Music Arcades: James Brown: Live in Concert

So it turns out I have not one, but two albums on the Tring International plc label. This one was only £1.99 — though I've a feeling that could have been Irish punts, and a second-hand price.

Beyond the label and the mention from the stage that the event is taking place somewhere in Georgia, however, the provenance of this recording is hard to pin down. It's not mentioned in Wikipedia's list of JB's live albums, yet it appears to have been released, under the same title, by other labels in other territories, so there are plenty of copies about. It was first released in 1986, so must date from before then

I'm not enough of a fan to be able to tell where it might sit in Brown's career. But, hell, while it has enough flat sections to sound like an authentic record of a live performance (rather than a touched-up compilation), it has more than enough hot passages to outweigh any longueurs.

In fact I'm pretty sure this was the first James Brown album I ever owned. What I heard immediately was the debt that Van Morrison's 1993/4 tour owed to this style of performance. Not just because it also feature It's A Man's, Man's, Man's World, but the whole medley/revue thing.