Starless is one of King Crimson’s most recognised songs, and closes the band’s seventh album Red, released in 1974. But by that time the band who’d struggled to make it had broken up, the result of Robert Fripp’s desire to change his life. Under-appreciated on their arrival, Starless has come to be seen as one of the band’s crowning glories. In 2024, within a detailed analysis of Red, Prog told the story of the song’s creation.
At King Crimson soundchecks in the early to mid 70s, Robert Fripp often threw out a chord or motif which might or might not be picked up on by the others. One of those had been the see-saw riff of Red. Sometimes, however, a more fully fleshed-out idea would be presented in the more formal surroundings of the rehearsal room. But one of those, Starless – among the most well-regarded and most recognised King Crimson tracks – almost never happened.
Bassist and vocalist John Wetton and lyricist Richard Palmer-James penned a ballad and presented an early draft at a rehearsal in late 1973. Wetton once recalled being crestfallen when his sensitive song was met with polite indifference, as the band quickly went on to other things. “Rehearsals were always an icy and rather bleak kind of engagement,” comments drummer Bill Bruford. “There was a lot of floor staring.”
However, Wetton’s bandmates did like the line from the song’s chorus, ‘Starless and bible black.’ Co-opted by Palmer-James from the opening passage of Dylan Thomas’s 1954 radio play Under Milk Wood, it connected so strongly with the Crims that it was assigned to an instrumental improvisation and used as the title to Larks’ Tongues In Aspic’s follow-up album.
Before that record’s release, hoever, the quartet revisited Wetton’s ballad. This time it would be augmented by several decisive and transformational new elements. The first came while the band were touring during the tail-end of 1973. “I can remember standing onstage in a soundcheck messing around with it, and just trying to trying to find some kind of satisfaction with it,” violinist David Cross says of the mournful, woebegone melody that opens Starless.
“I was experimenting with this kind of leap. I was always trying to find a way to get up and come down again. And I wanted to get up the octave and I wanted to feature the ninth of the scale, which is very powerful. I wanted to do it in a satisfying way. So I was always playing around with it, just wearing everybody down around it until we took some notice of it.
“Robert probably just got bored with listening to me fluffing around with it, and he picked it up and did some stuff with it and probably turned it into a proper tune, or I’d have just kept flapping around with it. He reckoned I started it and he finished it.”
Another feature of the new piece came when Bruford was playing piano at home. “I was interested in music in its totality,” he explains six decades after he came up with the glowering bass melody that underpins the central section. “A piano is wonderful because you can see the notes and it’s highly rhythmic.
“So for someone like me who’s going to do a rhythmic thing, just bang on a note, and out comes a rhythm on a pitch. If you then change some of those notes you get a rhythm with a bit of melody, and then you give it to John Wetton or Robert Fripp to see what they do with it.”
What Fripp did was distil all his years of experience, skill and dexterity into one note played across two strings with some pitch bending for over four minutes – which that Steven Wilson would come to describe as “the ‘death of prog solo.’”
Adding to this already exciting brew was a bass riff that had originally been part of the early versions of Fripp’s Fracture, written and performed during 1973. That fast-moving jazz-rock-style figure, propelled by the bass, provided the platform for the blowing/soloing section before the majestic recapitulation of the main theme brought the whole piece to a thunderous completion.
Receiving its first live airing just days after the arrangement had been completed, Starless was a huge hit with crowds – thanks in part to the simple but incredibly effective lighting cue that suffused the entire stage in an infernal, glowering crimson/red light as the piece relentlessly grew in power and magnitude over that memorable Bruford bass line.
It was extremely hard to deal with. But if you impose these obstacles to making something, and people stay in the room, you might just get there
Bill Bruford
As Fripp noted in his diary after the band’s last performance in New York’s Central Park on July 1, 1974: “Lights at the end of Starless really blew the crowd. Rapturous reception… Everyone was pleased with the gig. Conversation with John Wetton – lighting effects like that really make the difference.”
By the time they came to record the song at Olympic Studios in July 1974, the trio who remained after the departure of Cross had played it in concert more than 51 times. It was poignant that Crimson had at last been able to channel the raw energy of their live performances into the studio, considering what was going on within the psyche of the group.
As the sessions got underway, Fripp told his colleagues that he was “withdrawing the passing of his opinion” and that his thoughts didn’t matter any more. Bruford and Wetton decided he was simply “pulling a moody,” and got on with the task in hand. Fripp’s approach was part of what he would later describe as a strategy of radical neutrality: “the doing nothing that enables doing everything.”
His avoidance of taking the initiative in the way he’d done in previous recordings came in part as a response to reading JG Bennett’s work; and, during the weeks and months out on the road, a growing realisation that the madness and excesses of the music industry were contrary to the life he wished to lead. The burden and responsibility of steering King Crimson against the crosswinds of commerciality and artistic compromise was becoming too much for him.
His idea of a Frippless Crimson, with original member Ian McDonald rejoining the group on a permanent basis, was discussed; but ultimately nixed by EG Management. Exhausted at the prospect of another year on the treadmill, Fripp came to believe the only way out was to put an end to the band. Very little was discussed with Bruford or Wetton. “I think it was probably very hard for them,” Fripp reflects. Looking back on the making of Red, Bruford agrees with his ex-bandmate’s assessment.
“It was extremely hard to deal with. But I also understand that if you impose these incredibly hard obstacles and hurdles to making something, and people stay in the room, you might just get there.
“John and I stood our ground and said, ‘All right.’ Well, we said, ‘Sod that – we’ll do whatever we can here to make something up out of this.’ I think John and I were emotionally very, very involved.
“Towards the end, it got down to the mixing and it was very much John and George Chkiantz who took the baby from the bathwater, wrapped it up and towelled it down. Giving birth to the thing was rough work. I’m glad Robert acknowledges that at least his radical neutrality was quite a creative stimulant.”
