THE COMPLETE 1969 RECORDINGS

This is for those that particularly love the original King Crimson lineup and the debut studio album they produced, and want to have all the versions of that (including the 2019 edition freshly cleaned up from rediscovered first-generation tapes), plus a plethora of live material. The main thing stopping this being a five-star release is that the live material can tend to be a bit samey - this was an early incarnation of the group and their repertoire just wasn't that broad.

When it comes to sound quality, the BBC Sessions disc includes some of the best-sounding and worst-sounding material in the entire set. On the clearer side of things, there's crystal-clear live-in-the-studio runthroughs of 21st Century Schizoid Man, Epitaph, and In the Court of the Crimson King from a May 1969 session; an August session yields somewhat murkier-sounding versions of I Talk To the Wind and Get Thy Bearings (a Donovan cover they were playing live at the time), provided via a less-than-pristine source. Appended as a bonus here is Trees - the sole recording of this rare early track which would later be taken apart and thoroughly cannibalised - which is very evidently not from an official soundboard source, but lacking any other recording of this track it is presented out of archival interest. (Some sections are very evidently bits of Pictures of a City).

Most of the live releases in here are somewhat towards the middle of these extremes - generally sounding quite good for 1969 live tapes, but with some unavoidable issues here and there. If you already have a lot of the official live releases from the 1969 group, there may not be that much extra here for you to discover - but if you want an absolute ton of live 1969 stuff, this is the definitive set.