Uriah Heep: Live In Armenia

Old dogs, new tricks.

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At this rate Uriah Heep will soon become part of the GCSE geography syllabus. In the last three years they’ve issued live albums from Hungary, Austria, Sweden, Japan and Australia. And now Armenia where the president is apparently a fan.

What sets this album apart is the whacking chunk of tracks from their 2008 studio album Wake The Sleeper. That disc’s opening three tunes get this show underway with a rocking panache that lifts the dreaded ‘heritage band’ tag off their shoulders, to the evident delight of singer Bernie Shaw.

This comes at the expense of some Heep classics, but the Armenians also lap up the Zep-sounding Book Of Lies, the proggy What Kind Of God and the Deep Purple-y Angels Walk With You.

Hugh Fielder
Hugh Fielder

Hugh Fielder has been writing about music for 47 years. Actually 58 if you include the essay he wrote about the Rolling Stones in exchange for taking time off school to see them at the Ipswich Gaumont in 1964. He was news editor of Sounds magazine from 1975 to 1992 and editor of Tower Records Top magazine from 1992 to 2001. Since then he has been freelance. He has interviewed the great, the good and the not so good and written books about some of them. His favourite possession is a piece of columnar basalt he brought back from Iceland.