Space Goats: Live at Glastonbury Town Hall 1999 restored

The recording of the final Space Goats concert of the last millenium has been restored and reuploaded to the Wud Records website and to the now rather large collection of playlists over at SoundCloud.

This particular recording is from the Space Goats Live at Glastonbury Town Hall on 18th December 1999. Outside and inside the hall it was freezing cold, the roads were extremely treacherous from the snow and ice, and the hall itself had a vast natural reverb, similar in magnitude to the Taj Mahal. Due to the conditions and the time of year there were very few revellers to witness the occasion, which was a great shame.

George on bass remembers the flute being so loud in the stage monitors that he had to retreat back to his amplifier and then crank it up somewhat in order to hear anything at all that he was playing. The bass is not very loud in the mix as a consequence because the recording comes directly from the front-of-house desk. He claims that his girlfriend of the time had kept him awake literally all night the previous night in a most pleasurable way as she was not keen on him joining yet another band, so he was absolutely exhausted by the time he arrived in Glastonbury for the rehearsal – never mind the actual show in the evening! George also says that there was a set list written for the show, but Pok decided to change it all about on the hoof so the actual running order turned out to be completely different after the set opener Born and nobody really knew what was coming next.

We have arranged these songs in the same running order that they were actually performed. There is a fair amount of gribulage and general confufulation between tracks and Pok never properly seems to settle down. It is unusual for him to sound this tense when performing live and it affected his performance during the show, with many of his vocal lines more spoken than sung.

The band had only had one rehearsal, and that was a little earlier on the same day, and you can hear this in the band’s performance, although an untrained ear would never notice such details. All the musicians were very intent on listening to each other and keeping the whole thing going, which they did superbly under the circumstances. Also on the bill that day were Gandiva and The Ripple Effect.

All in all this set was a complete departure for Space Goats from their previous sound. It was a change similar in magnitude to when Bob Dylan played electric guitar for the first time at the notorious Manchester concert on 17th May 1966. Pok described the transformation as being akin to “electric elves”, whilst Clive described the band’s new sound as “cock-rock” and was none too impressed with the way things were going.

Whilst this particular line-up of Space Goats was a one-off, they performed again a few weeks later at Exeter’s Art College. Hills had come down from London to join up with the band and there were several more singers. Clive had departed and so had Dave, replaced by another drummer who was more of a whacker than a tapper. Jim Viz from The Invisible Opera Company of Tibet had also added his considerable skills to the band for this show in January 2000. That would then be the lot for the time being for the electric Space Goats.

Some of these songs will be included upon Pok’s forthcoming Anthology album. We believe he will be returning to our studios next month to continue work on its construction. We shall update Pok‘s fans of such developments in our News service.

If you would like to listen to this latest addition to our Archives here at Wud Records, please click here.

If you prefer to listen to Space Goats Live at Glastonbury Town Hall on 18th December 1999 over at SoundCloud, please click here instead.