King Crimson

19th June 2019

The Royal Albert Hall, London

Subsequent to the band's 50th Birthday (and also, I assume, commemorating the release of their debut album), King Crimson are spending much of 2019 undertaking a “Celebrating 50 Years” tour.  There were, at the time of writing anyway, only a trio of UK dates arranged: a three-night stint at the Royal Albert Hall, of which this gig was the middle one.  I had, extremely naively, as it turned out, hoped Robert Fripp would view these events as an opportunity to invite along a few of the Crimson alumni to share in the festivities.

I am aware four past members (Greg Lake, Ian Wallace, Boz Burrell and John Wetton) are no longer with us, and that others such as Bill Bruford, Jamie Muir and Andy McCullough, have actively retired (if that phrase is not an oxymoron) from live performing.  But there are a number still out and about: David Cross, Keith Tippett and Gordon Haskell all fall into this category, as do many names from the various post 1980 incarnations of the band.

So, my main motivation for travelling to London see attend one of these gig was a morbid fear of perhaps missing out on something special.

But regretfully, no Old-Boys put in an appearance this evening.  Indeed, all we were presented with here was just yer run-of-the-mill post-millennium Crimso Show.  With the usual zero band/audience chatter, other than the pre-gig recorded announcement passive-aggressively requesting we all refrain from photographing or recording the band during the show.  

Actually that is not totally true, for early on during proceedings we were treated to a rare piece of audience interaction from Mr Fripp.  During the opening number of the evening, RF clearly suspected someone to his right was ignoring the no-recording ban, and pointed the individual out (rather like Donald Sutherland in the closing scene to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, when I think about it), to the hall stewards who swiftly descended upon the offender with their shame-torches.


I have to say this was probably not one of the better KC performances I have attended over the past few years.  For the most part Fripp's guitar was buried within the sound of the three drummers drumming, and the limitations of Jakko Jakszyk's voice was shown up on more than one occasion.  Most alarmingly, Mel Collins looked, and frequently sounded, more and more like an old man struggling to keep up.  Some of his sax and flute playing at times could most charitably be described as wheezy.

That being said, his alto work on the climax to Islands, where he single-handedly turned the thing into a jazzy groove which would not have sounded out of place at a Van Morrison gig, was a real delight.

The other highlight of the evening was seeing all the band members unabashedly enjoying themselves performing Discipline.  This is an aptly named composition if ever there was one, as the musical concentration required as the tune shifts through pretty much every combination of time signatures a random number generator could come up with must, even for these seasoned musos, be more than a touch challenging.

Tony Levin picking up his camera was the signal for the audience (including me) to do the same.

...and RF

I smiled to note a couple of young lads in the audience who could barely have been out of their teens, head-banging away to the “newer” material: Frame By Frame and Level Five and the like, for they put me in mind of nothing so much as those seated hippies grooving away during Tony Palmer's footage of Cream's 1968 farewell shows.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.


Set list

Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part One
Cirkus
Lizard (Dawn Song and Last Skirmish sections only)
Cadence and Cascade
One More Red Nightmare
Discipline
Frame by Frame
Moonchild
Bass, Guitar and Drum Cadenzas
In the Court of the Crimson King
Larks' Tongues in Aspic, Part Two
                                                       Interval
Drumzilla
Easy Money
The ConstruKction of Light
Neurotica
Islands
Indiscipline
Epitaph
Radical Action II
Level Five
Starless

Encore
21st Century Schizoid Man



The following morning I treated myself to a tour of The Albert Hall, with coffee and a pastry thrown in.  The chap who gave the tour - Tony - was very knowledgeable on both Albert the Hall and Albert the Prince, and had a wealth of witty anecdotes covering both.  We were allowed up onto the topmost balcony but, regretfully, not onto the stage.

Nor were we taken into the bowels of the building - there are five levels below ground, we learned - where I imagine all manner of interesting stuff takes place.

The Royal Albert Hall.

These folks got to access the stage.  How come we did not?  :-(

I learned these ceiling mushrooms were installed in the late 1960s to help obviate the acoustic echo
problems which had bedevilled The Albert Hall since it's opening almost a century earlier.

The Royal Albert Hall.