Live At The Fillmore (1997)
WARNER
9/10
ROM about the mid-1980s onwards, Tom Petty’s output was defined by a frequently infuriating contradiction. While Petty and his Heartbreakers were (obviously) as fine and fierce a rock’n’roll band as had ever been assembled, Petty seemed peculiarly insistent on making records from which you wouldn’t necessarily know it. There was rarely much wrong with the songs, but the production grew increasingly glossy and decreasingly gritty. The Heartbreakers of their first three albums – that pugnacious, ferocious and glorious hybrid of the swaggering Southern swamp-boogie of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the fidgety, skittish, skinny-tied new wave of the Attractions – got harder and harder to hear.
