LIVE AT PLYMOUTH 1971

If only I could get past the sound quality, I could enjoy this much more. The performance is great. Mel Collons really steals the show. And where else can you hear live versions of Cirkus, Cadence And Cascade and Cat Food? But the recording renders the bass into an indeterminate rumble through most of the songs. Ah well, at least we have the recordings, raising my opinion again of what I thought was the worst King Crimson lineup.

They play relatively few of the songs from Islands. Only A Sailor's Tale, The Letter, and an even more bluesy, smoky version of Ladies Of The Road. The rest of the set comes from Crimson's first three albums, plus Get Thy Bearings and Mars. And Collins once again proves that he was one of the best reed players ever in prog.

Three stars, only because of the sound quality.

Just imagine: once upon a time, the only legitimate release circulating of the Islands-era King Crimson lineup was Earthbound, an album which sounds like it was recorded with a wax cylinder recorder hidden in a toilet in the next building over from the gig venue. With audio quality that poor and legendary stories circulating about the lineup's collapse, and with their studio output (Islands) greatly overshadowed by more widely-celebrated members of the King Crimson discography, it's no surprise that the Boz Boorer-fronted version of the band got short shrift for so long.

Thankfully, things have changed. As well as King Crimson incorporating material from the run of albums from In the Wake of Poseidon to Islands in their live set in recent years, thanks to Robert Fripp and Discipline Global Mobile's exacting process of documenting the King Crimson audio archives for posterity (and serving up juicy slices for it for the public's enjoyment) there's been an absolute feast of decent live sets from the lineup released - enough so that it actually makes Earthbound look worse by comparison. (My dudes, you had all these decent-quality tapes lying around and you chose to release THAT?)

In the case of the Plymouth Guildhall concert from 1971, the recording captures the band after they've returned home from a successful residency at the Zoom Club in Germany, where they'd really gelled as a live unit. Offering a jazzy, fusiony, at points Zappa-esque take on the material, we're treated to a mixture of pieces from In the Court of the Crimson King, In the Wake of Poseidon, and Lizard (all the Crimson albums that existed at that point) as well as some tasty foretastes of Islands, which they wouldn't record until after a few more months spent on the road refining the material.

That said, this isn't perfect. I would put the sound quality at slightly below that of the tapes of the 1971 Zoom Club residency, and as on those tapes there's some errors here and there and a few incomplete songs which kick in unexpectedly. Still, it's still miles better than Earthbound. That said, if you're a big enough Crimson fan that the sometimes shaky sound quality and incomplete songs on here don't put you off, you might as well get the Sailors' Tales boxed set - which this is included on - because there's a wealth of treasures in there which this only the tip of the iceberg of (and some of them sound better too).