IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING: KING CRIMSON AT 50

Toby Amies PANEGYRIC

IT’S A PERSONAL, POETIC VIEW RATHER THAN A FILMED WIKI PAGE.

Candid visual portrait of a band in motion.

It’s often said that music can change lives. Sometimes that can be hard to quantify but director Toby Amies’ 80-minute documentary, subtitled King Crimson At 50, provides many concrete examples through the testimony of King Crimson members past and present. Amies’ method of posing questions off-camera in a friendly, relaxed, and disarming fashion draws out a deeper response than might otherwise be achieved in a formal setting. The current band answer questions wandering along corridors, ensconced in dressing rooms or tour buses or waiting to soundcheck. More often than not they talk candidly about the changes in their professional, and sometimes private lives that stem from

King Crimson’s hothouse environment.

Structurally the film is largely unencumbered with the dead weight of chronology or the band’s labyrinthine history. The canonical albums are not dissected or duly assessed. Refreshingly free from celebrity admirers sharing their particular epiphanies, the focus is on the here and now. It’s not so much about King Crimson as it is about the experience of being in King Crimson with everything that entails.

Having been invited by Fripp to make the documentary in the first place, Amies frequently bumps up against Fripp’s unwillingness to actually take part and one can almost feel Amies’ pain. However, there’s no shortage of Fripp’s waspish wit or pithy commentary. In one hilarious moment, as Amies talks to Jakko Jakszyk at a soundcheck Fripp, in shot in the background, shouts from across the stage urging Jakko to “tell him he’s talking shite”, clearly exasperated at what he regards as Amies’ lame line of questioning. Even as Jakko formulates a reply Fripp impatiently butts in with, “There’s an even better answer than that,” as he takes over the interview. Brief contributions from ex-members, including Michael Giles, the late Ian McDonald, Jamie Muir, Bill Bruford, Trey Gunn and Adrian Belew, add context but occasionally distract from the film’s sense of a band that’s very much on a mission.

As might be expected, this is also an intensely serious documentary. Bill Rieflin’s poignant reflections on his terminal cancer diagnosis and why making this music continued to be important in the face of his own imminent death provides a moving counterpoint. It’s a highly personal and endearingly poetic view of Crimson rather than a filmed Wikipedia page that comes with a perspective that’s as quirky and as willfully idiosyncratic as the subject itself.