Third album, "Children" is the monsterwork that saw The Mission step to headlining Enormodomes and massive outdoor circuses. With a clear inspiration from Led Zeppelin (and Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones at the helm), the album was a huge conceit, aiming to be the biggest classic rock album of the decade, and, with a audaciously placed cover of Aerosmith's "Dream On" - a song that always felt incongruous in their body of work - "Children" was ambitious, bombastic, and unapologetically huge in scope and vision. Sadly, the album suffered from being too long, and not being stuffed to the gills with absolute classics. There's no bad songs on it, but there's a difference between "Out Ta Get Me" (which is good) and "Paradise City" (which is perfection) is both not far, and a very very very long way. Live, it is a recreation of the album with a couple of rarer songs thrown in.
The Mission - despite being a great rock band throughout their career and producing a fine body of work (albeit one that stuck determined to a relatively limited palette) - painted themselves into a corner. This set is an authentic Mission experience but the band performing these songs had nothing to do with the band who wrote this material, apart from sharing a singer. As a package, it's a fine production : exhaustive, fine value for money, containing quality performance worthy of permanence and a suitable epitah to their career.