Significant LongPlayers from the past

12 May 2025

THE WHO recorded their live LP LIVE AT LEEDS at the University of Leeds Refectory
on Valentine’s Day of 1970 and released it on 11 May 1970 today 55 years ago.

The band wanted to follow their 1969 album Tommy with a live one. They had
registered several shows on tours supporting that album, but disliked the sound.

They booked a show at Leeds University, along with one at Hull City Hall the following
day, specifically to record a live album. Six songs were taken from the Leeds show, and the cover was pressed to look like a bootleg recording. The songs got hard rock arrangements that were typical of the band’s live shows.

The record has been reissued on several occasions and in several different formats.
Since its release, it has been ranked by several music critics as one of, if not the greatest, live albums of all time. (My top live LP is Lou Reed‘s Rock ‘N’ Roll Animal).

Rolling Stone was one of the rare papers that criticized the album: “While Townshend’s packaging for the album is a tour-de-force of the rock and roll imagination, the music was dated and uneventful. The album functions simply as a document of the formal commercial
end of the first great stage of The Who’s great career.”

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