1As this audience recording demonstrates, there’s a lot of excitement generated by the entrance of the Crims in this football stadium in Barcelona. The tape also shows why clapping along to the rolling introduction to Waiting Man isn’t always a good idea. Putting such polyrhythmic problems to one side Waiting Man is the ideal opener for Crimson here supporting Roxy Music, then riding high in the charts with their eighth and final studio album, Avalon.
If Waiting Man’s pumping 4/4 pulse is going to get hesitant toes tapping, quite what the wider audience then made of Thela Hun Ginjeet and the bone-splitting dreadnought of Red remains unknown.
It’s interesting to note that although Beat was then newly released, only one track from the album appears here with the bulk of their shortened stage time allocated to the potentially better-known Discipline material.
The arrival of The Sheltering Sky gives Bill Bruford an opportunity to go walkabout on stage with his slit drum providing the lilting foundations to a piece that features Robert delivering some hair-raising soloing. Listen out for a fabulously deranged version of Indiscipline. What’s Catalan for ‘I like it?’
