Apols if this has been linked here before – if it has, I missed it, and just stumbled across it on ver Tube. It’s a nice half hour of Robert Fripp talking intelligently about his career to date.
Great interview with Fripp, from 1979.
by 20 Comments
Interesting Sunday Lunch with Robert and Toyah yesterday…Seemed a bit cold in their kitchen!!
Thunder in the mountains!
They seem to have a lot of time to kill. To my surprise Miss Toyah contacted me on Facebook after I sent one of their lunchtime vids to Steve Nieve. In a perfect world they both should be touring.
Hahaha! That was brilliant!!
I hardly know where to start…
Speak for yourself.
Hurrrr
Once, just once, I’d like to hear Fripp totally off his trolley having a wild, ignorant rant about something. Anything.
Once, just once, I’d like to hear H.P. Saucecraft totally off his trolley having a wild, ignorant rant about something. Anything.
You clearly haven’t been paying attention. Put down that paddle ball and concentrate.
Off your trolley though. I haven’t seen that. That’s the one domain I’ve yet to encounter you in as per Dante. Perhaps it’s due to the whole sun and moon and earth thing.
I get it now! I hadn’t watched before, but yes. Nothing seems to faze him. Not even his own wife’s glorious tits for us all to drool over. That’s a secure couple if ever there was one.
I seem to recall it’s her surgeon’s tits, but each to their own. (Disclaimer, I may be wrong, but she’s 60 odd, however good she looks, which is, her surgeon, as she freely admitted the other work to cheer herself and Robert up a decade or so back.)
And it doesn’t matter at all, either way.
Revealing interview that. Early on, Fripp mentions that after bringing Crimson to an end in 1974, he studied at the International Academy for Continuous Education at Sherborne House. Students at the IACE underwent intensive training (it says here) in the techniques that founder John Bennett had learned from G.I. Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff taught that most humans do not possess a unified consciousness and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic “waking sleep”, but that it is possible to awaken to a higher state of consciousness and achieve full human potential. Gurdjieff’s method for awakening one’s consciousness unites the methods of the fakir, monk and yogi, and thus he referred to it as the “Fourth Way”.
Indeed he does mention that interlude, a couple of times. He attended the fifth of the courses that Bennett instigated at Sherborne. The house, inevitably, is now converted to luxury flats (retired to the Cotswolds, dahling, do come round for supper when you are out of town), while the grounds are NT. Bennett was a polymath and very interesting individual, with a long history of philosophical exploration. I had previously had no idea that Robert was interested in such things to the extent that he’d taken himself off to spend some considerable time – several months – studying and meditating. I know little of Gurdjieff beyond what you have set out here, but I do know that other musicians have alluded to his teaching; Kate Bush being the obvious case.
*heads to Wikiland*
I think Fripp released some of Bennett’s talks on record; they met not long before Bennett died. Bits of one of the talks can be heard on Fripp’s ‘The League Of Gentlemen’.
There’s certainly some Bennet on Exposure
Inside the 1976 double LP ‘A Young Person’s Guide To King Crimson’, which was compiled by Fripp, there are is a nice booklet of photos and press articles regarding the band, also selected by Robert. On the penultimate page, a Melody Maker article is partially reproduced wherein Robert briefly touches upon his reasons for the disbandment of the band following the releases of 1974. He mentions a need to seek another form of education beyond that of being the conductor and driver of the thing that was King Crimson.
I’m not particularly a KC geek, though I’d place them in my top five bands (that seems a ridiculously reductive term for what is KC) of all time. So this is the only place I have previously seen him expound upon that turn of events (I do own a copy – 2 in fact – of the fat ITCOKC tome by Sid smith, but confess I haven’t yet read either of them!).
Here’s a photo from my copy of the splendid booklet:
That booklet in the “Young Person’s Guide” is indeed fascinating. Fripp continued it (including lots of entries from his diary) in the equally extensive booklets that accompanied the later Crimson career box sets.
But his Gurdijeff and Bennett activities were always mentioned in his interviews since his “Exposure” album (which also has excerpts from Bennett lectures between songs). And his whole separate career as a guitar instructor (and the Crafty Guitar groups) came from his time at the Bennett camps.
Thanks for the photo. I have a Japanese import AYPGTKC which sadly only include the photos.
G.I. Gurdjieff was an interesting chap.
It was quite trendy to be into him in the late ’60s – early ’70s when lots of hippie-types became “seekers”. I read his book “Meetings With Remarkable Men” around that time and attempted another of his “All And Everything” trilogy, “Beelzebub’s Tales To His Grandson”, but found it pretty impenetrable and gave up. There’s a third book “Life Is Real Only Then, When “I Am”” which I haven’t looked at.
All three are available at Amazon’s Kindle Store for not very much dosh. “Meetings With Remarkable Men” which I seem to recall is pretty-much autobiographical (to be taken with a large pinch of salt) and very readable, is only 99p currently.