The Who
Live At Hull

The audience of music lovers flocking to concerts in the early '60s must have considered The Who a powerhouse of unparalleled energy and adrenaline, if what the four of them were doing on tour was consistently at the level of the Leeds concert.

Fortunately, back then, someone realized that this energy should be considered a treasure of humanity and needed to be passed down to future generations so they too could be nourished by it. It’s not so obvious that it could happen, bringing Genesis into the example, no one thought of filming at least one of the concerts of "The Lamb...", and personally, I consider it a great loss.

The plan devised for the creation of a live album that would document the rock that The Who were able to propose in those years, included using two performances organized for the occasion, one in Leeds and one the following day in Hull.

The first, the one in Leeds, was intended to be the trial, and the performance in Hull the definitive one, the one to be entrusted to history.

No way. Technical issues damaged the recordings of the Hull concert and prevented them from being used for the album. Townshend listened to the material and decreed that there was nothing to be done with it, and they had to "settle" for the Leeds concert.

I read this story somewhere on the web before purchasing the album in question. I told myself that if there was any truth to it, it had to be the album of the millennium. Despite this possibility, my reluctance to spend managed to dissuade me from shelling out the small fortune that the deluxe anniversary edition of "Live At Leeds" costs, until a separate, economically affordable edition was dedicated to the Hull performance.

The accompanying booklet informs that it was possible to recover the live performance using recordings from the Leeds concert for necessary repairs. The damage to the original material consisted of the lack of the bass line in the first six songs, up to "Young Man Blues," so the booklet says, and some small gaps that eventually appear in the recording of the performance of "Tommy." If one checks, "Young Man Blues" is the fifth track of the first disc, not the sixth, but it’s pointless to ask too many questions, as one doesn’t notice anything.

It would have been nice to find performances of "Cousin Kevin" and/or "Welcome," songs from Tommy that are not present on the historic album, but the two performances featured almost identical setlists, even the medley within "My Generation" was done in the same way: "See me/ Feel me" - "Sparks" - instrumental fragment of "Neked Eye." They would therefore be two identical shows in every way if not for some differences: The absence of "Magic Bus" in the Hull concert, a notable omission, and the inclusion in that concert of a brief fragment of "Spoonful" (I found the name in the Rolling Stone review) within "Shakin' All Over."

Regarding the rendition of the pieces, I note that the opinions I’ve read around speak of more aggressive performances than those in Leeds. I disagree, it seems to me that the spirit of the group is almost the same in both performances, so even in this respect, I don’t note significant differences.

Fate decreed that the Leeds concert would go down in history, and it surely had its good reasons. Personally, I agree with the choice, and the reason I give is that, to my taste, the songs are played better. Or maybe it’s just my familiarity with the album giving me this impression. In fact, my preference is based solely on small nuances, brief passages, individual solutions used to which I am attached and that in the Hull concert are either not found or are done differently. For example, the brief bass solo in "My Generation": the one from Leeds for me remains the definitive one, the Hull one doesn’t seem to me played as well. Or the guitar in "The Hawker": "derailing" in the Leeds version, more "normal" in the Hull one. In summary, the Hull concert was undoubtedly memorable, listening to the album you can’t say otherwise.

However, being so similar to the one in Leeds in every respect, even in potency, makes "Live At Hull" certainly a nice album, but ultimately somewhat superfluous and destined more for Who catalog completists.