Orpheum Theatre

“Thank you very much, Good evening. Great to be back” says Belew after the band has just twisted itself around the double-helix of The ConstruKction Of Light. There’s a long tradition of King Crimson playing at the Orpheum in Boston and as this gig rattles along there’s a sense that the quartet is especially comfortable as the eighth show on the tour gets underway.

Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With chugs away and even though the words are by now wholly familiar we forget how novel this self-referential song, with its witty, self-deprecating outline of the songwriting process, would have been at the time.

There’s another insight into the process of Crimsonising during the terse and somewhat austere interlocking lines that make up EleKtriK. There’s a fractional wobble where the guitars pull a fraction apart. It’s slight and it probably went unnoticed on the night of the gig.

That micro-moment can be a scary place to find yourself as a player in the middle of all those moving parts. At the end of the piece we hear Belew whoop and acknowledging the precarious nature of such parts, he quips “The trick is to never think about it.”

Listen out for this really expansive version of The Power To Believe II: the dialogue on the hand sonic drums with the vocal-style do-do-do are well to the fore and there’s a real feeling of the band stepping out beyond the usual parameters in this piece.