BOOTLEG BINGO

Previously issued as a webcast and a DVD, this is an audio release of the concert from the Saturday evening of the 2002 Marillion Weekend. Marillion like to give their Weekend concerts interesting structures and themes to make sure they feel special, rather than "just another Marillion gig", and for this one they semi-randomised the setlist by using the mighty Butlins bingo machine to generate random numbers corresponding to songs from their repertoire over the course of the gig.

It's a light-hearted affair - perhaps appropriately, given that it followed on the heels of the previous evening's live performance of Brave - and for the most part the audio does a good job of capturing the ambience. There's a few hiccups here and there - notably, because the crowd are filtered out, you don't get to hear them sing along to The Uninvited Guest, which rather ruins the moment where H stops singing to encourage them to sing along.

On top of that, because of the randomised nature of the setlist, the flow of the concert just doesn't work - though the bingo idea is fun in principle, it's not so hot in practice. Still, any H-era live album which includes both the excellent This Town triptych and Warm Wet Circles/That Time Of the Night (one of the Fish-era songs which H has really made his own) can't be that bad, and this is no exception.