Europe - The Final Countdown – Live At The Roundhouse album review

A celebration that works only partially

By Malcolm Dome
( Classic Rock )
published
Cover art for Europe - The Final Countdown – Live At The Roundhouse album

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Last autumn, Europe marked the 30th anniversary of breakthrough album The Final Countdown by playing it in full at a show in London. This is the result.

What comes across is that while the audience clearly gets off on hearing the whole record, somehow it all falls flat. For one thing the band aren’t fully convincing, and for another there are too many fillers on the original album.

Oddly, what works better is when they precede this by performing the whole of 2015 album War Of Kings. This has real passion, proving that Europe have more to offer in the present than as a nostalgia act. But then that’s what they’ve been telling us for years.

Malcolm Dome
Malcolm Dome

Malcolm Dome had an illustrious and celebrated career which stretched back to working for Record Mirror magazine in the late 70s and Metal Fury in the early 80s before joining Kerrang! at its launch in 1981. His first book, Encyclopedia Metallica, published in 1981, may have been the inspiration for the name of a certain band formed that same year. Dome is also credited with inventing the term "thrash metal" while writing about the Anthrax song Metal Thrashing Mad in 1984. With the launch of Classic Rock magazine in 1998 he became involved with that title, sister magazine Metal Hammer, and was a contributor to Prog magazine since its inception in 2009. He died in 2021.