I have a UK copy on Virgin that has "Casablanca Moon"/Slapp Happy on the side one label, and just Slapp Happy on the side b label...

The label image shown here is of the second pressing with "Casablanca Moon" as the title on the label. The first pressing just reads "Slapp Happy", matching the cover and spine.

Shouldn't the album should be titled "Casablanca Moon"? It says so on the vinyl.

This is one of the greatest albums ever recorded. Really. The music already existed on tape before it was recorded, so it also stands as a remarkable, and telling, instance of a second go at an extreme creative act proving better than the charged and ground-breaking original. Does that happen often? I doubt it. [That first go can now be bought (it was simply shelved at the time) under the invert name of Analbasac Noom. It was recorded in Berlin with Faust, and is certainly very slap-happy, not to mention macabre. For this 1974 recreation, ordered up by the fledgling Virgin label in London, the entire work had been re-recorded, reformatted and subjected to achingly arch arrangements, albeit for cool 70s rock band with jazzers on the side.]One thing worth saying (and then attempting to unsay), is that the band were all impossibly sharp intellectuals, so when you’d want to point to the poetry in the lyrics, we are talking the highest calibre of contemporary poetry, or point out that the singing has a strange intensity, it is in fact working off a studied Brechtian take on the trained demotic cabaret voice. Take the studied capriciousness of the arrangements – every one is chained to a rocky outcrop of conceptual thinking, and drawn back into the safe cave language of rock only under exquisite duress. That’s them, hip as fuck, in the derelict shed on the cover. She, Dagmar, the very German chanteuse with the glasspaper enunciation, had been married to the English avant-garde composer sitting beside her, but that was then. She eventually joined Henry Cow, in so much as her very delicate health allowed, barely ever appears in public now, but could still probably sell out a Japanese or German auditorium – determinedly reclusive, mostly unknown. Her ex, the composer (and samplist before sampling was invented) Anthony Moore, is now a professor in contemporary music at a German university, pretty comfortably off after writing a few tunes for Pink Floyd that sold rather well. Also, an aficionado of the harpsichord, his own private dalliance. The tall louche American guitarist on the other side, Peter Blegvad, was an itinerant poet. He later created a metaphysical high-art comic strip for a national newspaper, a work of unprecedented conceptual brilliance easily the intellectual and surrealist equal of Herriman’s Krazy Kat. He’s still an itinerant poet and rock guitarist, tricksy genius for hire. They were young, fugitive, ironic and serious at the same time. They wanted to amuse themselves, like Duchamp always just wanted to amuse himself, or so he claimed. So, having been both accepted and rejected by Virgin, they ditched the Faust primitive rock approach and got in some very good 70s players instead, the sort of guys who might have worked with Kevin Ayers or Eno or someone, and asked them to play twisted tango, then hopscotch shuffle, then soulbeat under an echoing tudor fanfare, then melting electric piano tangle. Every one is a hard brilliant gem, but all curiously different. Dagmar’s voice has often been reviewed as being high and slight. Neither adjective is true (she had a relatively gravelly and husky projectile whisper, and her breath control was finely measured, albeit dragged across the back of her teeth, cabaret-style, in places. But it does actually register as thin and little-lost-girly despite that, so there’s some truth in the untruths about her voice (the Japanese unreservedly love it). So recording-number-two turned out with lots of sharp edges, torn edges, mock rock poses up against kitchen sink slumps, and just the right level of polish. Which leaves the lyrics. Most are by the poet, as you might suspect, but the composer is also a genius of coiling word games and contributes a fair few. They are simply superb. Ironic, of course, but also deeply mysterious, metaphysical taunts and romantic salves twisted round and round in the tightest of embraces. Pure, if archly sweet and errantly bitter, genius.

Dear 'nosuchzone', I am in my quiet way trying hard to sit on my hands and NOT join in the discussion of my poem in today's "Guardian" – for reasons which Billy's comments make clear. He's wrong about one point, though: my publisher decided to put the two poems on one page, despite my opposition. They are NOT a diptych, just two poems with something of the list/program about the way they work. I don't want to mess about with Carol Rumens's lovely reading with my big dirty boots (music reference there) claiming to Know Better 'cos I wrote it. Her reading is fine, and indeed finds clevernesses that had eluded me. None of which i much wanted to say; i really wanted to say how pleased I am to meet someone who knows my work in other fields – and that of my brother, Bill. (If you buy the book, or get if from your public library – I am a lapsed librarian – you'll find that another poem quotes an unreleased song by The Work. Now *that's recherché.) Much of their stuff is getting improved-quality CD reissues; I can particularly recommend the gathering-up of all the singles, compilation tracks, etc. Best wishesHarry Gilonis