Music Arcades: Robert Fripp: Exposure

Back with Fripp a year or two before The League of Gentlemen, which featured here last week.

Like that album, this one features J.G. Bennett's predictions of floods and a new ice age "within 40 years", and it begins and ends with edited collages of spoken word "indiscretions". The expanded reissue of this album names some of them (though far from all — the contributors to Häaden Two remain anonymous, for example), and the voices of Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno are distinctly recognisable. However, we are still left to guess at context. Where Gabriel is saying, "Actually I won't start like that, sorry — and again: 3, 4", my confident conjecture is that he is referring to his solo piano performance of Here Comes the Flood, included on this album and vastly better than the overblown version that appears on Gabriel's own first album. I base this on an answer Robert Fripp gave to an audience in the Talbot Road Rough Trade shop in July 1985 to the question, "What's it like to work with Peter Gabriel?" RF said that PG was so nice that if you asked him to do something he didn't agree with, he wouldn't argue, he'd just pretend that he couldn't do it. As regards Eno's comment at the end, "So the whole story is completely untrue — a big hoax," I read a rumour somewhere that this was itself a reference to the rumour that he had had an affair with Julie Christie. (Google finds further evidence of this rumour, including the suggestion that Christie had a miscarriage while carrying Eno's baby).

That's all very scurrilous, isn't it, when we know it's the music that matters, not celebrity tittle-tattle. Yet the music is uneven: always interesting, but not entirely satisfying as a whole. No doubt that is partly because the album has, literally, no single voice. This original version of the release has roughly equal vocal contributions from Peter Hammill, Terre Roche and Darryl Hall (as well as Gabriel's stand-out cameo), whereas the version before that, which was blocked at the time only to be subsequently included on the reissue (still following me?), had Darryl Hall singing the majority of the songs.

If all of that wasn't confusing enough, DGM Live discovered, and are giving away, recordings of early rehearsals for the album featuring Phil Collins, no less, on drums and one ex-King Crimson bassist or another.

£5.69 from Our Price, 1984 or '85.