U2 - Rattle and Hum - Live (1987)

I just posted an album containing the studio tracks from "Rattle and Hum," U2's 1988 double album. As I explained there, "Rattle and Hum" was a mixture of live and studio tracks, and I feel it works better to split it into live and studio albums. As you can see, this is the live album.

There actually aren't that many live tracks on "Rattle and Hum," and it's fairly short for a double album. There are seven songs for a total of 30 minutes. And that's if you include "The Star Spangled Banner," which is a recording of Jimi Hendrix's famous version of that song, played at the start of a U2 concert.

However, there are a lot of other songs done live by U2 in 1987 and professionally recorded. Most of these are songs played in the "Rattle and Hum" movie but not included on the album. I've taken those eight songs from a DVD of the movie.

Furthermore, I've included seven more songs that are officially unreleased and weren't in the film, but still are soundboard recordings that sound as good as the other songs. I could have included many more, but all these extra songs were chosen because they're special in some way. Most of them are performances of rare cover songs: "People Get Ready," "Springhill Mining Disaster," "C'Mon Everybody," "Stand by Me," and "Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home)."

Also, there's the very first performance of "When Love Comes to Town," with B. B. King. This song would be included on the 1988 album, again with King. This was its only performance in 1987. It was included in the "Rattle and Hum" movie, but unfortunately only about two minutes made it, and some of that had some talking over the music. For this one song, I had to resort to a bootleg recording that sounds slightly less as good as the others, but it's still pretty good.

If you add up all the songs, you get one hour and thirty five minutes of music. That's the typical length of a live double album. As for the song order, I arranged them chronologically by the dates of the performances.

As I mentioned above, I think it makes way more sense to have the live and studio songs as separate albums. And because I've included a bunch of live rarities, hopefully this will still be interesting for the person who has heard hits like "Bad' and "Pride" a million times already.

01 The Star Spangled Banner [Recording] (Jimi Hendrix)
02 Bullet the Blue Sky (U2)
03 Christmas [Baby, Please Come Home] (U2)
04 Springhill Mining Disaster (U2)
05 People Get Ready (U2)
06 C'mon Everybody (U2)
07 Stand by Me (U2 & Bruce Springsteen)
08 I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For (U2 & the New Voices of Freedom)
09 Spanish Eyes (U2)
10 Helter Skelter (U2)
11 Silver and Gold (U2)
12 Pride [In the Name of Love] (U2)
13 In God's Country (U2)
14 Exit - Gloria (U2)
15 Bad - Ruby Tuesday - Sympathy for the Devil (U2)
16 talk (U2)
17 Sunday Bloody Sunday (U2)
18 All Along the Watchtower (U2)
19 When Love Comes to Town (U2 & B. B. King)
20 Where the Streets Have No Name (U2)
21 MLK (U2)
22 With or Without You (U2)
23 Running to Stand Still (U2)

https://www.imagenetz.de/bA3a5

The album cover art is very similar to the official "Rattle and Hum" cover, but it's not the same. It uses the same main photo, but I found a version that's part of the band's promotional material for the movie that has some blue tinting. I don't know why it's slightly different like that, but I like it. I also added some letting. The larger "U2" comes from the same promo picture.