"Actor: Bobby Keys"

• The Rolling Stones - Bridges To Babylon 1998 | DVD | (01/10/1999) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £12.99

  Like any good brand, the Rolling Stones know to preserve the formula even when updating the package, and this long-form concert video underscores that market strategy. As with each of their tours since the early 1980s, the quartet, augmented by a discreet auxiliary of backup musicians, gives the fans new eye-candy while dishing up a familiar set list spiked with Mick Jagger's lip-smacking vocals and Keith Richards' signature guitar riffs. The visual twists are at once spectacular and conservative: a cyclopean main stage design with massive pillars (presumably the Babylonian connection), a vast oval video screen (shades of Big Brother), and a hydraulic bridge enabling a mid-concert sortie into the audience, with the Stones playing a more stripped-down, intimate set on a small satellite stage. That huge physical setting doubtless made the live shows eye-filling rock spectacles, but the video crew necessarily accepts the limitations of the small screen, focusing more on close-ups of the band, rapid cuts, and racing, hand-held tracking shots to convey excitement while keeping the viewer close to the action. The evening's repertoire sticks to the band's most familiar hits, and if the Glimmer Twins occasionally slip their masks to let the routine show, the real wonder is how effectively they keep the playing focused. During the first half of the programme, the band's newest songs (especially "Saint of Me" and "Out of Control") elicit conspicuously higher energy from the band, if not the audience. But just as the show seems doomed to a certain anonymity, the escape onto the smaller, no-frills stage pumps up players and crowd alike, particularly when they launch into "Like a Rolling Stone", a cover that winds up sounding like a great idea too long deferred. --Sam Sutherland, Amazon.com

• Keith Richards - Live at the Hollywood Palladium | DVD | (09/12/2002) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Live At The Hollywood Palladium December 15 1988 1. Take It So Hard 2. How I Wish 3. I Could Have Stood Up 4. Too Rude 5. Make No Mistake 6. Time Is On My Side 7. Big Enough 8. Whip It Up 9. Locked Away 10. Struggle 11. Happy 12. Connection

• The Rolling Stones - Live At The Max | DVD | (26/11/1999) from £16.70   |  Saving you £3.29 (19.70%)   |  RRP £19.99

  This 1991 concert film was shot in the IMAX format and was originally presented on enormous IMAX screens, with outstanding visual and audio clarity. The dimensions may have been scaled down for this DVD release, but the show is still huge in energy and talent. Filmed during a European leg of the Rolling Stones' Steel Wheels tour, this production boasts 15 songs and an extraordinary stage set with inflatable floozies (for "Honky Tonk Woman") and wild dogs (rather cleverly for "Street Fighting Man"). The Stones' set emphasises material from the late 1960s and early 70s ("Tumbling Dice", "Happy", "You Can't Always Get What You Want"), but the band's performance is so furious that the show is far from a pandering oldies act. Highlights include "Paint it Black", at once brutal and delicate, as well as a muscular "Rock and a Hard Place", a psychedelicised "2,000 Light Years from Home", and a cheeky "It's Only Rock 'n' Roll". Once kings of a gloriously sloppy sound, the Stones prove to be as effective in their artistic maturity with small, breathtaking touches as they are with chunky orchestration. Guitarists Keith Richards and Ron Wood play as if they are of one mind, Richards providing powerful leads while his partner captures some of the texture of the group's original recordings. Bassist Bill Wyman, still in the band at this phase, offers wit and an encyclopaedic grasp of rhythm & blues history, while drummer Charlie Watts adds control and swing. Mick Jagger prowls, climbs around the set, and delivers all the charismatic goods for adoring audiences, even touching the forbidden fruit again in a feverish performance of "Sympathy for the Devil". The DVD also includes a full Stones discography. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com