Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75 is both a concert video and the fourth live album by Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, released in 2006. It is a full-length recording of their performance on 18 November 1975 at the Hammersmith Odeon in London, during their Born to Run tours. It was first released as a DVD on November 14, 2005 as part of the Born to Run 30th Anniversary Edition package, and then several months later on February 28, 2006 released as an audio CD.
The concert was part of Columbia Records’ push to promote Springsteen in the UK and Europe following the success of the Born to Run album in the US. The large amount of publicity accompanying these appearances, especially the one in London, famously caused Springsteen to react badly and furiously run about pulling down promotional posters proclaiming “Finally London is ready for Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band.”
This performance marked the European concert debut of Springsteen and the E Street Band, kicking off a four-date mini tour which also featured shows in Stockholm, Sweden and Amsterdam, Holland, as well as a second concert at the Hammersmith Odeon on November 24 that was added due to the huge ticket demand for the first London gig.
In the liner notes, Springsteen himself writes that after the show had been recorded, “I’d paid no attention to it. I never looked at it … for 30 years.” After the Rising tour, he had an inkling to dig into film of the early part of his career, the vast majority of which remained “a blank spot,” with little or nothing ever released. He found the film and the 24-track audio recordings. The two-and-a-half-hour concert film was spliced together from 32 reels of silent 16-mm footage, digitally restored frame by frame in a painstaking process that took editor Thom Zimny a full year to complete. Bob Clearmountain, a veteran of several Springsteen projects, mixed the audio for the CD and film.Actor, writer and Monty Python member Michael Palin was in attendance and devoted an entire diary entry (Tuesday, November 18th, 1975) to the concert and his first impression of Springsteen and the band. He notes that the hype by CBS Records was met with a certain skepticism by the ticket-buying public. He notes that the concert did not start until 45 minutes after the scheduled start time, that the PA system made it difficult for him to make out the lyrics, but the band and The Boss “kept the evening alive — and he did three encores.”
The Fat Angel Sings 