Henry Cow

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

In Praise Of Learning (1975) is Henry Cow's third album and the second of their two collaborations with Slapp Happy (after the parallel Desperate Straights of late 1974). Recorded at The Manor in February and March 1975, the line-up is the largest of Henry Cow's career: Fred Frith, Tim Hodgkinson, John Greaves, Chris Cutler, Lindsay Cooper from the standing quartet, plus Dagmar Krause, Peter Blegvad and Anthony Moore from Slapp Happy, with guest appearances by Mongezi Feza (trumpet), Geoff Leigh (soprano sax) and Phil Becque (oscillator). The album's politics are unambiguous: anti-imperialist, Marxist, deliberately radical.

"War" opens the record with Krause spitting a Brechtian text over two minutes of crystalline fury. "Living In The Heart Of The Beast" (Hodgkinson's composition, lyrics by Cutler and Hodgkinson) takes up the rest of side A: fifteen minutes of through-composed political agitprop set against the most complex music Henry Cow ever recorded, Krause carrying the lyric across shifting time signatures. Side B contains the improvised "Beginning: The Long March" and the album's other great composed piece, the choral "Beautiful As The Moon, Terrible As An Army With Banners". The record jacket sock, this time in unmistakable red.

The pressing on offer is the 1979 Red Records issue, RED 003: the first US edition of an album originally released in May 1975 on Virgin UK (V 2027). Issued four years after the European original, this Red Records pressing was the version that introduced In Praise Of Learning to American collectors. A notable political-musical statement of the 1970s.