To perform Erik Satie’s piano piece Vexations, with its 840 repetitions, is an amazing achievement, but neither Igor Levit nor Ruth Davis was the first to do so in the UK (‘It is trance-like’: pianist Igor Levit performs Erik Satie’s Vexations 840 times, 24 April).
On 10 October 1967, Richard Toop performed it at the Arts Lab in Drury Lane, London. He gave an account of this to Gavin Bryars that was published in Contact magazine in 1983, and later quoted in David Curtis’s 2020 book London’s Arts Labs and the 60s Avant-Garde.
