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After the triumph of their debut shows at Moles in Bath, Bill, Ade, Tony and Robert undertook a further two warm-up dates in in Weymouth and Bristol and a day in rehearsals before finally getting on to the highways and byways of the UK with fellow EG act, The Lounge Lizards as support. Arriving at Liverpool, the third date on the tour, Discipline as they were still, are brimming with energy. You can just picture Belew bouncing up and down on the spot as they launch into powerful versions of Discipline and Thela Hun Jinjeet, which at this point still contains Belew intoning “Your house - my house,” a quote from NY3, a track on Fripp’s 1979 solo album, Exposure.
Judging by the whoops, hollers, and gleeful appreciation, the Liverpool crowd had their minds blown after the team finished Red. That strange sense of the old mingling with the brand-new is a definite feature of these shows. Tony’s intro to Elephant Talk contains some highly abstract slides and runs on this early outing that would later be lost. Similarly, while the form and overall structure of The Sheltering Sky is largely in place, on this outing it seems a good deal more porous than it would become. Indiscipline is highly charged with a glorious stop-start ending which again would be honed to a more reliable finish in the future. All told, a great performance.
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