Can – Live In Brighton 1975

as so many i have been a fan of early can, with damo leaving their lost their plot in the studio.
concerts were a different story, you can find great performances even when holger stopped playing the bass and got into tapes, electronics etc., which was ahead of it's time, early sampling.

this concert is very interesting, when you compare it to the 75 stuttgart gig, 2 completely different sets.
here you can hear bits of songs, while the stuttgart show was even more improvised.

the sound quality is good on this, it does not sound like a crappy bootleg, i think they did a great job restoring it.

it is worth for jakis drumming alone, the whole band seemed to be inspired.

it was an amazing and dynamic gig with jaki exploding at times.

jaki has been my favourite drummer since i listened to him when i was around 13, he got me instantly as the whole band...it was monster movie and listening to that at such a young age got me the most intense musical experience of my life and the start of a live long love.
he was a shaman, a magican, at the same time robotic and organic.
praise to the unknown man who told him to play monotonous and repetitive around 1968, which seemed to make a deep input for him as he followed the "instruction".
he was ahead of the time as he played funky breakbeats that fits to modern styles.

dinger of neu was the other german drummer who gave the world something new, the famous motoric beat, which jaki also played on parts of the mighty mother sky.

can gigs were adventures, some failed, more were magic.

most concerts today are quite boring comparing with that.
on a coldplay tour there are no significant differences between the shows, they play to pre-recorded music on a laptop, everything is safe, no chances.
that is ok, people like it.

this is great and i hope there will be some more concerts of the early days with damo or malcom.

it is a shame, that they made no proper live album back then, isn't it?

1 Half Past One
2 Bel Air
3 Dizzy Dizzy
4 Vernal Equinox
5 Quantum Physics
6 Interlude
7 Vitamin C

I think the fact that they have edited the Cuxhaven CD down to 30 minutes when the circulating tape is nearly 90 minutes shows that the decisions to edit what gets released aren't being made because of sound quality or space issues. Just seems to be randomly whatever Irmin thinks sounds good. You just wish they'd quit it with the pretence that they are releasing complete gigs

I will wait for a black vinyl version if it ever happens. Damn those stupid coloured vinyls.

On the face of it, it's a bit worrying that the first two in this series of Can live recordings were recorded 20 days apart in the autumn of 1975, when Can were widely regarded as going off the boil (personally I like Landed, with the exception of the rather dull Half Past One, but it's not their greatest). The first instalment, from Stuttgart, is nice, very much so in places, but not spectacularly brilliant. The first track from the Brighton gig sounds like it's going to be more of the same - it's very pleasant but a bit polite. They up the ante a bit on Zwei, which is mainly a variation on Bel Air, with a very tasty guitar intro. Then we get to two tracks that have been released before - Drei and Vier are, respectively, versions of Dizzy Dizzy (with a little bit of vocal from Michael Karoli) and Vernal Equinox and were previously released as part of Can Box: Music (Live 1971-77). Both are absolutely storming and all the more so because the sound quality is greatly improved here. Jaki Liebezeit's assertive drum entrance on the latter is something to behold and the drum sound is good throughout. Fünf has a lengthy section exploring the main riff of Quantum Physics, though with a very different vibe, and goes completely apeshit at one point towards the end. Sechs is a rather strange interlude that doesn't quite come off but at least tries something different and then Sieben is a long and lovely jam on Vitamin C, with a near-solo drum excursion towards the end, spiced up with mad keyboard stabs from Irmin.

There's a lot less polite noodling on this release than on the Stuttgart recording - perhaps what sounds like a more fired-up audience helped, and perhaps also the fact that much more of the performance is based around themes easily identifiable from their studio records. The sound quality, given that this appears to have been recorded from the audience, is frankly astonishing, and very strongly stereo. Given the powerful dynamics and strong bass of the recording it's hard to believe it was recorded on a cassette machine; I lean towards a portable reel-to-reel. Either way, very good microphones were used. Clearly the quality of the live sound and the acoustics of the venue didn't hurt either. And finally, as demonstrated by the huge improvement in the sound quality of the two previously issued tracks, the mastering and audio restoration by Andreas Torkler and Dieter Denzer is superb - it would be fascinating to know what the source tape sounded like. One can only wonder if they could work similar miracles with the very boxy 1972 Colchester recording on the Can Box, and at least hope that some subsequent releases in this series will be from earlier in the 1970s. But if most of them are going to be post-Damo, then this will do very nicely.