Poole Arts Centre

There’s no denying it. The audio quality of this audience recording is a challenge for the ears of innocents. Seasoned Crimheads however are possessed of ears of steel capable of processing the spongy sonics into slivers of something that's just about listenable from Red onwards.

It captures the Crims on the final night of a short UK tour which itself came off the back of a run of American dates, and just before a TV appearance on the UK music show, The Old Grey Whistle Test.

The aforementioned Red isn’t so much played as detonated to the extremely appreciative audience who are happy to be blasted by the heavyweight riff. A different kind of rapture can be discerned from the shifting ambiguities within The Sheltering Sky. From Fripp’s molten soloing amidst Belew’s gentle folds of synth guitar and the distant pulses and land-mass rumbling from Bruford and Levin, even in a degraded sound quality environment such as this, it remains a transcendent experience.

It’s a bit of a treat hearing this pre-vocal Neurotica, the first new track played on this evening. It’s immediately followed by another number that the audience will not have heard before, Neil And Jack And Me, destined to the be opening track on Beat, which as Ade makes clear in his announcement, the band will begin work on just two days after this gig.