We did a lot of gigs around 1970 - by then the Softs were well established as the darlings of the progressive rock scene, especially in France, Holland and Germany. Fans (and particularly it seems to be the Geramn fans) still come up to me when I'm playing today and tell me how their lives were totally changed hearing Third or seeing us live. The classic Third line-up - Dean, Hopper, Retledge, Wyatt - or the brief earlier period when we also had Nick Evans on trombone, Marc Charig on cornet and the eccentric Lyn Dobson on sax/flute/sitar/nasty voice drones...

There were plenty of nervous energy and tension then in the band. Irresponsible young men in charge of powerful machinery. A lot of raucous fuzz Lowrey organ and brain-searing fuzz bass through 100-watt Marshall stacks. We weren't scared to do our ears in, or the audience's ears, either.

Mike Retledge had a good musical education and when the expanded line-up to going he wrote some immaculate arrangements for his pieces, like Esther's Nose Job and Hibou Anemone & Bear. I had only a very unsystematic past history of listening to R&B, Ravi Shankar, the Beatles, Motown, Zappa, Ornette Coleman and Monk. Consequently I came up with bizarre angular versions of tunes like Facelift and Mousetrap.

Speaking for myself, at the time I was working hard just to play the stuff right and didn't really have the chance to appreciate what the audience saw and heard - a steaming, thundering monster of a band. We took a breath at the beginning, put our heads down and plunged into this rhythmic racket - Robert pounding the living bejasus out of his Ludwig kit, the horns wailing through wahwahs, the whole insane crew not stopping until it was time for the interval. When I hear tapes now of the really good gigs I can't believe how we did all that. And anyone who only heard the band on record had no idea what a gang of musical hooligans we were live - as Robert has said, we used to write new pieces each time we went into the studio to record a new album, and then only really get to know the music after playing it night after night on tour...

So here is a sample of two live gigs in 1970 somewhere in Europe - and interesting maybe for archive buffs is the fact that the shorter chunk with excerpts from Facelift and Moon In June is one of the very few gigs we did as a quartet with just Lyn Dobson - Elton was presuambly stuck somewhere else in Europe...