Some Girls: Live in Texas '78

After a trend-setting career as the 'bad boys of rock'n'roll' in the 1960s, come the 1970s the Rolling Stones began to subside into a kind of comfortable corporate entity with progressively less inspired music and performances. 'Love You Live', the enervated, heavily-overdubbed 1977 album drawn from 1975 performances, represents the nadir of the band's 1970s releases. During the time between the tour and release of that album, punk rock broke and immediately condemned as irrelevant poseurs all but a very few 'old guard' rock stars (David Bowie and perhaps one or two others escaped unscathed). Forced to confront their own increasing disengagement from the current rock scene, the Rolling Stones reacted by cutting out the excess, playing hard and writing 'Some Girls', released in 1978 and celebrated as one of their career- best albums. 'Some Girls: Live in Texas '78' presents a conspicuously energised-by-punk Stones, with upbeat tempos and a sublimely strutting Jagger wearing vinyl pants and the same 'Destroy' design t-shirt as worn by Johnny Rotten a year before. The set list is basically the titular album played live with some Stones classics mixed in for good measure, and the whole package makes for easily the best live Rolling Stones DVD of them all. Turn it up, sing along and dance all around your living room; this burst of energy is invigorating enough to delight even those who detested what the band had become by 1977. It didn't last, but here are the real Rolling Stones, back on form and proving they still had it even as the Clash et al were snidely (and not a little jealously, as it turned out) saying they were through.