The Advent of Panurge

The sleeve note sums it up: the giant Pantagruel, from Rabelais, finds Panurge, his lifelong friend and companion. Pantagruel had already appeared on Acquiring the Taste, in Pantagruel's Nativity. In Rabelais's second book Panurge shows off a string of languages, answering Pantagruel in every tongue but French, and fans hear the song's nonsense syllables as an echo of that scene. It was recorded at Advision in the summer of 1972, with Weathers new on drums.

Ryan Reed of Ultimate Classic Rock heard it resting on Derek Shulman's muscular vocals and Gary Green's tight guitar riffs. Strawberry Bricks wrote that Weathers' hard-hitting drums and a huge bass line launch it into a hypnotic groove.

Live

It was in the set by March 1973, played straight after Knots, and setlist.fm logs it 38 times on its own, besides the 64 Excerpts from Octopus medleys that usually contained it. The BBC recorded it for a session on 4 December 1973, a version later issued on Out of the Woods, and it is filmed in the 1974 German TV concert and the 1975 Long Beach concert on Giant on the Box. It closes the Octopus medley on Playing the Fool, taped in Paris in October 1976. At Hempstead in May 1980 it stood alone near the end of the set. The upload in the hypersongs web is the band's official audio of the album recording, in its original 1972 stereo mix, since Panurge was one of the tracks the 2015 remix could not touch.