ‘The trouble is Tony that my bass playing really suffers when I’m singing live and playing at the same time.” He was right he missed a lot of notes. Once again we couldn’t match the sound from the different cities, so we set his stage gear up in the studio and he replayed every bass part. Good Earth (Visconti’s London studio) had a three tiered control room. Phil stood on the top tier towering over me sitting on the middle tier as I recorded his bass. Interestingly Phil used his radio transmitter for his bass so that he could move around like he did on stage; I was also getting a visual performance, which made the whole thing more entertaining. Phil also wanted me to blast the volume so that he could feel the sound rumble in his feet the way he did on stage.”
After working in Visconti’s studio they went to to Paris for a weekend to finish it at Studio Des Dames. According to Visconti, “Doing an ‘in concert’ album this way was cheating, slightly, but the album is about 55% live and the overdubs gave the poorly recorded performances a more uniform sound."
In de liner notes van het album valt dan weer te lezen dat het album ongeveer 75% live was. Voor mij boeit het eerlijk gezegd ook niet zo veel, want op Life Live krijg je misschien een meer onversneden sound, maar het klinkt volledig mat en de dynamiek is helemaal zoek. Geef mij dan maar liever een "opgesmukte" versie die zo fenomenaal is als deze.