* Remastered repress. Comes with printed inner sleeve. * For thirty years this music existed only on Swedish radio tapes. Then it surfaced, and the missing years came into focus. Stockholm & Göteborg collects previously unreleased Henry Cow concert recordings made by Sveriges Radio, captured in Gothenburg in May 1976 and Stockholm in May 1977, with one piece from Hamburg in March 1976. Originally released in 2008 as the sixth volume of the 40th Anniversary box and offered as a standalone album, it was the band's first new release in three decades and the first to feature Georgie Born, the bassist and cellist who joined in 1976. It fills the gap in the recorded history between In Praise of Learning and the final studio album Western Culture.
The music finds Henry Cow at its most extreme in both directions, the compositions more composed and the improvisations more improvised than ever. At its heart is the first official recording of Tim Hodgkinson's Erk Gah, a large-scale composition played live throughout 1976 to 1978 but never committed to a studio, long held among the band's peaks. Alongside it sit Fred Frith's March, which closed many of their concerts, and a stark arrangement of Phil Ochs's No More Songs, the band's requiem for the songwriter and the only outright song they ever performed, framed by long stretches of free improvisation with Lindsay Cooper, Chris Cutler and Dagmar Krause.
Drawn from the original radio masters and remixed by Bob Drake, reissued by ReR for the first time on vinyl as a double LP, with printed inner sleeves carrying full notes by Frith, Cutler and Hodgkinson and photographs. A band caught in its true element, on stage, in real time.