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Baker's Dozen

Critic's Round-Up: Mark Kermode's Favourite Albums
Marc Burrows , February 11th, 2014 08:20

The film critic, television presenter and skiffle bassist sets aside his DVD stack to talk top records with Marc Burrows

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Jerry Lee Lewis - Live At The Star Club, Hamburg
I'm a huge Jerry Lee Lewis fan anyway, but I think this is arguably one of the greatest live albums ever made. He's completely at the top of his game and the crowd are going nuts. There's an awful lot of pausing between the songs so you have the crowd chanting: "Jerry Lee! Jerry Lee! Jerry Lee!" It's one of those live albums where you can imagine what it must have been like to be there, to see him when he was really giving it all at the piano. Funnily enough I bought a vinyl copy of it a long time ago, the original version from the 60s, and then there was a vinyl reissue. A friend of mine's daughter has just got a record player, as we would call it, and he was trying to get a record collection together for her, so I brought her a reissued vinyl version of it. It's one of those things you should ideally listen to on vinyl, especially for the sleeve which has this great picture of Jerry Lee attacking the piano.