Beautiful as the Moon, Terrible as an Army with Banners

Frith began it after the alliance with Slapp Happy started in 1974. On the tour with Captain Beefheart that May and June he worked up a rhythmic phrase, No Sun No Birds, drawing on Beefheart's poem One Nest Rolls After Another and on his own piece No Birds, and he finished the song at the piano in the Netherlands near the end of the tour, folding in a vamp the band had played in October 1973. The words were Cutler's first song lyric and the first Frith and Cutler wrote together, the partnership that led to Art Bears. The title comes from the Song of Solomon.

Piekut notes that it has fewer changes of metre than Frith's other pieces for the band and no counterpoint, with a long-note melody and a plain, unified texture that puts Krause in front. A diatonic section recalls Kurt Weill, and an instrumental break gives way to overdubbed improvised pianos before a last verse returns with altered words. Cutler sets Christian images of the apocalypse beside communist revolution, with death and ghosts standing for a world of lies and exploitation, and the song moves from talk to action. Ian MacDonald thought it worked desolately well but faulted the lyrics, and Philip Clark of The Wire heard the seeds of Art Bears in its stripped-back sound.

Live

It entered the set on the May 1975 tour with Robert Wyatt, and setlist.fm logs it from Grenoble that month to Paris in November 1977. On stage the piano improvisation became a melody for Hodgkinson's organ and Cooper's oboe, with Frith improvising on guitar. The August 1975 Peel session version, with a reprise, is on Concerts, and the Hamburg 1976 take appears as Fair as the Moon and Terrible as an Army with Banners. A performance filmed outdoors in Vevey for Swiss television in August 1976, split by a free improvisation, is the only known video of the band; Kelman called it the gem of The Road. The Michel Edelin Quintet recorded it in 2019 with spoken words by John Greaves. The upload in the hypersongs web is the album version.