Henry Cow

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

The first Henry Cow album, recorded across three weeks in May and June 1973 at The Manor (Virgin's studio in Oxfordshire) and released that September on Virgin (V 2005) as one of the early LPs to bear the new label's logo. The line-up: Fred Frith (guitar, piano, violin, viola), Tim Hodgkinson (organ, piano, reeds), John Greaves (bass, piano), Chris Cutler (drums, toys), Geoff Leigh (clarinet, flute, recorder, saxophone). Their first time together on record, all five committed to what they called "a music for the third world" of Anglo avant-rock.

The album opens with "Nirvana For Mice" and immediately stakes the band's territory: Soft Machine clockwork rhythms, Zappa-style compositional rigor, free-jazz improvisation, the whole carried with an unsmiling intelligence that progressive rock had not yet seen. "Amygdala" is a Frith composition of complex unison riffs against Cutler's sprung polyrhythms. The two-part "Teenbeat" suite (the band's manifesto piece) crosses an extended group improvisation with quoted song-form fragments. "Nine Funerals Of The Citizen King" closes the record on darker material. The cover, Ray Smith's knitted-sock painting, became as iconic as the music inside.

The pressing on offer is the ReR Megacorp reissue catalogued ReR VHC1, a 180-gram limited-edition vinyl with Chris Cutler's own oversight and the band-approved master. Not the 1973 Virgin first pressing, but the version Cutler considers the definitive presentation of the record on vinyl. A core document of the band's discography.