King Crimson: âThe spirit of KC â69 was an open collaboration of ideas, energy, freedom of expression, spontaneity and taking risks by going into the unknown.â
King Crimson's original drummer and co-founder Michael Giles interviewed by Martin Ruddock for Shindig! magazine issue #110, December 4, 2020. [x] Transcription below.
Shindig!: You formed Giles, Giles & Fripp with your brother Peter and Robert Fripp after Fripp answered an ad for a singing organist. He was neither of these, but you formed a trio anyway. What were your first impressions of Fripp?
Michael Giles: I was firstly impressionised by Robertâs sheer audacity in applying for a position for which he had absolutely no qualifications, or even latent talent. Secondly, Peter and I were very impressed with Robertâs left-handed dexterity for fingering strings and frets to navigate alternative courses through little known Norwegian sequences. Thirdly more, and perhaps the essential reason for asking him to join us, was the fact that he had a van which of course would be necessary if we were booked to play toilet tours down and up this great country of ours.
So imagine our dis-impression when Robert abandoned his van in Wimborne just before our move to London, whereupon we had to squeeze our suitcases, instruments and equipment into Peterâs old preselector gearbox Daimler saloon and my old pea-green side-valve two door Ford Anglia, registration number MRU 7 â a good old Bournemouth number plate which I wish Iâd kept.
SD!: What are your memories of recording GGFâs album for Deram, The Cheerful Insanity Of Giles, Giles & Fripp?
MG: We recorded The Cheerful Insanity Of at Decca Studios in West Hampstead â fairly near Brondesbury Road where we lived and recorded the demos. The Decca studios were in a large old building, maybe an old church, inhabited by serious middle-aged maintenance technicians wearing spectacles and long white laboratory coats.
For some unknown reason we were assigned to a producer called Wayne Bickerton who seemed to be somewhat apathetic towards our cheerfully insane way of making music. However, we were blessed by working with the brilliant young sound engineer Bill Price who enjoyed smoking copious amounts of menthol cigarettes while diligently carrying on recording after Wayne went home.
We had lots of fun during those sessions but we had to stop laughing when I, with a cold in my ears, nose and throat, was recording the vocals for âThe Sun Is Shiningâ â live with the girl vocal backing group The Breakaways plus a 12 piece mini orchestra. I think we did it in two or three takes, but if I, The Breakaways or the orchestra had started laughing while recording this silly, soppy, satirical song, it would have taken many more takes to make it a seriously meaningful M.O.R. song about lost love â let alone running into Musicians Union strict rules about big overtime fees for session musicians and singers.
I donât know if The Breakaways were sniggering in between their vocal lines but if they were I didnât hear it and I couldnât look at them in case we all collapsed into fits of giggling. When the orchestra packed up and left, I wanted to see how the song arrangements looked on sheets of paper abandoned on their music stands, and I found some boldly written words under the song title â THE SUN IS SHINING â âand itâs shining up my arse!â
Moreover, the sun did not shine on my ambition for someone at Decca to get Ken Dodd to make it a Top 10 Hit Single.
SD!: GG&F were together a year or so. The band expanded in 1968 when Ian McDonald joined, and briefly Judy Dyble as well, before King Crimson mk1 came together in late â68. I read that Peter left the band when Fripp suggested that Greg Lake joined as Peterâs replacement â or as his. What really happened there, did Robert just not want to play with Peter anymore? Was his departure awkward for you?
MG: I was surprised and disappointed by Peter leaving after enjoying 10 years of a symbiotic bass and drums partnership. But his decision was probably based on all our good work resulting in a spectacularly successful lack of success. It was only after Peter left that Robert suggested Greg Lake who had a unique powerful voice and was willing to be taught by Robert how to play bass guitar, which came to sound more like a guitar player playing bass rather than a bass player playing bass. I would have been happy with Greg on lead vocals and second guitar and Peterâs brilliant bass playing, but this was never discussed by any of us because Peterâs swift departure was well before Gregâs arrival. This change of personnel was conducted with the utmost amicability and âin the best possible tasteâ.
However, Gregâs vocals, Peterâs bass and my drums did eventually come together on KCâs In the Wake of Poseidon.
SD!: King Crimson were a huge success out of nowhere. Three months after your first gig at The Speakeasy you were playing for a huge audience opening for the Stones in Hyde Park. What was that gig like?
MG: The Hyde Park concert was a very important event in the bandâs rapid rise to international recognition. We played a shortened set fairly well on a very large stage. Â Because we were so spread out across the stage with inadequate stage monitoring it was difficult to hear each other, so we had to rely on our well rehearsed routines. Fuelled with adrenaline, the tempos may have been a little too fast, perhaps also due to CBS â acronymical muso-speak for Clenched Buttock Syndrome.
During the set we played some somewhat jokey British improvisations which must have surprised many people amongst the guestimated hundreds of thousands who were there to see the black blues-based Rolling Stones rocking and rolling. Although Mick Jagger wore a girlâs short white cotton summer frock and paid tribute to Brian Jones, their set was probably not one of their best.
Nevertheless, Mick cavorted all over the stage, Keith kept his guitar slung low over his knees, Bill played the bass guitar vertically under his chin and Charlie wore his customary dead-pan face.
So quite a Rolling Stoned show after the recent death of Brian Jones and their two years away from public performance. Anyway, the audience were impressed with KC, enough to pack out The Marquee Club every time we played there.
SD!: KC first went into the studio with Moody Blues producer Tony Clarke, but it didnât work out. Why was that?
MG: For some unknown and perhaps spurious reasons Tony Clarke tried to transform and tame the wild energy of King Crimson into another smoothly controlled echo-washed version of The Moody Blues by using the same old production formula (especially acres of multi-tracked strumming guitars) which gave rise to the Satin Knightsâ success.
However, we did not regard ourselves and our music as moody or bluesy, nor did we wear white satin knightgowns. We didnât want to be a copycat version of any band. So without wasting time looking for a producer who would honour our music, we decided to take the risk of producing it ourselves. If we made a mess of it, we would be to blame â not someone else. Our enthusiasm for self-expression combined with confidence soonly produced an album which genuinely represented our music.
SD!: Crimson really brought out the best in all of you, playing-wise. Your drumming on In The Court Of The Crimson King is some of the most inventive to be put down on record, full stop. Was there maybe a feeling of competition within the band, driving each other to new heights as players?
MG: As far as Iâm aware there was no competition to be the best musician in the band â it was enough for me to be competing with myself. We all played to the best of our ability, encouraged and stimulated to go further by what the others were playing, and my drumming on âIn The Court Ofâ is a natural instinctive human response to the sounds created around me by Robert, Ian and Greg plus Peteâs words. The spirit of KC â69 was an open collaboration of ideas, energy, freedom of expression, spontaneity and taking risks by going into the unknown.
SD!: It was obviously an intensely creative period for all of you, but do any memories of recording In The Court Of The Crimson King particularly stick out for you?
MG: Although the sessions were intensely creative we also had lots of fun, especially in the making of âMoonchildâ. It was one of Ian and Peteâs ideas for a wistful song, but without an ending, and this invited an instrumental extension whether or not it would return to the melody.
So when the song section ended, our little trio of Robert, Ian and myself carried on spontaneously without a care about what might happen, where it would go and how or when it would end. I was pussy-footing mainly on tom-toms muffled with fluffy yellow dusting cloths. Ian had parked his Mellotron in an underground keyboard park and came back to find himself standing behind an abandoned vibraphone which, as a multi-instrumentalist, he was compelled to play. Robert was perched on a stool in his preferred position as guitar master, with no inclination towards fingering the holes in a water-filled ocarina. Â
Ian was floating on the vibes, Robert was listening for a good moment to creep in, and I was enjoying their sounds waiting for an opportunity to respond. Â Our gently-as-you-go trio became more responsive to each otherâs spontaneous playing as we went on. Â We were playing and listening simultaneously in a beautiful bubble of musical awareness, which often happens when surrendering egotistic desires to the unknown energy of nature and the universe.
Of course I canât speak for Ian and Robert whose views might differ from mine. But I do think we would all agree that it was an enjoyable adventure into empty space, open time and silence. Â We were not improvising, as in trying to improve something. Â We were going with the flow of sounds without forcing anything. Â The music was playing us.
For me, there are many amazing incidents of coincidence that occurred while we were strolling through âMoonchildâs garden.  One moment in particular occurs later on when Ian plays a fast trill on vibes at exactly the same time as I play a fast trill on cymbals.  Ian and I could not see each other from opposite ends of Wessexâs large orchestral studio, so was this brief moment just an incredible coincidence, synchronised trilling or invisible musical telepathy?  Weâll never know but Iâm happy that it happened.
I played the track recently and the 12-minute original version is definitely not too long â I wanted it to continue. So those who exist in human hurry-time, who want factory-made armour-plated mechanical music-by-numbers and who refuse to go with the natural ebb and flow of free spontaneous music (but can just about put up with the shorter edited version) should be put on trial for treason against the Crimson Kingdom.
SD!: During the US tour at the end of 1969, both yourself and Ian decided that you were leaving which led to the mk 1 bandâs split when Greg decided to quit as well. The live tapes from that tour show a band at the peak of its powers. You were also playing new material. Was it musical or personal differences, or were you not keen being on the road?
MG: We each had various, different and some similar musical and personal reasons for leaving.
I decided that my musical freedom was only one important part of the freedom to be a whole human being â not just a narrowly intensively focused musician dedicating his life to being in a rock band, separated from simple living for many months every year. It was a good decision leading to being creative in other areas of my life. Â Also, the shenanigans of being in a rock band, especially a fastly famous one, gave rise to various unexpected pressures and stresses that my genetic code was not designed to cope with. Â I didnât want to live in or out of a suitcase, even with H1 visas, long black limos, jumbo jets and 7 star hotels infested with drug pushers and avid female plaster casterers.
I remember thinking that all those hours per year spent travelling could be used for creative living, including making music, having fun and enjoying the simple uncontaminated aspects of life on earth. The lack of contact with nature and separation from ordinary life was not efficacious for my well-being. Also I did not want to be in the big music business which attracts a strong contingent of mercenary barrow boys, spivs, mafia types and various other money-grabbing sycophants and parasites. Their ruthless exploitation of tunnel-vision musiciansâ naivety is little better than the pernicious pursuits of footpads, cut-throats and tearaways on the streets of Victorian London.
Musicians need to be aware of the high price of so-called success. As we know, most bands are formed with a shared purpose and then break up when they become rich, famous and successful, which was beginning to happen to KC. I found touring to be tedious, tiresome, turgid and tawdry. And if you become famous you become public property, which can impede your progress when buying underpants at Marks & Spencers â as it were, if you will, so to speak.
Also, I didnât like being a passive passenger on tour and hanging around for some 12 hours a day. I heard Brian Eno talking about this in a recent TV interview, and he echoed my own thoughts along the rhetorical lines of  â âWhy get involved in fame-laden shenanigans just for the sake of two hours on stage, like a performing monkey.â Â
No wonder you get such big performances from rock bands, because they are effectively shut up in cages, shut up in cars, aircraft, hotel rooms and other claustrophobic spaces with little chance of healthy physical exercise. Â This is similar to what performing lions were subjected to in the circus. They were shut up in cages all day and let loose for a performance in the evening. Â Thatâs the way I saw it, and of course there were money-hungry music-biz men cracking the whip backstage. It seemed pretty sick to me, and sadly dependent on musiciansâ naive compliance and personal ambitions.
However I do enjoy being an active passenger on the big wide-open planet, said to be spinning at 1,000 mph. But I donât enjoy being confined in small man-made metal contraptions that can only achieve permitted speeds of between 70 mph and 600 mph. Then to find myself confined yet again in a high-rise luxury hotel that also doesnât have windows that open. Thatâs isolation, isnât it?
Prior to KC Iâd been on the road for some six years cramped in a van. When we four members of KC were starting on the road squashed into a small Volkswagen Beetle travelling âup tânorthââon the M1 motorway, all I wanted to do was to stop the car, jump out, run up the embankment, leap over a fence and roll over on the wet grass in a farmerâs field. I enjoy being off-road.
Translation: This is the humble drummer, lowest of the low on a stool, once spat upon by a court of penniless, groveling minstrels, who perhaps did what they did in their time to earn an honest penny. Indeed, they fiddled and diddled in a mud-filled dungeon on the road to who-knows-where. But with a few flicks of their deft musical wrists (and ankles) they were thrust upon a hair-raising ride to play to thousands of foreign people who had bought their records. Then, lo and behold, and with another few flicks of their wrists, they went their separate ways. However, they'd made their mark on twentieth-century music.
Michael Giles and Peter Sinfield of King Crimson interviewed by Nick Logan for New Musical Express, November 8, 1969. [x] Transcription by geirmykl below.
Fashions are pleasant but can be dangerously short-lived. In roaring out from nowhere in a matter of half a dozen months to become the fashionable. Underground attraction of the day King Crimson have a problem.
âItâs very worrying,â agreed drummer Mike Giles, speaking from their managerâs Kensington mews house before the group left for its debut tour of America. âBut I cannot see what on earth we can do about it. How much are we responsible for what has happened? We started off doing our thing and after that it was not up to us at all. People either go to see you or they donât. If they do then word gets passed. But there must be some value around behind the fashionability. People seem to like the group and we can only hope that they genuinely like the music.â
King Crimsonâs success â their first album âIn The Court Of The Crimson Kingâ is at No. 4 in this weekâs NME LP Chart â really has been staggering. Too staggering for some, notably the groups who had been slogging round the circuit only to discover King Crimson racing past them to become the biggest potential success the Underground has produced this year.
So while the majority of critics, Underground connoisseurs and musicians have been showering lavish praise in their direction âoriginal,â âsensational,â âthe new Beatlesâ â there has also existed a small but vociferous band of detractors.
âI think we have had our success a little too fast for some of the people whoâve been trying to make it for ages,â says Mike Giles. But although the band could be called an overnight success, its members certainly couldnât. Giles, a 27-year-old who speaks with deliberation and much forethought, has been playing drums for 12 years, first in Bournemouth alongside people like Zoot Money, Peddler Roy Philips and Shadow John Rostill and then in London from 1967. Session work and various unsuccessful groups came before he formed Giles, Giles and Fripp with Robert Fripp.
Fripp himself, King Crimsonâs lead guitarist, had spent three somewhat soul-destroying years playing in a resident hotel band, backing cabaret artists like Bob Monkhouse and Norman Vaughan before the âforgettableâ group with Mike Giles, about which they donât like to talk. Ian McDonald, 23 and on alto sax, clarinet, flute and mellotron for King Crimson, is a former army bandsman who has played in all kinds of outfits from classical orchestras to wind ensembles. Former draughtsman and member of The Gods, where he switched from lead to bass guitar, Greg Lake is now the lead vocalist while fifth member Pete Sinfield doesnât actually play in the group but writes their lyrics and operates the famed King Crimson light show.
The group came together in January this year; first Robert and Mike, closely followed by Ian and then Greg. Pete, a one-time computer executive, drifted in later: âI thought how bad the lights were in some clubs and I said I would build them some to give colour on stage. At the beginning I was just changing the lighting for each song but eventually I started `playingâ the lights with the music.â
Different
All five brought different influences. Says Mike Giles: âYou have got jazz from me, classics from Bob, Beatles and Dylan from Pete and Ian and heavy rock music from Greg. But the divisions arenât really that satisfactory because we all like jazz, we all like Beatles and Dylan etceteraâŠâ
The group rehearsed for three months in a room beneath a cafe in Londonâs Fulham Palace Road and made its first public appearance in April. âThere was a very hard core of people who gave us support early on,â said Mike Giles. âThey spread the good word for us around the clubs and when we went out and did our first gigs we found a lot of people already knew about us.â
Their biggest stroke of luck was a booking on the Rolling Stonesâ Hyde Park extravaganza. It is no meagre tribute that more than a quarter of a million Stones fans who had sat for hours on the hard ground raised howls of delight and surprise for the aggressive music of King Crimson. Like many of their Underground contemporaries, the group has a loathing of âhype,â although Pete and Mike say it has been somewhat exaggerated.
âIt was because everybody had been messed around by managers and agents,â explained Pete. âParticularly Bob, Mike and Greg who have been through every bad scene in the pop machine.â And Mikeâs definition of âhypeâ: âHelping oneâs self without helping others at the same time. Our sort of protest about `hypeâ is aimed at the `hypers,â the ones who are still doing it.â
âWhat does the word pretentious mean to you?â asked Pete suddenly. âPretending to be something youâre not,â I replied. âBecause weâve been called pretentious,â Pete continued, âand I canât see it. I think most people are not quite sure what to make of us actually. Audiences arenât quite sure what bits they should applaud. We may be a little bit ahead of our time. They can see there is something worthwhile but they are not sure what.â
Mike: âWhat do we do? Stop pushing ahead, cash in on what is simple for people to understand, or go by our own standards.â
Simplicity
âI hope this doesnât sound pretentious but another group could come along and simplify what we play and they would be away. There are strong feelings in the band to get into more involved music. If we did this straight away I donât think we would have an audience for it. Nevertheless we enjoy what we do at the moment and believe in it, and it earns us enough money to set up the machinery to get into the music we want to in time.â
The group made its debut album three times; more through their own inability to be their own producers than for musical reasons.
Pete: âWe were trying so hard. And we were rushed at the end to get it finished. It could have been much better.â
Mike: âIt could have been 50 per cent better. When we started we were going to be a recording group more than a live group and it appears to have turned out the other way. There is a definite lack of feel on the album in some places and only about 30 per cent of the sound everybody wanted. What is missing is the presence, the harshness, the attack. We ideally need a sixth member of the band in the shape of a producer.â
As is so often the case when a group makes it breakthrough, King Crimson is now in America. They left last week for a two-month tour, complete with three tons of equipment including Pete Sinfieldâs lights. âIt will cost a fortune to send,â said Mike.
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