The fifteenth gig in almost as many nights, even though it’s an incomplete concert we hear, Crimson certainly hit the ground running after arriving in Quebec City. Opening the show with Schizoid Man is certainly a way of grabbing the audience’s attention, and in this case, grabbing them by the lapels and slapping them about a bit. Fripp is on form and David Cross’s violin solo adds a fiery piquancy. Even John Wetton gets to take a short, rumbling breakout solo between the handover between the string players.

Lament benefits from an amped-up Fripp solo break in which he employs the devastating Sailor’s Tale-style chordal attack. Perhaps having blown themselves out a touch, the improv preceding Exiles, which had often been a spring board into a pastoral interlude, sounds rather non-committal and half-hearted on this occasion. Exiles itself wobbles slightly after the first verse but also contains some good violin commentary from Cross.

Swinging out of Easy Money on a searingly brutal sustained guitar note, Cross takes the band into a confident but reflective mood at the start of the second improvisation of the night. For the first minute or so Wetton and Cross drift in a lilting duet with Bruford confining himself initially to small points of percussion before opening out on dramatic washes of gong after three minutes. Holding his own against Fripp’s twisting laser beam tones, Cross emerges as the moving force of this particular episode.

The gig’s excellent sound quality is marred only by the incomplete versions of Schizoid Man, which cuts in on “Cat’s Foot, Iron claw”, and Starless cutting out during Fripp’s final solo thus being robbed of the dramatic restatement of the main theme at the climax.