King Crimson: “The spirit of KC ’69 was an open collaboration of ideas, energy, freedom of expression, spontaneity and taking risks by going into the unknown.”
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 Robert’s 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 Robert’s 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 Peter’s old preselector gearbox Daimler saloon and my old pea-green side-valve two door Ford Anglia, registration number MRU 7 – a good old Bournemouth number plate which I wish I’d kept.
SD!: What are your memories of recording GGF’s album for Deram, The Cheerful Insanity Of Giles, Giles & Fripp?
MG: We recorded The Cheerful Insanity Of at Decca Studios in West Hampstead – 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 ‘The Sun Is Shining’ – 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 – let alone running into Musicians Union strict rules about big overtime fees for session musicians and singers.
I don’t know if The Breakaways were sniggering in between their vocal lines but if they were I didn’t hear it and I couldn’t 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 – THE SUN IS SHINING – “and it’s shining up my arse!”
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 ’68. I read that Peter left the band when Fripp suggested that Greg Lake joined as Peter’s replacement – 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 Peter’s brilliant bass playing, but this was never discussed by any of us because Peter’s swift departure was well before Greg’s arrival. This change of personnel was conducted with the utmost amicability and “in the best possible taste”.
However, Greg’s vocals, Peter’s bass and my drums did eventually come together on KC’s 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 band’s rapid rise to international recognition. We played a shortened set fairly well on a very large stage. 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 – 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 girl’s 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 didn’t 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 Knights’ success.
However, we did not regard ourselves and our music as moody or bluesy, nor did we wear white satin knightgowns. We didn’t 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 – 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 I’m aware there was no competition to be the best musician in the band – 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 ‘In The Court Of’ is a natural instinctive human response to the sounds created around me by Robert, Ian and Greg plus Pete’s words. The spirit of KC ’69 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 ‘Moonchild’. It was one of Ian and Pete’s 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.
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. Our gently-as-you-go trio became more responsive to each other’s spontaneous playing as we went on. 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 can’t 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. We were not improvising, as in trying to improve something. We were going with the flow of sounds without forcing anything. The music was playing us.
For me, there are many amazing incidents of coincidence that occurred while we were strolling through ‘Moonchild’s 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 Wessex’s large orchestral studio, so was this brief moment just an incredible coincidence, synchronised trilling or invisible musical telepathy? We’ll never know but I’m happy that it happened.
I played the track recently and the 12-minute original version is definitely not too long – 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 band’s 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 – 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. 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. I didn’t 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 musicians’ 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 – as it were, if you will, so to speak.
Also, I didn’t 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 – “Why get involved in fame-laden shenanigans just for the sake of two hours on stage, like a performing monkey.”
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. 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. That’s 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 musicians’ 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 don’t 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 doesn’t have windows that open. That’s isolation, isn’t it?
Prior to KC I’d 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 “up t’north”’on 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 farmer’s 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.
Giles, Giles and Fripp — The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp (The Songs)/The Brondesbury Tapes (DGM/Panegyric)
Once upon a time, and, as Judy Dyble’s “Harp Song” beautifully attests, what a wonderful time it was, an intrepid trio made what might be described best as a jazzy comedy album for Decca. The contract was hard-won, and the music fared far beyond the humorous trappings for which the 1968 album, The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp, has become unfairly infamous. Neither aided nor encumbered by foresight, there would have been no way for Michael Giles, Peter Giles and Robert Fripp to know that while longevity would elude them, a new project — new in so many senses — would emerge the following year. Meanwhile, the discography of Giles, Giles and Fripp (hereafter GGF) is being reissued with updated notes and crisper sonics to encapsulate this fascinating and very enjoyable point of definition and transition.
Dyble, Ex-Fairport Convention vocalist, will play a part in our story later in the year documented by this disparate burst of recorded activity, but the trio’s album beckons first. Shorn of its spoken-word elements in its new incarnation — initially a point of concern for this Rodney Toady devotee — the songs are at liberty to shine of their own accord. Now, the organ-soaked and winkingly morose “Call Tomorrow” transitions very nicely into what King Crimson archivist Sid Smith’s ever-on-point essay labels the “coy permissiveness” of “Digging My Lawn” and then into the pastoral sunshine of “Little Children,” with its beautifully modulated bridge, wistfully nostalgic lyrics and lush arrangement.
This seems an appropriate moment to push back on one point in Smith’s notes. He states that beyond the coda to the admittedly far-reaching “Erudite Eyes,” there is little on the GGF album to hint at King Crimson’s future. Yes, the track does delve into somewhat heavier territory than the rest of the album, dynamics driven into the red in all their late 60s psychotropic glory. Smith observes the Islands-era orchestral repurposing of “Suite No. 1”’s second part, but there’s more, even beyond the Michael Giles and Robert Fripp virtuosic synergy. While by no means a humorous aggregate, Crimson’s “Cat Food” does extend the GGF whimsy, not to mention “Ladies of the Road” or the ironically bluesy “In the Court” proffered on tour by the 1971-72 band. We might also glance ahead to the snark of “Elephant Talk” or even "ProzaKC Blues,” stretching credibility to bring David Singleton’s fly-on-the-wall studio documentaries into the humorous fold to demonstrate the gradual reintroduction of GGF absurdity into the Crimson sphere of influence. If the hat-doffing toward humor seems a stretch, sample Fripp’s crystalline and exquisitely voiced comping on “Little Children” and the quasi-arpeggiated opening of “Thursday Morning” to hear precursors of his similarly tasteful contributions to “Exiles." Of course, timbre is also integral to the then-emergent Crimson vision, and many of the pungently clean distorted flavors associated with Fripp are there in microcosm in GGF. Finally, while Crimson is perpetually and irritatingly thrust into the “Progressive” category they pioneered, “Travel-Weary Capricorn” speaks overtly to the jazz predilections that were so much a part of the sweet but strong draught that was GGF’s musical brew.
However, to hear nascent Crimson without the need for thought experiments, simply visit 93a Brondesbury Road via the concurrently reissued The Brondesbury Tapes. Originally released in 2001, the disc of home recordings was a revelation. Not only are early Crimson compositions waxed, including “I Talk to the Wind” and a proto-version of “Peace, a Theme,” but arranger, composer and multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald, so integral to In the Court of the Crimson King, makes his first appearances, further solidifying the Crimson nucleus in the summer of 1968. Again, Smith’s historical and descriptive notes provide snapshots into the time and space in which the transitional music was birthed. Peter Giles rightly marvels at McDonald’s rapid-fire vocal arrangements and vocal contributions to tracks like “She Is Loaded,” which the group would return to Decca to record and can be heard as one of the plentiful bonuses on the Cheerful Insanity reissue. For anyone wishing to make comparisons with various early Crimson favorites and associated ventures, the disc is a treasure trove of alternates, including one version of “I Talk to the Wind” with Dyble and McDonald’s harmonized vocals, the only GGF out-take of an early Crimson piece to be released before the Brondesbury Tapes. “Why Don’t you Just Drop In”’s two radically different guitar solos return us to the rapidly morphing world of Fripp timbres that would serve as the blueprint for so much to come. There are moments when Dyble’s vocals, exhibiting a startlingly wide range and proving themselves indispensable to complex arrangements, prefigure what would later emerge from Canterbury in groups like Hatfield and the North. In this context, special mention should be made of “Under the Sky,” available in very different renderings on both discs and which it’s composer, Pete Sinfield, would finally record, entirely reimagined and reorchestrated, for his wonderful and several-times-reissued album Still. Dyble’s experienced innocence imbues the track with a light similar to Sinfield’s own, reflected in the way their slightly airy voices complement the llyric’s meditative symbol and surface.
Despite these continua, both reissues, now presented as the complements they always ought to have been, stand as representatives of one moment in a time of extraordinary musical flux, of many similar moments. We can hear them, waxed in all of their optimism and idealism and not simply by switching tracks. The Giles brothers deftly make the genre switch as “Newly-weds” jump-cuts from swing toward something approaching funk, and the drums and bass evocation of both genres, with equal dexterity as they support Fripp’s snarky slides, speaks to facility and whimsy in perfect balance. The band’s lyrics engage in punning swings and roundabouts to match: “Standing outside as the night turned to dawn, there was a man who I didn’t know digging my lawn.” They spoof, lampoon and introspect in equal measure, and though the surreal ultimately takes centerstage, the removal of the spoken word bits foregrounds the songcraft, its elevation unexpected and rewarding even to those who know the albums well. Yes, the music is idealistic, offering glimpses into that time of growing and comradery Dyble celebrated four decades later, but I find it impossible to hear any of it as immature. Each track becomes, just as the group was in the process of becoming, a process now elucidated in full. Excess hiss has been removed, and while no radical remixing has occurred, this is now the way to experience what turns out to be an extraordinary opening chapter.
King Crimson
A Young Person’s Guide to King Crimson
1975 Island
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Tracks Disc One:
1. Epitaph (including «March for No Reason» and «Tomorrow and Tomorrow»)
2. Cadence and Cascade
3. Ladies of the Road
4. I Talk to the Wind
5. Red
6. Starless
Tracks Disc Two:
1. The Night Watch
2. Book of Saturday
3. Peace - A Theme
4. Cat Food
5. Groon
6. Coda from Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, Part One
7. Moonchild (including «the Dream» and «the Illusion»)
8. Trio
9. The Court of the Crimson King (including «the Return of the Fire Witch» and «the Dance of the Puppets»)
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