“Good evening my fine-feathered and well-fedded friends,” says Belew, smiling at the punters sitting at various dinner tables dotted around the venue. It’s not that often that King Crimson plays a supper club-style gig but here they are. With Pat Mastelotto’s detonating bass drum triplets throughout Level 5 causing a ripples in the audience’s soup dishes, Trey’s bass rattling the cutlery during The ConstruKction Of Light and the scorching solo in the middle of FaKcts of Life incinerating everyone’s crème brûlée, there’s plenty to get your teeth stuck into with this gig. After a particularly spicy version of Happy, Dangerous Curves is sliced and diced to the point of oblivion with only a minute or so as a leftover for posterity, sadly. That disappointment, however, is more than made up for with a super-heavy serving of Larks Tongues’ In Aspic that brings the formal part of the show to a rousing close. At the end of the gig, the band and crew load up to begin the 375-mile drive through the night en route to San Francisco.
