Robert Wyatt and friends, Theatre Royal Drury Lane 8th September 1974

Long bootlegged, this glorious live album documents an intriguing moment in UK rock history, when the rock mainstream and the outer-limits vanguard were in bed together. Three decades on, it's hard to imagine a contemporary equivalent to the supergroup that Wyatt convened in September 1974: musos like Mike Oldfield and Pink Floyd's Nick Mason rubbed shoulders with jazz players Julie Tippetts and Mongezi Feza , and with avant-proggers such as Henry Cow's Fred Frith , Hatfield and the North's Dave Stewart , and Soft Machine alumnus Hugh Hopper.

The bulk of the set consists of a run-through of Rock Bottom, the Wyatt album released earlier that summer, a crushingly poignant work shadowed by the singer's paralysis following a fourth-floor tumble during a wild party. 'Sea Song', as mysterious and lovely a ballad as Tim Buckley's 'Song to the Siren', opens up into a fabulous extended improvisation, a malevolent meander of fuzz-bass and glittering keyboards that's akin to an Anglicised Bitches Brew. Wyatt's falsetto spirals up into ecstatic scat acrobatics, as though his spirit is trying to escape his shattered body.

'Little Red Riding Hood Hit The Road' - its title a whimsy-cloaked allusion to the accident - is equally stunning: Feza's trumpet channels Miles, while Wyatt's delirium of anguish is only slightly softened by the English bathos of lyrics like 'oh dearie me, what in heaven's name.' The singer actually miaows at the start of 'Alifi b', a gorgeous quilt of shimmering keys and glistening guitar, while the set ends with a rampant, edge-of-chaos take on the Monkees's 'I'm a Believer' . Alarming but true: one of the best releases of 2005 was recorded 31 years ago.

Burn it: 'Sea Song'; 'Little Red Riding Hood Hit the Road' ; 'Alifi b'