PETER SINFIELD: WHERE NEXT?
Post Crimson, Sinfield produced, wrote and even recorded his lone solo album…
In the aftermath of his split with Fripp in December 1971, Peter Sinfield spent some time wondering what to do next. He didn’t have long to wait. He was asked by EG Management to produce the debut album of their latest signing, Roxy Music. “I thought they were very original so EG let me give it a shot within the £5k budget. That really just paid for 10 days at Command Studios.” Recorded over two weeks in 1972, Sinfield says, “I worked like a slave. I was in rehearsals for three weeks and went to gigs. I did everything I could to help. I was a bit brusque during the recording but one reason was that I couldn’t mess about. It was like: ‘Phil, that take was no good. Go away and practise another one’ as opposed to: ‘Yes, wonderful, blah blah.’ I didn’t have time to be producer smoothy-smoothy.”
Sinfield returned to Command the following year to record his solo album, Still, when Crimson were in a different part of the building laying down Larks’ Tongues In Aspic. The album marked Sinfield’s first and only time as a frontman and, conscious of his shortcomings as a vocalist, he opted to place his voice lower in the mix and, on the title track, ceded the lead vocal to Greg Lake. In Envelopes Of Yesterday, Sinfield’s lyrics deal with the rupture in his relationship with Fripp and Crimson, albeit with coded references. “Like all these things I nicked it from Lennon, who wrote How Do You Sleep? about McCartney. I thought I’d do one of those,” he says. On the jazzy tour de force The Night People, Mel, Boz and Ian are reunited for a barnstorming appearance.
After Still was released on ELP’s Manticore label in 1973, Sinfield stepped out of the limelight as a solo performer and took up his role as producer for PFM’s Photos Of Ghosts, on which he also provided lyrics. “I was working with wonderful musicians, the best musicians I’ve ever heard,” recalls Sinfield. “So you have wonderful people, Italian food and great music and I can write anything I want on it. The only downside was the state of the vocals and trying to get them to sing in English. We just about got away with it.”
It was a busy time for Sinfield, who was also engaged in providing lyrics for parts of ELP’s Brain Salad Surgery and, later, Works and Greg Lake’s best-selling I Believe In Father Christmas. For someone whose words have been decried by critics for being pretentious, Sinfield slipped into mainstream songwriting with surprising ease, scoring hits with pop acts such as Bucks Fizz,
Leo Sayer, Celine Dion and Cher. In 2014, he was asked by Fripp to update the lyrics of 21st Century Schizoid Man to spotlight the shift of American foreign policy from Asia in the original lyric to events taking place in the Middle East.