I remember seeing King Arthur's first band the Stone of Destiny in a pub in Blackpool, before they were famous. When bassist Lancelot and backing singer Guinevere left to form their own double act, Arthur broke up the band and recruited Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to complete the Holy Grail line-up. What I can't remember is whether that was in May or October 1970 ...
There's a shot of a June date with Lancelot still there, but Sir Gawain already there banging a tambourine during a freak out section.
Ah, the continuing saga of when was 'To Live For To Die' recorded....
.... There was a gig at the Musickhalle on 7th June (which one German tape trader told me had a creaky wooden stage which he claimed he could hear on the TLFTD recordings!) which would fit the bill nicely, and at this moment this is the date I would go for, but given the convoluted history of trying to pin a date down I wouldn't say this is a definite.
Sterling work here, Iowerth. I do hope I haven't done like Tony Hancock did in "The Missing Page" where he and Sid turn up on the doorstep of the last man to have taken the incomplete book out of the library, who had been consumed near-mad by solving the murder mystery, managed to put it out of his mind again only for them to knock his door and stir it all up!
I'm inclined to agree on the Musikhalle date. Too many completely unrelated accounts support it: Martin's memory (given that it was the first gig of the new line-up and he was switching instruments he'd be more likely to have the gig stand out in his mind than those doing their regular thing); the date of the Musikhalle gig falling between the latest known live photo with Jeff/Ray and the run out groove date on the TLFTD vinyl; the recollections of the local fan/collector.
My guess is that the run out groove date relates to the date that masters were made - it certainly isn't the kind of album where much remixing or production was done between recording the gig and cutting the masters; three weeks seems do-able.
It's quite believeable for Deke to have cross threaded his own memories with Pete Frame's accounts and concocted the Ernst Merck Halle theory. Few would doubt the word of Frame, and usually rightly so. So if Deke referred back to PFs trees for line-up change calendar points, happily accepted Oct 1970 as the start of TW/MA era, but remembered the Ernst Merck Halle as one of his first ports of call when rejoining the band, actually some months prior, it's easy to surmise how this came about.
I might point out that when I proof read The Twang Dynasty word doc manuscript for Mr Heatley, Deke was convinced that Edmunds opened the final (1970) tour of Love Sculpture shows
with Graham Parker's "Crawling Through The Wreckage"...Again, all credit to Iowerth here. I've never been happy about Oct 1970 being the first gig of Man V3.0 given that Ray/Jeff went in the summer and three or four months lolling about just wouldn't have happened. Nor would the songs on Man have been anywhere near as different as versions on TLFTD with only a month to fully develop them between the erroneous Oct gig date and the start of studio recording in Nov!
