Nirvana for Mice

The first track on Legend, recorded at The Manor in May and June 1973, with Mike Oldfield engineering its first part. Frith wrote it using chance methods after reading John Cage. Jakko Jakszyk, who later covered it, pointed to a middle section that moves into 21/8 and stays there while the band alternates bars of 5/8 and 5/4, and still sounds organic to him. Voices run in the background, and the closing vocals, prominent on the original mix, are barely audible on CD.

In rehearsal it was Nirvana for Moles, and the April 1973 Peel session take was later issued under that name on The Road; by 1976 a Hamburg version had become Nirvana for Rabbits. Hodgkinson and Frith remixed it for the 1991 CD, which added a short Nirvana Reprise.

Live

setlist.fm logs it from the London School of Economics in March 1973 to Bourges in November 1977. In concert the band often broke off Beautiful as the Moon partway through to play it, then went back. The August 1975 Peel session version is on Concerts, and in Hamburg in 1976, John Kelman wrote, it slid gradually into crazed freedom. Jakszyk recorded it in 2006 with Dave Stewart and Gavin Harrison. The upload in the hypersongs web is the album version.