For those of you who don’t know the record “Hysteria” it’s time you discover one of the best gems that came from the 80’s. Every song on this album could have been released as a single. Now you have the chance to witness the Music in it’s purest sense, “Def Leppard” did the effort to play the entire album live on their visit to the city of sin, Las Vegas. Not only did they play the album from front to back but it also was recorded to be released as a full blown high definition Bluray/DVD/2CD release.
As a promotional stunt they showed the concert in several movie theatres all around the World. It captures the band in all it’s glory doing what they do best, performing live! The concert itself is just amazing, every song is played with the greatest enthousiasm and Def Leppard deliver what is expected from them, every note they play is played with the finest precision and the Music just matches the images perfectly. If I need to say something critical about this release is maybe the lack of the sound from the audience, it should have been mixed in a bit more in my opinion, don’t get me wrong you will get a concert that blows out of your speakers and it won’t dissapoint you.
Now about the Music, hearing tracks like “ Excitable”, “Don’t shoot shotgun” is just mindblowing, most live recordings of these songs are only to be found on obscure bootleg recordings from soundchecks. Now you can really enjoy these tracks like you should.
CD2 is performed by “DED FLATBIRD”, the Leps covering themselves, recorded over several nights they played a set of long ago and rarely played tracks including “Good morning freedom”, an AC/DCish track, I never heard before, I know it exists on bootleg cd’s, and now played live, like it was written yesterday. Most of these tracks are from the pre “Hysteria” era and bring back the great rockers like “Let it go”, “Wasted”, “Switch 629”, “Mirror mirror” …
This is a great record that should have a place in every classic rockers’ record cabinet. It was a milestone in 1987, not only because of the tracks, but because it’s the First record that was recorded after Rick Allen’s car crash. To me he shows that you can achieve everything if you want it!! I give it 3 thumbs up! Great package! Only the record version (doesn’t exist) is missing from my collection!
Joe mentions in the foreword of the booklet that they might not have the youth anymore, but they still have the energy! Well, he’s right!!! Go and get this piece of Earcandy!!!