Blimey, Crimson arrives on stage like a wild bull bursting through a five-bar gate with this rendition of The Great Deceiver. There’s a frenetic energy to the piece that presages the indignant fury that punk rock would later channel. While the pace might well be exhilarating it doesn’t help John Wetton’s enunciation of the lyrics. Though he sounds ragged in the song’s coda, as the band follows with Lament, Wetton regains control with a powerful vocal. Having replicated the running order of the side one of their just-released Starless And Bible Black, the Crims return to the previous year’s album for a lovely version of Exiles, preceded by some brooding atmospherics.
The limitations of this audience recording mean that a lot of the finer details inculcated within Fracture are lost to the ear. However, such is the sturdiness of the structure overall, the cumulative force and the way it builds to that bone-crunching riff means that the power of the piece remains impressively intact. The double whammy of Fracture being immediately followed by the then-unreleased Starless, to be followed by a brilliant improv into a storming Talking Drum a truly eventful LTIA Pt2, in which Fripp seems to have pedal problems, and an explosive 21CSM, all conspire to make this an especially compelling performance.
