Rainbow: On Stage/Long Live Rock 'n' Roll

Two unearthed classics from the man in black

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While Rainbow Rising is often cited as perhaps the greatest of all Rainbow albums, here are two more reasons to celebrate the band.

ON STAGE [9] was released in 1977, and features the band in peerless form during shows in Germany and Japan. One of all-time great hard rock live records, it still sounds stunning. Plus, there’s now a bonus CD with tracks taken from a show in Osaka. Listening to the way they fly through Kill The King, bring Mistreated to life and power up Sixteenth Century Greensleeves is a breathtaking experience.

The following year’s LONG LIVE ROCK’N’ROLL [8] was the last studio album with Ronnie James Dio. It’s endured, with the title track, Gates Of Babylon and Kill The King sounding especially inspired. The bonus CD offers rough mixes, TV shows and live rehearsals of most of the same songs, but it’s an edifying snapshot of the band stuck somewhere in time.

It and the excellent On Stage are reminders of why Rainbow remain among the most essential hard rock bands of the 1970s.

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.