Facelift

Hopper wrote Facelift, and it takes up the first side of Third. The album version is a splice made mostly from live recordings by the five-piece band: the Fairfield Halls in Croydon on 4 January 1970, which was the band's first gig of the 1970s, with a brief section from the Mothers Club in Birmingham on 11 January 1970, plus recordings from the band's 1969 Spaced project. The tape was treated with speed changes, looping and backwards playback. At the end, two versions of one riff, one live and one at double speed from Spaced, play backwards at the same time. Dean, Ratledge, Hopper and Wyatt play on it, with Dobson on flute and soprano saxophone. On stage the five-piece typically stretched the piece with solo improvisations, including features for Dobson on flute, vocals and harmonica.

Critics are divided on the result. Rolling Stone heard free-jazz menace in the opening, while Leroy found the sound and performance weak and saw it as the last trace of the band's earlier approach. Hopper later said that Third was the album everybody always mentions.

Live

Setlist.fm counts 94 performances, the third most of any Soft Machine song on its stats page. Documented live versions include Amsterdam on 17 January 1970, Breda on 31 January 1970, Paris on 2 March 1970, Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club from 20 to 25 April 1970, Croydon on 26 April 1970, Bremen on 23 March 1971 and the Paris Olympia on 2 May 1972. Soft Machine Legacy later revived it.

Facelift France and Holland, released in 2022, pairs the Paris and Amsterdam shows and is billed as the only professionally recorded Facelift by the quintet, with the only video of that line-up. Hopper's archive series includes Anatomy of a Facelift, issued in 2015, with five performances from 1969 to 1971.

One upload in the hypersongs web is titled as a live recording. The other is a fan-posted upload.