Heart - Live (Soundstage)

Introduction

Heart have been around for decades, formed in the early 70's by sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson. Hailing from Vancouver, Canada the duo were influenced by both rock and folk music and forged an early career mixing the two genres successfully on tracks like Barracuda, Magic Man and Crazy On You amongst others.

Their popularity waned in the early 80's, but the band successfully reinvented themselves in 1985 with a line of power ballads that ensured that the band were not ignored. Tracks from this period included These Dreams, Never, What About Love, Alone and All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You.

In the 90's the two sisters formed a new band called The Lovemongers, covering Led Zeppelin's Battle Of Evermore for the triple platinum soundtrack for the film Singles. This film was the first musical collaboration between Nancy Wilson and her husband, director Cameron Crowe. The husband and wife team also worked on Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous, Vanilla Sky and Elizabethtown.



Heart reunited (albeit only the two siblings) in 2002 and two years later released the critically acclaimed album Jupiter's Darling. The Soundstage performance was filmed in December 2005 and includes a mix of both songs from the latest album, old tracks and cover versions of both the aforementioned Led Zeppelin and Elton John.

Visual

Very nice picture, as is standard so far with the Soundstage series. A number of cameras used including a crane with nice overhead sweeping shots of the band on stage. Bright stage with colourful backdrops.

Audio

Nice 5.1 Surround track that is both clear and powerful, the latter only when it needs to be.

Extras

Interview with Ann & Nancy Wilson - 9 minute piece, not really enough time for a decent interview as it only really has time to cover a few subjects superficially.

Overall

I have to admit that I only heard about Heart after seeing the video to These Dreams featured on The Chart Show, the weekly tv music show that only featured video's rather than performances. This was a couple of months before Heart became really huge in the UK for the next few years and I remember a bus journey to London for a Queen's Scout Award parade that year and listening to a tape of the Heart album of that year on the six hour journey (alongside Billy Idol and Ultravox and a lot of batteries).

I have to admit that I much prefer the lighter gentler side of Heart, the songs of love with Ann Wilson's powerful and distinctive voice and initially found it difficult to get into the rockier side of Heart. I bought all three of the Heart albums from this period but never really them as a whole, probably really liking only about half a dozen tracks in total. Much better for me was when the group released their Greatest Hits collection in 1997 and I was exposed to tracks like Barracuda, Magic Man and Dreamboat Annie. Much more like it.



This performance is a nice mix of old and new and the siblings, who have been musical partners now for over 30 years, compliment each other nicely. The new band that backs them sound quite tight but are clearly playing second fiddle to the main attraction, Ann and Nancy playing at least a third of their set by themselves. I'm not that familiar with any of the Zeppelin or Elton John covers, but they sound very competent.

A nice performance and whilst not a return to their 80's pomp, which I would have preferred in all truth, this is a nice souvenir for the hardcore fans rather than the fly-by-nights like myself.