We could listen back to it the next day and be sure that we had it. When we were on the tour, sometimes we would say, 'Tonight we'll concentrate on this particular song for sure', and made sure that we play it and jump and run around a bit less, so there was a plan while we were doing it. We then collated all the scores and chose the best ones to be on the album. Everyone had to listen to the songs - there was no escape! - and give each song a mark out of 10. "We each had a sheet of paper with the setlist from every single show. Everyone in the band had input into that part of the process. The hardest part was listening back to every single show, because we've already played the songs a million times and then we had to listen to them a million times.
"We had the Digidesign Avid Venue desk feeding into the Pro Tools HD system and recorded all the instruments direct to hard drive, so it's pretty easy actually. How do you get from recording a live show to the finished product? It's so easy with the technology these days." We actually recorded all 19 of the shows on the last UK tour, so we could pick the best performances later on, rather than record just one show and then realise it wasn't that great. We hadn't played a lot of the old songs for a long time, so we skipped some of the newer songs earlier on in the tour to refresh the old ones, so when it came time to record the shows we were well prepared. It was the last leg of the world tour and we were doing songs from all four albums. "We had an idea of what songs had to be on the live album based on which ones go down the best with the fans.