Are You Ready?

Digital Video Disc (DVD)

Label: Eagle Rock

Are You Ready?

UPC: 801213705498

Release Date: 11/10/2009

Original Release Date: 11/10/2009

Number of Discs: 1

Hal Horowitz

Even though this German 1981 concert was recorded while Thin Lizzy were on an artistic and personal downslide from which they would never recover, Phil Lynott and crew could still heat up the stage. This tour found the quartet, now augmented by the extraneous and even distracting keyboards of Darren Wharton (whose presence is all but hidden and whose musical contributions are usually mixed so low as to be almost inaudible) working its Chinatown album, but smartly mixing more recognizable songs from its career into the set. While it is no Live and Dangerous, the band tears into the material with conviction and even Lynott, in the thick of his drug and alcohol problems and also nursing a cough, seems relatively spirited. New (at the time) songs such as the blues-rocking "Sugar Blues" and "Chinatown" are delivered with as much enthusiasm, arguably more, as the old stuff, which remains exciting if not always riveting. Blues guitarist Snowy White, who had recently joined, doesn't seem entirely comfortable with his role in the hard rock world, but longtime string-bender Scott Gorham makes up for it. Two songs that would later appear on Lizzy's final album, Renegade, show that the band was still writing good, if not classic, material. Lynott, perhaps not surprisingly, looks a little distracted but still pulls off the frontman role convincingly and sings with authority, although lacking the edge of when he was young and hungry. The video -- originally intended for television -- is reasonably well shot but looks to be a tape transfer and lacks crispness. It is also marred by sporadic horizontal bars -- typical of the period -- and obtrusive stage lighting saturates the screen, occasionally obscuring the picture. Surround audio is good, yet it too shows the wrinkles of its age with an inconsistent mix. Still, this is recommended for fans, especially since there isn't much footage from this particular version of the unduly overlooked hard rockers. ~ Hal Horowitz, Rovi