Divide and rule
Monumental 27-disc survey of King Crimson’s 1970-72 period brings no real surprises but some fantastic live material. By
King Crimson
★★★★
Sailors’ Tales DGM/PANEGYRIC. 21-CD+4-BLU-RAY+2-DVD BOX SET
“Look Andy, this is the groove and all he’s done is remove the groove. You’ve got to keep the groove in your head and play a load of bollocks instead.” Mutinous bassist Gordon Haskell’s claim that his former school friend Robert Fripp overhead him advising drummer Andy McCulloch along these forthright lines may go some way to explaining why their particular (Lizard-era) incarnation of the King Crimson rhythm section was so short-lived. If Haskell’s “funky version of Cirkus putting in Average White Band-like licks” was ever actually recorded, it sadly did not make it onto this monumental 27-disc box set. But there is more than enough savage beauty and bourgeois ugliness (and vice versa) here to confirm that the transitional period between King Crimson’s debut album, 1969’s In The Court Of The Crimson King, and 1973’s Larks Tongues In Aspic was as representative as any other of the band’s peculiarly toxic brand of greatness. Given that this was a phase of the band’s development of which Robert Fripp might have easily observed “if it’s me and Pete Sinfield on synthesized bongos, then it’s King Crimson,” the extent to which its highlights have held their own in the live repertoire of the revitalised ensemble’s allconquering 2014 line-up has been little short of miraculous. What purchasers of this sumptuously appointed £140 (at the time of writing) box set should not expect is any notable addition – at least in terms of new material – to the original tripartite recorded legacy of In The Wake Of Poseidon, Lizard and Islands, although the balance of famously rough-as-dogs US live album Earthbound is greatly improved by the addition of three extra tracks. What they will get – alongside the now traditional audiophile paraphernalia of BluRay needle drops, new Steven Wilson mixes, additional tracks of questionable value (although the Greg Lake guide vocal version of Cadence And Cascade is nice) and a CD and a half of rehearsal/ audition jams – is an insane quantity of ridiculously exciting live music. After the departures of Ian McDonald, Michael Giles and Greg Lake at the end of 1969’s debut US tour had turned Robert Fripp’s earlier assertion that King Crimson’s fundamental aim was to “utilise the latent power of chaos” into a classic case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for, it took survivors Fripp and the ever more influential Sinfield a full year and a half to mobilise a stable live band to tour the two new albums they somehow cobbled together in the meantime. Of the treasure trove of painstakingly restored (and crystal clear) soundboard cassette recordings here assembled, the first to jump out are the trio of ‘new to CD’ warm-up shows from Frankfurt’s Zoom Club in April 1971 – wherein after just a few weeks’ rehearsal, Haskell’s replacement Boz Burrell made a heroic stab at mastering Sinfield’s notoriously florid lyric book while also playing the bass, an instrument that was new to him. This experience was so traumatic that it left him with no other therapeutic option but to form Bad Company, and in the course of a mischievously chosen cover of Donovan’s Get Thy Bearings (“Get together, work it out, simplicity is what it’s about”) he sounds like he’s having an actual nervous breakdown. From the listener’s point of view, though, it’s thrilling stuff, and a supremely relaxed – yet amazingly ‘on it’ – Marquee show from a few months later (in this writer’s opinion the pick of this heavyweight bunch) confirms the extent of Burrell’s ultimate integration. With Fripp’s guitar presiding like a sadistic magus, Mel Collins’ battery of flutes and saxes doing the work of three orchestras, former Neil Innes drummer Ian ‘Hammerhand’ Wallace intermittently threatening to invent techno and the whole thing projected through the wonky gauze of Sinfield’s VCS3 (to especially spooky effect on The Letters), the music is a match in terms of drama and formal innovation for anything Brian Eno was achieving in Roxy Music with one-time Crimson auditionee Bryan Ferry at around the same time. Of course, it couldn’t last for ever, although anyone who’s worked their way through 10 and a half CDs, a Blu-Ray and two DVDs of the next year’s US tour could be forgiven for imagining that it had done. By the time that marathon was over, Robert Fripp had “ceased to believe in the band, but not in Crimson”. King Crimson’s triumphant recent rebirth with Collins among the returnees has at once validated and undermined this strange notion of a band’s essence as somehow divisible from its actual members. While the oracular filigree of Pete Sinfield’s lyrics was grist to the mill of sixth form satirists even at the time, hindsight now allows us to hear the apocalyptically carnivalesque Cirkus as a fly-on-the-wall documentary account of what it actually felt like to be a member of King Crimson in 1970-72. The line “Elephants forgot, force fed on stale chalk/Ate the floors of their cages” perfectly encapsulates the experience of those – like Haskell and McCulloch – left to join the dots of the music Fripp heard in his head. And “Megaphonium fanfare/In his cloak of words strode the ringmaster/Bid me join the parade” comes closest to making sense as a suitably baroque commemoration on the progrock Cyrano Sinfield’s own rapid ascent up King Crimson’s greasy pole. As for what would happen next, well, let he who is without Pete Sinfield cast the first stone…