Motorhead
Motorhead in 1980

Heavy Quarantine: live metal videos to watch at home of Motorhead, Power Trip & more

Every weekday during this quarantine, we’ve been posting five amazing live videos from YouTube since no actual live shows are happening. Our daily posts aren’t genre-specific, but every Friday, we also post an all-metal edition. Here’s this week’s, which ranges from Motorhead in 1980 to Power Trip in 2018, with plenty of other cool stuff in between.

Motorhead @ Nottingham Theatre Royal in Nottingham, UK – 8/20/1980

A few months before releasing their now-legendary Ace of Spades album, Motorhead taped a show in Nottingham for the UK TV series Rockstage, and this video does a killer job of capturing The Loudest Band In The World in their prime. Lemmy, Philthy Animal, and Fast Eddie Clarke were on fire, and the awesome fog and light show only made them look even more badass. They opened with the furious “Overkill,” and they stayed on that high all night as they powered through more now-classic songs like “Too Late Too Late,” “Jailbait,” “Metropolis,” “Bomber,” “Motorhead,” and more. We miss these guys a lot.

Power Trip @ Bloodstock 2018

Power Trip are hands down the best thrash band of the last decade, and as good as their recorded music is (and it’s good), the stage is really where they come to life. We’ve always had an amazing time seeing Power Trip play in the pre-quarantine times (including at shows we booked), and though we’ve usually seen them tearing it up in small clubs, this video from Bloodstock 2018 shows that they can own a gigantic festival crowd too. How is this not the biggest band in the world?

Deep Purple in Copenhagen – 1972

Maybe more proto-metal than metal, but metal as we know it wouldn’t exist without Deep Purple and this great quality video really shows you how much of a force this band was in their prime, and we’re truly lucky that footage like this exists. This was shortly before Machine Head came out, and Ian Gillan introduced the set-opening “Highway Star” by saying they’d be opening their sets with it for the next year or so. They looked genuinely stoked to finally be able to show off this “new” song, and it’s a trip to see such an iconic band seem so hungry. Later in the set, they did the trippy, jammy “Child In Time,” other bangers like “Space Truckin'” and “Fireball,” and plenty of other great songs that make this historic set worth watching and rewatching.

Electric Wizard @ Khyber Pass Pub in Philadelphia, PA – 6/27/2002

Here’s a comparatively newer band who are definitely influenced by Deep Purple (and even more definitely by Black Sabbath, but duh), UK stoner metal greats Electric Wizard. Pretty much every era of Electric Wizard is great, but this is the classic lineup where frontman Jus Oborn was joined by bassist Tim Bagshaw and drummer Mark Greening, and the setlist is fantastic. They opened with the title track of 1998’s Supercoven EP, then played two off the then-new Let Us Prey (“…A Chosen Few” and “Priestess of Mars”), and then wrapped up with the two great opening songs of 1997’s especially legendary Come My Fanatics… (“Wizard In Black” and “Return Trip”). If you like your riffs as thick and hazy as a room full of weed smoke, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Kvelertak @ Saint Vitus in Brooklyn, NY – 5/14/2014

Kvelertak recently released a livestreamed concert video, and it’s one of the better ones I’ve seen during all of quarantine (especially within metal, which is a little harder to pull off without a live audience than other styles of music), but as good as it is, I still miss the classic Kvelertak lineup with original vocalist Erlend Hjelvik and longtime drummer Kjetil Gjermundrød. That lineup had an insane amount of chemistry, and it was always a thrill to see them live, with Erlend looking like a total beast as all three guitarists and bassist Marvin Nygaard swung their axes in the air, and here’s that lineup at Brooklyn’s Saint Vitus on 2014’s Meir tour. The room is unsurprisingly packed (this was an intimate one-off headliner during Kvelertak’s tour with Mastodon and Gojira, which hit NYC’s much larger Terminal 5), and Kvelertak fed off the crowd’s energy as well as they ever have. You can feel the sweat from here.

Check out a gallery of photos of Power Trip at Psycho Las Vegas 2019:

For more live metal videos, head here. For more of our favorite live videos in any genre, head here. We’ve also been rounding up archives of metal livestreams.