Blue Öyster Cult – ‘45th Anniversary – Live In London’ (Frontiers Music)

By Jim Rowland

Since signing with Frontiers Music last year, 2020 has been quite a prolific year in terms of releases for the mighty Blue Öyster Cult. The live album and DVD of the ‘Agents Of Fortune 40^th Anniversary’ came out early this year, followed by very welcome re-releases of 1998’s ‘Heaven Forbid’ and 2001’s ‘Curse Of The Hidden Mirror’, both largely overlooked BÖC gems which had become pretty hard to get hold of. So ‘45^th Anniversary – Live In London’ is the fourth release on Frontiers this year, with strong hints that a brand new studio album will follow before the year is out. So there’s plenty to cheer about for BÖC fans, despite the inevitable postponement of the live shows, mostly with Deep Purple, put back to next year.

This particular release, ‘45^th Anniversary Live In London’, is a real treat too as it captures a unique concert where the band played the whole of their very first album in sequence to a packed Indigo2 crowd on the Saturday afternoon as part of the 2017 Stone Free Festival at London’s O2. I was there, and I remember it well. I hadn’t planned on attending the festival, being somewhat underwhelmed by the line-up which was headlined by Ritchie Blackmore’s recent ‘poundshop’ Rainbow incarnation, but the prospect of Blue Öyster Cult playing the whole of the first album was too much to resist for this hardened life-long BÖC fan so I took the only available option – I sneaked in to the Indigo2, saw the show, had a couple of drinks afterwards and then went back home satisfied I’d seen the only thing I really wanted to see. And it was great.

The album captures the whole show from start to finish, has excellent sound quality, and is a straight-forward live recording – no big post-production and no overdubs as far as I can hear. It kicks off with 1972’s ‘Blue Öyster Cult’ played in its entirety and in order. Whilst ‘Cities On Flame With Rock and Roll’ and ‘Then Came The Last Days Of May’ are staples that would feature in most BOC live sets (and both are excellent here), it’s the ones that you’ve rarely or perhaps even never seen or heard live that are the attraction here. Tracks like ‘Stairway To the Stars’, ‘Transmaniacon MC’ and ‘Workshop Of The Telescopes’ are ones we may have seen crop up once or twice over the years, but when was the last time you saw them do the likes of ‘Before The Kiss, A Redcap’, ‘I’m On The Lamb But I Aint No Sheep’, ‘Redeemed’ or the eerie Doors-esque ‘She’s As Beautiful As A Foot’? That’s what made this concert unique and special. Of course most of those first album tracks are fairly obscure, and the band finish the set with five big BÖC hitters in the shape of ‘Buck’s Boogie’, ‘Godzilla’, ‘(Don’t Fear) The Reaper’, ‘Tattoo Vampire’ and ‘Hot Rails To Hell’.

Within a few days of this show I was off on a train to Nottingham to catch the band again on the 45^th anniversary tour (a review of which nestles somewhere in the Über archive), and whilst they played quite a few from the first album on that night, it wasn’t the whole thing, so as far as I know this concert was a unique one-off event, and it’s great it’s been captured for posterity with this recording and commercially released. It does come with a DVD too, although I haven’t seen that, but it boasts behind-the-scenes and bonus video footage, so I’m guessing there’s at least some visual content of the concert itself, if perhaps not the whole thing. What ‘45^th Anniversary Live In London’ proves is that even after all those years, Blue Oyster Cult remain a potent live band – just check out the extended version of ‘Then Came The Last Days Of May’ on this recording. Blue Öyster Cult are a truly unique and wonderful band, definitely still going strong.

‘45^th Anniversary – Line In London’ is released on Friday (7 August). You can get your copy HERE.

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