Henry Cow – The Henry Cow Legend

I thought this pressing sounded good until I bought an original pressing. Wow the original is so much better!! I guess that's to be expected with modern reissues. Not bad but there's better.

I have bought it twice and both times scratched on a track.
Goodfellas Last Purchase. Very, very bad. No quality control

Flat and quiet vinyl, no clicks or pops. Paper inner sleeve, which I tore off to avoid damage to the record.

In the late 70s we used to truck down to a second hand shop in Brighton called (with a lack of imagination) Brighton Rock. It was quite a large place with a massive stock of decent vinyl. In those days nobody really wanted Henry Cow records (or Gong, Can or Faust. Or James Brown records, but that's another story. Zappa's were a bit pricier, but not much).

I picked up an entire HC/ Slapp Happy set of Virgin releases for £2.80 each. This one, along with Unrest, must be the prize in the catalogue. There's a lot to digest with thse albums. A sophisticated fusion of avant garde rock, jazz and chamber music (plus some Zappa inlfuence) that still sounds remarkable today. I stupidly sold most of my HC records a long time ago, but held onto Legend and Unrest. This one is in perfect conditon, looks brand new.

Sorry, but there is little in this entry that is even 'close' to being correct.
This US promo does NOT have the word 'Legend' anywhere on it and the sleeve is NOT laminated - it is a normal US Atlantic distributed promo sleeve. The matrix numbers are wrong as well - they should be the same as the ones listed in the normal common US release.

The 2019 Red Record pressing has been cut with two second gaps of silence between the tracks (which should seamlessly play-through on each side). As such, this has all the hallmarks of being cut from a CD. And therefore it is probably of dubious origin. I suggest that you AVOID.

This LP was my introduction to Cow when I chanced upon it in a used record store nearly thirty years ago. A highly convoluted, thoroughly unclassifiable album that is deftly composed and skillfully executed by an adventurous group of like-minded musicians. At times an utterly ethereal concoction, this is their most jazzy, Canterbury-inflected release. Peerless in terms of sophistication, Legend is one of the preeminent pieces of music of all time that holds a special place in my collection for both sentimental AND musical reasons. Henry Cow was clearly a band that had digested their myriad, wide-ranging influences and coalesced them into a completely original amalgam. Their sound would change with each successive release, reaching their peak, some would argue, with 1975's overtly political "In Praise Of Learning" and culminating with the apocalyptic and revelatory "Western Culture." One of the best bands there ever was.

Fantastic first release! Unique mix to these ESD releases of their first 3 LPs