Beggar’s Opera – Raymond’s Road

When you leave five or so pounds of Semtex in the crawlspace beneath a stage, then tell whoever’s booked to play, mid-set, that you’ll detonate it unless they crank up the pace a touch, it probably sounds a little something like this.

Beggar’s Opera, playing as though their lives depend on it.

‘Raymond’s Road’, the standout track on the Scottish prog band’s 1970 album, Act One, is a medley of classical soundbites, spun together to create one magnificent whole. With twenty times more keyboard noodling than government guidelines advise, it’s not hard to see why we singled out ‘Raymond’s Road’ in our review of Act One, the other week, as being the crowning glory on an album that now sits firmly in the HFoS Prog Top 10 (coming soon).

This performance of ‘Raymond’s Road’ is taken from German TV, where many a British prog band found airtime during the seventies, and is, for want of a better term, bloody marvellous! Boiling down to a crazy duel between keyboards and drums, it leaves you little time to catch breath as you gasp in amazement… Possibly.

Whatever. All I know is that Beggar’s Opera provide us with nine minutes of prog bliss. The original album version runs just shy of 12 minutes, but one can excuse them shutting up shop early when there’s that amount of explosives beneath their feet.

Let’s hope they all made it home in one piece.

‘Raymond’s Road’ appears on the album Act One, which is available to buy from Amazon.co.uk

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music vid, prog rock