So when I see a link for an article on “ The 50 Greatest Live Albums Ever”, do I really have time to read about 50 live albums that may or may not be deserving of the appellation of “greatest ever”?

Both the Sing Blue Silver documentary and the Arena film were reissued on DVD in 2004; the Arena DVD features The Making of Arena as an extra. But one fantastic live album that isn’t included in the list – and to be honest probably shouldn’t be – is Duran Duran’s Arena. I can live without “The Reflex”, I can live without “New Moon on Monday”, but the few Duran Duran songs I can’t live without are all here (except “Rio”, but the 2004 remastered version with the bonus tracks fixed that): “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “Save a Prayer” and “The Seventh Stranger” and “The Chauffeur”, and then a bunch of the kind of interchangeable songs where it hardly matters which songs they picked.At 14, i bought this album on cassette in a bin in a French gas station and played it to death, as my Australian family travelled through a frozen European winter in 1984. Give the guy some credit – it takes a tremendous amount of talent to invest that kind of feeling into songs that are pretty much black holes in terms of narrative or content. Popular though they may have been in their prime, but they were pretty formulaic in the early 80s, and hearing any random Duran Duran song was hardly different than hearing any other.

The Wild Boys" single was issued with six separate covers in the UK - one featuring each individual band member and one of the band collectively.I mean let’s be honest, if you have “Hungry Like the Wolf”, you really have a good chunk of the truly essential Duran Duran songs you need. At the time of release, critics were suspicious that the mix was too polished for a live album, as most of the audience was muted. Take “ The 100 Greatest Prog Artists of All Time ” (as though there had actually been 100 prog artists worth mentioning). Other criticism arose from the omission of some of the band's biggest songs like " The Reflex", " Girls on Film" and " Rio". The Duranies were a pretty tight band live actually – I actually snuck my nine-year-old daughter into one of the shows on the Astronaut tour with the five original members back in 2004.

About halfway through the show one of the concessions workers got off and saw me sitting there while my daughter was playing over by the pond by the entrance, and offered me the free ticket she had, which was very generous of her and which I gratefully accepted. But now I had a problem – I had a ticket and my daughter didn’t, and I could hardly leave a nine-year-old girl outside the venue to wait for me. There’s no denying that their hooky choruses, danceable grooves, and general sense of style not only suck you right in, but also made them an integral part of the first half of the decade.And I mean, yeah, everybody and their brother bought a copy of Frampton Comes Alive in 1976, but does it really belong on a list of the 50 greatest live albums ever?