This
time YouTube Junkies strike gold! The utterly awesome Captain
Beefheart live in Paris from 1980, a mere two years before he gave up
music. The man of which John Peel exclaimed “there was never a
greater, not even Mark E Smith!”
Most
commonly, Beefheart fans prize the early 'Trout Mask
Replica' and regard his Virgin era as naught but second
helpings. But, perhaps because this album ('Doc At the Radar
Station') was the first of his I ever owned, I've always
held it close to my heart.
The
deranged mutant funk, the stop-start structures seemingly obeying
some higher calling than conventional song composition, the sound as
if each instrument is a spring permanently coiling and uncoiling, it
all seemed a fellow-traveller of post punk. (In much the way Bowie's
Berlin trilogy did.) Perhaps partly because, however off the wall it
gets, it never stops being a really catchy dance number!
There's
five tracks uploaded from the gig, each with their own page. (Check
out the links from the clip below.) But not only is this a
particularly fine version of 'Dirty Blue Gene',
including the (ad-libbed?) line “I hope Reagan don't start a
fight”, it contains the great man's credo - “if you got ears, you
gotta listen!”
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