In its day Greens’s Playhouse was always a make-or-break venue for bands on the UK touring circuit. The crowd there could be very, well, volatile, and vocal would be a polite way of putting it. The received wisdom of the day held that if you could win over the punters in Scotland’s second city, you would do well anywhere. Crimson decides to take the bull by the horns and open the show with the newly-written Doctor Diamond, here being played live for the very first time.
After that bold, and, it must be said, great rendition of the number, they don’t so much play LTIA as charge into it. As Wetton’s descending bass notes leading the quartet into the power chords, gather like storm clouds, each note acting as an augury that something powerful and malevolent is about to manifest.
Even if Robert’s remarks in the announcement aren’t discernible due to the low quality of the audience recording, it’s immediately apparent that what he’s saying is going down incredibly well with the notoriously hard-to-please punters.
Coming out of Easy Money, the first improv of the night opens with the arpeggio of what would become Fallen Angel. They had previously worked around the riff the previous year in Frankfurt’s Zoom Club show with Jamie Muir and while it would be several more months before it would coalesce into a song, hearing it in this nascent form is utterly fascinating. The group’s collective control of dynamics is astonishing throughout this marvellous excursion into the unknown.
The second improv after Book Of Saturday opens with a guitar glissando that sounds like a close cousin to the introduction of The Night Watch, a number which of course is still several months away from being written.
Although the sonic quality for this show is poor, its place in Crim history is important, given that it’s nothing short of the sound of the new quartet establishing itself and fleshing out its new vocabulary.
