* Remastered repress. Comes with printed inner sleeve. * Leg End is the debut of Henry Cow, recorded at Virgin's Manor studios in May and June 1973 and released that summer. The band had formed five years earlier around two Cambridge students, Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson, and had spent the intervening time building a reputation in London's experimental margins, running their own concert series under names like Cabaret Voltaire and Explorers' Club, sharing stages with Lol Coxhill and Derek Bailey. They were among the first signings to the newly formed Virgin label, brought in partly on the recommendation of Robert Wyatt, who called them his favourite band in the world. By then the line-up had settled around Frith, Hodgkinson, bassist John Greaves, drummer Chris Cutler and reedist Geoff Leigh.

What they delivered was a debut that fit no available shelf. Pieces like Nirvana for Mice, Teenbeat and Amygdala move through knotted time signatures and abrupt structural shifts, folding free jazz, chamber writing and the harder edges of progressive rock into something brittle, agile and entirely their own. Leigh's flute and tenor give the record a jazz inflection later Cow albums would shed; Cutler's drumming refuses to settle into any groove for long. It closes on Hodgkinson's Nine Funerals of the Citizen King, the band's five voices rising in unison, the first hint of the political seriousness that would soon harden into method.

The cover, a stitched sock by the artist Ray Smith, opened a trilogy of sock sleeves and signalled, with deadpan wit, a band that took everything seriously except the marketing. Reissued by ReR Vinyl, remastered and faithful to the Virgin original, the first chapter of one of the most singular bodies of work in British music.