PARIS

It seems that the "mega-success" of the "Breakfast in America"album had an enormous pressure for the band. I have read some interviews with Roger Hodgson done in the 90s, and he considered that the "Breakfast..." tour was the time when the band started to have some personal frictions, and the fun to play together started to diminish. But this "Paris" live album is very good, and being a live recording from the 70s I still consider it a very good recording which sounds better in the CD format (as I listened to this album in CD format in a FM Radio station broadcast some years ago). I think that this album, which has 7 songs from the "Crime..." album, could have been better if the band and the record label included songs like "Give a little bit", "Goodbye Stranger", "Even in the Quietest Moments" instead of almost all the songs from the "Crime..." album (except one:"If Everyone was listening").Still, this is an interesting live album, with very good live versions of "Ain`t nobody but me", "The Logical Song", "You started laughing" (which also was recorded in the studio and released as a B side of one of the singles of the "Crisis?..." album, but this live version is the only available version of this song in an album), "Hide in your shell", "From now on", "Rudy", "A Soap Box`s Opera", "Take the Long Way Home", "Fool`s Overture", and an energetic "Crime of the Century". The original double L.P. had inner sleeves with very good photographs of the band playing in concert (I don`t know if the CD package also includes these photos). I can hear several keyboard players playing at the same time in some songs, so John Helliwell also played keyboards as some of the photos show. But I don`t know if the band also used some programmable keyboards because in some albums and in this album too they gave credits for "Oberheim programming" to some people.But it is clear that they used some "pre-recorded tapes" in some songs like "Rudy" (train and train station sounds, a violin), , "Take the Long Way Home" (in the Harmonica/Clarinet solos, it sounds to me that they "doubled" them with pre-recorded tapes), "School" (children`s voices), "A Soapbox`s Opera" (the choir), "Asylum" (the two final piano notes) and "Fool`s Overture" (Churchill`s voice and other voices). The presence of Roger Hodgson singing his own songs in this album makes this album their best official live album.