WELCOME TO THE BLACKOUT (LIVE LONDON '78)

Bowie's best live album. It's superior to Stage (which covers the same tour, Isolar II, from 1978) because it captures an entire live performance (without fade-outs or changes in the setlist order, like the original LP version of Stage), the band plays tightly, the sound quality is slightly superior and it has two more tracks: "Sound and Vision" and "Rebel Rebel" (if we consider the 22-track version of Stage released last year in the box A New Career in a New Town; compared to older versions of Stage, it has 4 more songs than the 2005 CD version and 7 more than the 1978 LP version). Highlights: "Station to Station", "'Heroes'", "Warszawa", "Sound and Vision", "TVC 15" and the Ziggy Stardust medley.

Recorded only a couple of months after the material on David Bowie's Stage, Welcome To the Blackout catches a London set from the Isolar II tour. With recent remastered and expanded versions of Stage largely restoring the original running order and setlist, you might think that this release would be redundant - however, the extra time on the road has really helped the band bed in and the rendition of the repertoire here is much more self-assured, with all the songs sounding like they fit together in the same set list (despite the wide span of Bowie's career they are drawn from) more so than on Stage itself.