Magnum: Live at the Symphony Hall album review

Old and new Magnum material given a live sparkle

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Magnum: Live at the Symphony Hall

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Magnum: Live at the Symphony Hall

Magnum: Live at the Symphony Hall

Magnum have released quite a few live albums, and this one is among the best of them. 

Recorded in their home city of Birmingham, it presents a nice balance between songs from the past decade and more familiar classics. 

The band are tight and passionate, while Bob Catley’s vocals cut through with febrile certainty. 

And it says a lot about how committed Magnum are to more recent material that tracks like Crazy Old Mothers and When We Were Younger sound as momentous as the timeless How Far Jerusalem or The Spirit. The highlight, though, is the anti-war Don’t Wake The Lion (Too Old To Die Young), still remarkably epic

Malcolm Dome
Malcolm Dome

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021.