Living in the Heart of the Beast

Tim Hodgkinson began writing it in mid-1974 and brought the group an untitled, unfinished instrumental, which they cut into fragments and played live with improvised sections. A performance recorded in Halsteren on 26 September 1974 appears in the Henry Cow box set. Once Krause arrived with Slapp Happy, Hodgkinson asked Peter Blegvad for lyrics. Blegvad admitted after several attempts that he was out of his depth, and Hodgkinson wrote them himself. The title is a quote from the Cuban poet José Martí. The piece was recorded in sections and edited together, since the group had not yet mastered playing it, and released on In Praise of Learning in May 1975.

Benjamin Piekut finds Marxist humanism, linguistics and situationism in the lyrics, which also quote Mao Zedong. Philip Clark of The Wire called it perhaps the archetypal Cow statement and a prototype of Rock in Opposition. Henry Cow played it from 1975 to 1977, and on 8 May 1975 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris Robert Wyatt joined Krause for the closing verses. A performance in Vevey, Switzerland, on 25 August 1976 for Swiss TV is the only known video recording of the band. The Kalahari Surfers named an album after it in 1986, and the Michel Edelin Quintet recorded a jazz version in 2019.