A not so well-kept secret.
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When Spandau Ballet guitarist Gary Kemp became a founding member of Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets, he proved himself a lifelong member of the prog club. But in 2019 he revealed that, across the entire spectrum of musical genres he’d encountered, King Crimson mastermind Robert Fripp was his guiding light.
My introduction to Robert Fripp would have been with In The Court Of The Crimson King and 21st Century Schizoid Man. All the sixth-formers had that album, as did my cousin. For me as a kid it was extraordinary – it allowed me to think outside of the pop box. It was so diverse, unfathomable; I couldn’t get in there. I couldn’t see through its intricacies. But it had such a great rock energy, and it showed me that there was so much more to music than I thought.
That first Crimson album is the beginning of prog rock. We all knew here was something intricate beginning to happen, and that the middle classes were being satiated musically with early Pink Floyd. Here was something a little more difficult – a little more intellectual.
Rock music had been a very working-class folk music. Fripp grabbed that and took it to darker, even further-out places on the edges of the universe, mixing it with jazz and with classical. He was taking the psychedelia of Floyd, the Syd Barrett stuff, playing around with loops and tapes.
Pete Townshend told me that when he’d gone to Pink Floyd’s very first gig at UFO, Syd had Echorecs on stage with him, getting this double tape loop going, which is what Fripp ended up doing with Brian Eno.
Robert Fripp has never stayed in this snooty University Challenge area of music, where no one else is ever allowed to come in. He’s never turned his nose up at anything that was going on in the other music worlds. He’s been totally willing – probably with the influence of Eno – to come into pop, but never to bend for it, to say: “I’ll give you a straight blues riff on this one.”
He has always brought his beauty and his wonderfully intricate sound into other pop genres. Obviously I fell in love with “Heroes” by David Bowie, and that wonderful sustaining guitar that he’s very famous for; and Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) later on.
Fripp turned up the weird. His playing has an exotic, erotic quality; that sustained drone that we associate with Eastern music but also with old British folk music and the hurdy-gurdy. This beautiful, ambient, abstract guitar playing, using odd tunings and tape delays that became a sound that everyone craved in the 70s.
It bounced out of the wonderful solo on Eno’s Baby’s On Fire or that wonderful first side of ambience from [Fripp & Eno’s] No Pussyfooting. Then he went as pop as you can get, playing on Blondie’s Parallel Lines and that wonderful solo album he produced for Daryl Hall, Sacred Songs. Here’s a very interesting, strange, leftfield man, who doesn’t mind marrying himself to pop music. I mean, he literally did that with Toyah!
I’m slightly afraid of him. There are certain musicians in the world that we’re all afraid of, and I think Fripp’s one of them. I don’t think I’d ever have the nerve to introduce myself to him, and I’m sure he’s never heard of Spandau Ballet.
He’s never been afraid to challenge himself and challenge music in general. He’s the godfather of prog rock – but he also helped psychedelia become progressive rock; and he helped glam become ambient with his work with Eno and Bowie.
He brought Bowie, a glam pop star, into a darker, stranger landscape. Everything was on a slightly higher plane. We were out of reality here; we weren’t singing about waking up that morning and his baby was gone. Bowie’s lyrics were matched by Fripp’s strangeness on guitar.
I don’t know all of his catalogue intimately, because it’s so vast and pretty much all encompassing. But if I had to pick my favourite Robert Fripp song ever it would be Starless from Red. That melody he falls upon – no matter how many times I listen – it’s always heartbreaking. It’s always full of yearning; an absolutely gorgeous riff.
