7 may 1980
Gently fading in Eye Needle gets the second gig in Belgium off to a flying start. With the first Dislocated you really can hear nagging lines that Fripp would later deploy when recording It’s No Game for David Bowie. The second version doesn’t quite have the same belligerence but coming out of the drop-drown you’d swear he was picking out parts of Fracture in slo-mo and in doing so really builds the sense of tension in the piece.
In his diary of the time the guitarist notes “The dance last night...put us up a step. A lot had to do audience, which was remarkably supportive and had a wide age range, probably 12 to 36. The manager of the club gave us a bottle of champagne afterwards because ‘it was the best concert we ever have here’. One musician didn’t like it because ‘it was not the music of the future’ which he had expected. Another man liked it for exactly the same reason. Although we were between innocence and incompetence, generally embracing both, the spirit is growing despite Barry’s heavy cold, John’s lung problems (accentuated by smoking) and the beginnings of ‘flu with me.”
In his diary of the time the guitarist notes “The dance last night...put us up a step. A lot had to do audience, which was remarkably supportive and had a wide age range, probably 12 to 36. The manager of the club gave us a bottle of champagne afterwards because ‘it was the best concert we ever have here’. One musician didn’t like it because ‘it was not the music of the future’ which he had expected. Another man liked it for exactly the same reason. Although we were between innocence and incompetence, generally embracing both, the spirit is growing despite Barry’s heavy cold, John’s lung problems (accentuated by smoking) and the beginnings of ‘flu with me.”
