1999 Live In Detroit [Live]

Most of the key tracks from 'Comes Alive' are covered, together with a few numbers from later albums, but herein is one of the failings of the collection - that it tries a little too hard to reproduce the original hit live album. This is rather pointless as the defining live versions of those songs are on 'Comes Alive', and the 1999 renditions do not add anything new. 'Do you feel like we do', for example, which was already an almost interminable 14 minutes long on the original live album, is now even longer, and 'Can't take that away' (from the 1994 'Peter Frampton' album) is stretched to 10 minutes and yet is weaker than the studio version (Peter's swearing in a mock Scottish accent not surprisingly adds nothing of value to this track!). It might have been better to produce an excellent live collection of completely different tracks from those of 'Comes Alive' - certainly within Peter's back catalogue of studio albums there are ample suitable songs. So whilst this album is certainly of interest to committed Frampton fans (who should be sure to go for the German SPV record label version, which runs to two CDs and has several additional tracks, rather than the shorter BMG version), it is no substitute for the original live album, which is now available in an excellent remastered version with four extra songs.

Most of the key tracks from 'Comes Alive' are covered, together with a few numbers from later albums, but herein is one of the failings of the collection - that it tries a little too hard to reproduce the original hit live album. This is rather pointless as the defining live versions of those songs are on 'Comes Alive', and the 1999 renditions do not add anything new. 'Do you feel like we do', for example, which was already an almost interminable 14 minutes long on the original live album, is now even longer, and 'Can't take that away' (from the 1994 'Peter Frampton' album) is stretched to 10 minutes and yet is weaker than the studio version (Peter's swearing in a mock Scottish accent not surprisingly adds nothing of value to this track!). It might have been better to produce an excellent live collection of completely different tracks from those of 'Comes Alive' - certainly within Peter's back catalogue of studio albums there are ample suitable songs. So whilst this album is certainly of interest to committed Frampton fans (who should be sure to go for the German SPV record label version, which runs to two CDs and has several additional tracks, rather than the shorter BMG version), it is no substitute for the original live album, which is now available in an excellent remastered version with four extra songs.