Red Hot Chili Peppers: Live In Hyde Park

By RUSSELL BAILLIE

(Herald rating: * * * *)

A hefty souvenir of America's biggest band scaring the ducks in London

Aha, the live album, and a double at that. No, they don't make them like they used to, especially in an age where many are the soundtrack for an in-concert DVD, milking one's more diehard fans before starting another album-tour cycle. In the vinyl era, they used to be an event and, often, an act's defining moment. Just ask our cover stars, the MC5.

For those growing up a long way from the rest of world, the sound of a crowd cheering the start on track one, side one was the first hint how exciting this rock'n'roll stuff could get. Much blame can be directed at Cheap Trick's Live at Budokan for why yours truly is on this page and not next door subbing the racing results.

Anyway, here it is - the first live Red Hot Chili Peppers album, recorded in London in June before a couple of hundred thousand people over three nights. Sounds like it was quite an event, especially considering the opening act was a young whipper-snapper named James Brown.

He's not heard here but Anthony Kiedis mentions meeting him backstage, and songs like Get On Top, Throw Away Your Television and the newbie Rolling Sly Stone remind that, like the Godfather, they remain effortlessly funky.

This does bring back some memories of the Chili Peppers' Western Springs show back in late 2002, post the release of the brilliant and enduring By the Way album, with much of the 27 songs from its predecessor Californication.

It has its fair share of tangential moments, like covers including their take on Donna Summer's I Feel Love, the 70s Looking Glass hit Brandy, and Black Cross by 80s LA metallers .45 Grave which, with the sonic weirdness of Flea's Trumpet Treated by John, makes for an amusingly indulgent closing. And there are plenty of other excursions which remind what good players they are, and leave any other stadium rock act of the age sounding like unmusical simpletons.

Those who appreciate fleet-fingered rock counterpoint will find themselves lapping up the extended intros and outros of guitarist John Frusciante and bassist Flea, the best saved for last on Give It Away with its crazed genre-mashing instrumental of an ending which turns the old classic rap-rock hit into a 13-minute odyssey.

As an album, it's thankfully not a greatest hits with an applause track, though it's a little long and meandering to sustain the attention all the way through its double CDs. But this is proof that the latest RHCP studio albums were models of restraint: live, nobody lets loose quite like them.

Label: Warners