Live At The Apollo

Plenty of records get called legendary. Very few genuinely earn it. Live At The Apollo absolutely does.

Released in spite of label doubts, Live At The Apollo confirmed James Brown as the unchallenged master of soul. Deejays played the whole album straight through, even in an era when radio programmers were turning down four-minute singles for being too long, and it climbed to number two on the Billboard pop chart, a remarkable achievement for a gritty R&B record.

But this is more than a major pop success. It is a snapshot of one of America’s greatest performers operating at full power. Brown’s singing is pure release, from the opening squeal on I Go Crazy onwards, and the intensity never drops. He pushes his crack band through breathless takes on early hits before stretching into the 11-minute bump-and-grind of Lost Someone, the peak of a set packed with them.

Decades on, it still stands as one of the greatest live albums ever made.