It’s in the live environment where the wheat is separated from the chaff; that moment on stage where there’s no second chances and reputations are made or lost. Thankfully, it seems Stourbridge’s Diamond Head were born to be on stage and since their first show in February 1977, the band have become renown for their live prowess. After blazing a trail across the UK with Saxon in 2022 (we caught their set at Leicester here) the band document that tour with an explosive offering, the aptly-titled Live And Electric.
Culled from performances the length and breadth the UK from Cardiff to Cambridge and taking pit stops in Aberdeen and Bexhill, Live And Electric flows smoothly like one set, and that attests to Diamond Head’s consistency. Of all the times I’ve seen them live the energy levels have never dipped below maxim and that’s precisely where opening track ‘The Price’ steps in. Still as fresh as the day it was first recorded, ‘The Prince’ evidences a band at the peak of their powers, late bloomers who’ve taken all the was great about their celebrated early years and filtered into the present. Much of the band’s current vigour and sense of purpose is undoubtedly due to vocalist Rasmus Bom Anderson who, since 2014, has made the mic his own and commandeered centre stage with authority and through the magic of Live And Electric we can visualise his trademark leaps and bounds (believe me, this guy’s like Bruce Dickinson on amphetamine) and he certainly made use of the larger stages this tour afforded. However, Diamond Head work best as a collective whole and they lock in tightly, from giving opener ‘The Prince’ real kick and bite to finally turning ‘Am I Evil?’ into a supremely menacing closer, this is the sound of a band at the top of their game.
Although Live And Electric has been sequenced from six shows, it has an ebb and flow like an actual concert (and is considerably longer than the sets they performed on this tour), so we get the crushing, wrecking-ball swing of ‘The Messenger’ sitting next to the heartfelt, emotive ‘In The Heat Of The Night’ which segues nicely into the riff monster that is ‘Set My Soul On Fire’ before they release the break on ‘It’s Electric’. That’s exactly how an album (or a live show) should flow, lifting us up one moment before dropping us back down to earth the next. Due to the nature of live releases someone is always going to be disappointed with the track selection (my personal bug bear is the absence of cuts from the criminally underrated Canterbury opus), but mainly Live And Electric plays like a greatest hits type package, only with the added oomph of being unleashed live.
Live And Electric is an album that finds Diamond Head shining bright.
- Live And Electric is released via Silver Lining Music on 11th July 2025.
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Track List:
- The Prince
- Bones
- The Messenger
- In The Heat Of The Night
- Set My Soul On Fire
- It’s Electric
- Dead Reckoning
- Death By Design
- Sweet And Innocent
- Helpless
- Belly Of The Beast
- Am I Evil?
