Hadn't encountered this clip until this past week. Was pretty much floored by the first four-plus minutes of the thing, with the build and Wyatt's vocalizations, before the band launches into the song(s) proper. Reminds me of how Wyatt once said that he'd always been rough on himself as a drummer, because the drummers he admired were the likes of Max Roach, Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, et al. Whereas he never had anything he was particularly aiming for as far as the vocals were concerned. Which maybe explains why -- in Soft Machine's early stretch -- he initially settled into the default blues-rock Janis-Joplinesque causasian wheeze that had the reign of the day, soon progressed to something more richly nuanced soon thereafter, and by the early 1970s was beginning to get all experimental on occasion, doing things that that really didn't have many contemporary parallels, unless you reach for Tim Buckley's "Starsailor" or some of Yoko Ono's more extreme excursions.
The other things that came to mind was that for a brief moment it's almost like Sun City Girls many years before the fact. But maybe that's just because of the headgear.
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