Happy birthday King Crimson

It is 40 years since King Crimson’s debut album In the Court of the Crimson King was released. It still sounds amazing. The opening track, “21st Schizoid Man”, probably invented heavy metal. The title track was spooky as. Other pieces were delicate pastorals with lots of flute and acoustic guitar (“I Talk to the Wind”) or doomy cinematic epics of vast dynamic range (“Epitaph’). The Mellotron was a big feature throughout.

Maybe it helped to have four great players – guitarist Robert Fripp (that’s him on David Bowie’s “Heroes” and loads of Peter Gabriel albums), sax and keyboard player Ian McDonald (later of Foreigner), bass player and singer Greg Lake (Emerson, Lake and Palmer) and jazzy drummer Mike Giles. Boy, they could play.

This version of the band broke up when they toured the US to support the album – apart from the usual personal problems, the music was so dark that they couldn’t all handle it. But this one album set a bar so high that no subsequent prog rock album ever reached it again.

Amazingly, King Crimson is still a functioning unit though with a new cast alongside Fripp. Even more amazingly, their music in the 21st century is still as genre-bending and challenging as their early stuff was in the 60s. Unlike that of any of their contemporaries. Fancy a new Stones album, anyone?

I can’t find any YouTube clips of that first edition of the band, so that one above is by a good later one, with Adrian Belew on guitar (Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Talking Heads), Tony Levin on bass (Peter Gabriel, Paul Simon, Seal – more good music than you’d think humanly possible) and Bill Bruford (Yes and jazz) on drums. The song is from this unit’s first album Discipline and is called Elephant Talk. Possibly because Belew can make his guitar sound like an elephant. Bit of Fane Flaws in the performance too, if you ask me. The famously serious Fripp smiles at 1:35, and again later at 2:25. This is probably late 1981, so 28 years ago.

And here they are playing “Frame by Frame” on The Old Grey Whistle Test about that time. Which is mostly 7/4.



Any version of the band is worth hearing but this one was followed by an even better one IMHO, a double duo – two guitars, two basses/Sticks and two drums. Again there are no YouTube visual clips but this track from the live double album B’Boom will give you an idea of the power of the double power trio. Play it loud.