GuideConcept & Special

The Best Live Prog Rock Albums of the Modern Era

Something changed once filming a concert became cheap. The modern live record is usually one named night in one named hall, released with the video, rather than four tours spliced together and mixed into a compromise. That shifts the whole question: not what the band salvaged from a year on the road, but what it did on that particular evening that it could not do on any other. The best live prog rock albums of the modern era are the ones with an answer, and the six below range from a reunion twenty-nine years in the making to a record whose audience paid for it before it existed.

Van der Graaf Generator — Real Time (recorded 2005, released 2007)

On 6 May 2005 the classic four-piece played together again at the Royal Festival Hall in London, and the two discs of the original edition run 128:46. It came out on the singer’s own label almost two years later, on 5 March 2007, which is a long gap by modern standards and part of why it feels like a document rather than a product. The setlist reaches into every studio album the band made between 1970 and 1976, plus the reunion record of that year, and touches nothing from the 1969 debut. Reviewing the concert, The Independent noted that the hall had sold out in January and that the audience had come from twenty-seven countries. A three-disc edition adds material from the tour that followed.

Porcupine Tree — Anesthetize (2010)

The exception on this page, and it is worth flagging: not one night but two, on 15 and 16 October 2008 at 013 in Tilburg, at the close of the Fear of a Blank Planet tour. Kscope released it in mid-2010 on DVD and Blu-ray, with a deluxe edition packaged as a cloth-bound hardback of concert photography, limited to four thousand copies with a grey cover and one thousand with a red one. The film runs 130 minutes in that edition, and the CDs carry a song that is not in it — so the audio and the video are not quite the same show either. It was certified gold in Canada and Classic Rock named it its DVD Release of the Year.

Transatlantic — Whirld Tour 2010: Live in London (2010)

One night, 21 May 2010 at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, and one of the odder arithmetic problems in live prog: three CDs carrying six songs. Earlier Transatlantic live records had filled space with cover versions; by 2010 the band’s own catalogue was long enough that none were needed, and the result runs a little over three hours. A member of another progressive band joined the tour as a fifth player throughout, on keyboards, guitars, percussion and vocals. The DVD release carries something the CDs do not: a Genesis song performed with a guest guitarist who had played on the original.

Anathema — Universal (2013)

The only entry here with a real orchestra rather than a string section. It was recorded on 22 September 2012 in the Ancient Theatre of Philippopolis at Plovdiv in Bulgaria — a Roman amphitheatre, which puts it in unexpected company with a certain Pink Floyd shoot — with the Plovdiv Philharmonic Orchestra and its conductor. Kscope released it on 23 September 2013, almost exactly a year after the performance, as a Blu-ray, a DVD and two CDs, with a limited mediabook edition sold through one shop. The two CDs hold the complete set from that night, which is rarer on these releases than you would expect.

Leprous — Live at Rockefeller Music Hall (2016)

Recorded on 4 June 2016 at Rockefeller Music Hall in Oslo and released by Inside Out on 25 November, in four different configurations: two CDs, a two-CD-and-DVD digipak, a three-LP set with the CDs, and a limited DVD edition. The fourteen songs run 52:35 and 47:53 across the two discs of the CD edition. What sets it apart is how it was paid for — the release was funded by a crowdfunding campaign before it existed, with copies ordered through it signed by the band. Guests on violin, drums and vocals are credited on the sleeve without being tied to particular songs, so this page will not guess which.

Steven Wilson — Home Invasion: In Concert at the Royal Albert Hall (2018)

The final night of a three-night Royal Albert Hall residency in March 2018. The sources do not agree on which calendar date that was — the artist’s own site and the official release both describe it only as the last of the three, so this page does the same. Eagle Rock released it on 2 November 2018 on Blu-ray and DVD, with and without a pair of CDs, and the whole package runs to over three hours of content. A five-LP edition followed in March 2019 carrying six performances that the CD does not, which is the same trap the 1980s pages describe, thirty years on.

Where to start

Anesthetize is the way in: the best-shot of the six and the most immediately gripping. Universal is the one to watch rather than only hear, for the amphitheatre and the orchestra. Home Invasion suits anyone who wants the widest span of songs in one sitting. Real Time is for listeners who already know the 1970s catalogue, and Live at Rockefeller Music Hall is the best argument that the modern end of the genre is in good hands. Save the Transatlantic set for an evening with nothing else in it.