20. A One Man Show (1982)
The only commercial release of A One Man Show is a wasted opportunity, padding out six live tracks with four (admittedly fantastic) Grace Jones videos. But the live stuff is so fantastic – dramatically lit, beautifully staged, Jones snarling and imperious – it’s unmissable: it’s time someone released the whole gig.
19. Minor Threat Live at 9:30 Club (1983)
It’s shot on video cameras towards the end of Minor Threat’s career, but no other film captures US hardcore punk’s potency this well. Minor Threat don’t play like a band about to break up, and situating a camera behind the drums is an inspired idea, revealing the audience: a stage-diving, slam-dancing maelstrom of arms and legs.
18. Jay-Z: Fade to Black (2004)
Hip-hop concert movies are surprisingly thin on the ground, which means it’s worth overlooking Fade to Black’s premise – heralding a retirement that never happened – and luxuriating in the footage from Madison Square Garden, complete with guests including Kanye West, Missy Elliott, Mary J Blige and Beyoncé.
17. Mad Dogs & Englishmen (1971)
Mad Dogs & Englishmen is now a fantastic period piece, documenting a vast, overblown musical travelling circus touring the US on the morning after the 60s. There’s a bludgeoning intensity about the music, Joe Cocker remains a bizarre, compelling presence, but the scene-stealer is the charismatic, if faintly unsettling keyboard player, Leon Russell.
16. Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That! (2006)
A fascinating attempt to re-frame the concert movie: 50 fans at a Beastie Boys’ Madison Square Garden show were handed camcorders and told to film the entire show. Edited together, the lo-fi results are occasionally headache-inducing, but few films so accurately replicate the experience of actually being in the audience at a gig.
15. Don’t Think (2012)
Adam Smith’s astonishing film of a Chemical Brothers set at Japan’s Fuji Rock mixes colour-saturated visual bombardment with audience members wandering off for food midway through the performance. It genuinely feels like being at a festival in an altered state: moreover, it captures the lost-in-the-moment transcendence central to dance music.
14. Elvis: That’s The Way It Is (1970)
Without wishing to pick nits, it’s the 2001 cut of That’s The Way It Is you need to see – more performance and fewer fans rhapsodising, thus more compelling evidence that, initially, Elvis in Vegas represented a career highlight: on stage he’s spontaneous, emotionally powerful and still carries a distinct sexual energy.
13. Sign O’ the Times (1987)
Prince diehards may favour the rarely screened film of Prince’s 1986 Parade tour – which features the Revolution and mercifully eschews Sign O’ the Times’ scripted “dramatic” vignettes – but Sign O’ the Times is fantastic nonetheless: beautifully shot, with a setlist heavy on the career-highlight album with which it shares a title.
12. Wattstax (1973)
The Wattstax festival was labelled the Black Woodstock, but the subsequent film is infinitely more interesting than that of Woodstock itself: the performances are all spectacular (Isaac Hayes is the star, the Bar-Kays possibly the highlight) and the director’s contextualising is gripping – it’s a festival situated in a tense, deprived Black neighbourhood.
11. Depeche Mode: 101 (1989)
DA Pennebaker’s film inadvertently helped invent reality TV – the footage of Depeche Mode is interspersed with that of young fans who’ve won a contest to see them live. Quite aside from the performance at the Pasedena Rosebowl, 101 ends up saying fascinating things both about Depeche Mode on the brink of vast fame, and about late-80s America.
10. The Song Remains the Same (1976)
The fantasy sequences may be the last word in 70s rock self-indulgence, some sections of footage may feature the band miming at Shepperton Studios, Robert Plant might have dismissed it all as “bollocks”, but no matter: the highlights of Led Zeppelin’s 1973 live performance at Madison Square Garden are so fierce as to trample all objections underfoot.
9. Dance Craze (1981)
The making of Dance Craze was apparently fraught with arguments between the director Joe Massot and the artists, but you can’t tell from the end product: a relentless onslaught of frenetic live performances – from the Specials, Madness, the Beat et al – that perfectly captures the rowdy euphoria of the Two Tone movement’s zenith.
8. The Last Waltz (1978)
Martin Scorsese approached shooting the Band’s farewell show like a feature film: storyboarding, employing seven cameramen, playing close attention to lighting. But it’s the performances – not just the Band, but Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and an accelerated-looking, high-kicking Van Morrison – that make it worth watching.
7. The TAMI Show (1964)
The story of The TAMI Show – of James Brown’s determination to upstage headliners Rolling Stones – is better known than the film itself, which spent decades out of circulation. Brown is incredible, but the rest of the lineup is great too, taking in Motown, the Beach Boys, Lesley Gore and garage punk (via the Barbarians): a perfect survey of mid-60s US pop.
6. Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé (2019)
The rehearsal footage is perhaps a little too hagiographic, but Beyoncé has every right to feel pleased with herself: the first Black woman to headline Coachella put on an authentically jaw-dropping show, its thrills amplified by the movie cutting between its two performances, denoted by a change in costume colour.
5. Monterey Pop (1968)
Jimi Hendrix’s guitar-immolating appearance is Monterey Pop’s most famous moment, but really, the viewer looking for highlights is spoilt for choice: Janis Joplin’s racked reading of Ball and Chain, the thuggish power of the Who – utterly at odds with the festival’s peace-and-love vibe – or Otis Redding’s majestic career-changing appearance.
4. Gimme Shelter (1970)
Most great concert movies make you wish you’d been there; Gimme Shelter makes you delighted you weren’t. The Rolling Stones’ performances are really good, but that’s besides the point: the film’s power lies in the way it keeps cutting back to the band’s subsequent reaction to reports and footage of the violence and murder at Altamont.
3. Stop Making Sense (1984)
Director Jonathan Demme called Stop Making Sense a “performance film” rather than a concert film, stripping away visual and lighting effects to concentrate on Talking Heads’ incredible, highly choreographed performance, catching them at their post-Speaking in Tongues musical peak, their augmented live band awesomely tight and funky.
2. Amazing Grace (2018)
When Aretha “gets her body and soul all over some righteous song, she’ll scare the shit out of you”, the late Billy Preston once opined. Well, quite: other concert films may be more visually spectacular, but for sheer, blazing musical intensity, nothing matches this long-unreleased 1972 film of Aretha Franklin at her father’s LA church.
1. Summer of Soul (2021)
Summer of Soul isn’t so much a concert film as an incredible piece of cultural archaeology, unearthing long-buried footage of the 1969 Harlem cultural festival. It seems astonishing it was ever forgotten in the first place: it may well represent the pop era’s greatest gathering of Black talent – with every participant at the top of their game – and the audio and visual quality is stunning. Literally every performance, from Nina Simone’s incendiary rabble rousing to Sly and the Family Stone’s euphoric set, to Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson’s soaring gospel, is jaw-dropping: no wonder it scooped every award going.
