[citation needed] "Living in the Heart of the Beast" was the first of two "epic" compositions Hodgkinson wrote for Henry Cow, the second being "Erk Gah" (1976), later known as "Hold to the Zero Burn, Imagine".
[3] A jazz interpretation of "Living in the Heart of the Beast" was recorded by the Michel Edelin Quintet [fr] with spoken texts by John Greaves and released on their 2019 album, Echoes of Henry Cow.
[6] The addition of a singer opened up new possibilities for the piece and Hodgkinson commissioned Slapp Happy's songwriter Peter Blegvad to write lyrics for Krause to sing.
[5][7] Blegvad presented a slightly different interpretation of this situation in a 1996 interview with Hearsay magazine: The piece that got me kicked out [of Henry Cow] was "Living in the Heart of the Beast".
"Living in the Heart of the Beast" was later remixed and slightly shortened by Fred Frith, Hodgkinson and Martin Bisi, and was released by East Side Digital Records on the 1991 CD reissue of In Praise of Learning.
[12] In his 2019 book Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem, Benjamin Piekut wrote that themes in Hodgkinson's lyrics for "Living in the Heart of the Beast" include "Marxist humanism, linguistics and situationism".
[14] Piekut said the song begins in the first-person (the "subjective 'I'") and tells the story of someone discovering that they are oppressed by huge corporations which distort history and corrupt the truth.
[16] In Beyond and Before: Progressive Rock Since the 1960s, Paul Hegarty and Martin Halliwell wrote that the song's opening verses chart the decline of revolt, from "rebellion to helpless loathing" to "wallow[ing] in the hopelessness of capitalist society".
[19] Reviewing In Praise of Learning in Let It Rock, Dave Laing wrote that he was impressed with Hodgkinson's "Living in the Heart of the Beast", noting its "long controlled lyric" and its "determined fermenting movement to its climax".
[20] Writing in The Wire, Philip Clark suggested that "Living in the Heart of the Beast" is "perhaps the archetypal Cow statement" (italics in the original text), and the prototype of the soon-to-be Rock in Opposition movement.
[22] MacDonald added, however, that Henry Cow's use of a wide range of instruments gives the song a "genuinely orchestral sound" evoking shades of Stravinsky, Varèse, Messiaen and Weill.