A great-sounding audience recording that captures the band on their fourth gig of 1982, consolidating older songs and evolving their newer ones. “If you don’t mind I’m going to take my tie off and tell you about the next song,” says Adrian Belew halfway through a set that’s filled with new material. “This began in Paris on our last tour, while reading about Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy and all of those perverts. This is about being out in the hotels of the world and being lonely,” he continues by way of introducing Neal, And Jack And Me.
Interestingly the show opened with Absent Lovers, a number that was then very much a work in progress but one which was never finished in the studio later that year in the recording sessions for Beat, resisting the Crims' attempts to hone it into some final shape.
However, as the ecstatic reactions to the shifting moods and time signatures demonstrate, the crowd had no such problem with the music coming at them.
The concert comes to a formal conclusion with a particularly brutal version of The Howler, brimming with snarling lead lines, stomping polyrhythms, and a collective intensity that not only blows the minds of the punters in the room but blows out the doors of the venue.
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