Tag: King Crimson

Give the drummers some

Memorial notices go out today to two kind of disparate figures behind the drum kit…

Rick Buckler from The Jam, who I’ve never really considered a particularly favourite band as such but goddamn there are some mighty singles in that discography. I’ve always liked this one, the only single written by all three of the band, and apparently it peaked at #4 on the UK chart so it was a reasonable hit; I always thought it had a sound kind of bordering on early goth, particularly when you hear the drums, and on listening to it again before posting this I could definitely imagine Killing Joke in that era doing this. I suppose at least Paul Weller will never be asked again about getting the band back together now…

And then Jamie Muir from King Crimson, pictured here in a photo grabbed from Bill Bruford’s FB (John Wetton’s not in it for some reason); he wasn’t so much a drummer as an all-purpose percussionist for whom drums were just part of a panoply of things he could hit. Crimson was an infamously unstable band many of whose members were kind of short-lived, and Muir’s departure from the band would be notably abrupt after his own brief tenure, but that tenure would be influential as well. Unfortunately Beat-Club don’t let you embed their YT videos, so you’ll just have to click here to see him in action.

Also, as Bill Bruford notes, Muir met Jon Anderson from Yes at Bruford’s wedding in 1973, a conversation which led to Muir suggesting Anderson read Autobiography of a Yogi, which means he was inadvertently responsible for this:

The dental work of the Crimson King

Found this on Facebook: Robert Fripp with a somewhat disconcerting facial expression. I’m not actually shocked by the body hair, I’ve seen other 80s-era images of him flaunting that, but… smiling is a new one, I don’t recall ever seeing him do that before. Not a full, non-ironic smile anyway. However, a bit more looking through Robert Fripp pictures then turned this up:

And this:

And the latter is identified as the Lizard version of the band, so I’m assuming the previous picture has to be of similar vintage. So there you go, three photos of Bob Fripp smiling when I’d never seen even one before this… and as a bonus you also get Andy McCulloch and Gordon Haskell in the last shot pretending they’re happy to be part of the band.