“Good evening. Welcome to the League of Gentlemen. We are a dance band. There is a dance floor. Let’s fill it,” says Robert providing helpful instructions for the audience just in case Inductive Resonance didn’t provide them with a clue as to what the evening was about. The sound initially sounds fuzzy and raw but as the track progresses it quickly improves and toe-tapping is happily unfettered. After a cutesy false start, the ever-jaunty Heptaparaparshinokh gets off on its merry marching way but it’s not enough to get the crowd frugging. “Correct me if I’m mistaken,” observes Fripp after the song, “but it doesn’t look as if you’re dancing. It looks as if you’re standing there like a load of stuffed turkeys. I may be mistaken.” So, of course, what better dance-friendly tune to go into than Thrang Thrang Gozinbulx to find out? Of course one of the joys of listening to these gigs is to hear the nascent Crimson that lies within the music’s DNA; the coda to Boy At Piano here providing a strong pre-echo of what was to come with Frame By Frame less than a year later. Of course, the League wasn’t only projecting future Crimson. The manic chordal flurry Fripp deploys in Dislocated offers a strong reminder of Sailor’s Tale and in this reading, the immediate aftermath, where the band goes back to building up the tension, Fripp’s carefully cross-picked lines evoke the opening section of Fracture.
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