King Crimson: In the Court of the Crimson King

Sometime around about 1974, our school got a new art teacher, Mr Hayward. He had a beard. In one lesson, he brought in a record player and played a record called In the Court of the Crimson King. (I don't think any of us eight- and nine-year-olds, even those with older siblings, had ever heard of this record.) He asked us to draw what came into our heads as we listened to the music. The result was quite a lot of kings with red robes and red cheeks astride rather grand thrones. I drew a supersonic passenger aeroplane (we still had them in 1974). Mr Hayward's contract was not extended beyond his first term.

In 1981 I assembled my first hi-fi system. It had to be one component at a time, because I couldn't afford a whole system at once. By the summer — with the Aerco speakers I got for my birthday — I had enough to play records and hear them without headphones. And it was that same summer that I got A Young Person's Guide King Crimson. When I heard the drum beat (I'm not even proficient enough to know whether it's a snare drum or something else) that comes in around 45 seconds into Epitaph, I felt the hi-fi had been worth it. Maybe that was a fetishistic reaction, but if so, I maintain it was a musical fetish, not a audiophiliac one. Aesthetic, rather than technical.

Once armed with the Young Person's Guide, I felt for a long time I could manage without In the Court of the Crimson King, since the former contains more than half the songs on the latter.

In the Court… trumps even Red with 58 issues listed on Rateyourmusic.com. It appears there was a 20th anniversary re-issue, a 30th anniversary, a 35th anniversary — and, in Japan only, a 25th as well.

Drawn in by Robert Fripp's diaries of the remixing process, I ended my asceticism with the 40th anniversary edition. And since the extra money for the version with DVD (audio and video) was so little, I treated myself to that.

The sound the plain CD version makes is the most viscerally dynamic of any recorded music I have ever heard. Again it's the drums that underline the experience: the way they rumble in, gently and distantly at first, but ultimately a tidal wave of sound — just an amazing coming together of performance, engineering and post-production. I've always been a fan of Bruford's drumming in King Crimson (old school loyalty, and all that), but on this evidence Michael Giles was incredible in a quite different style.

The idea that the DVD version might sound even better than this led me to stop joking about getting a DVD-audio player and actually research getting one. I'm horrified to find that they've more or less been discontinued. I toyed with the idea of getting this one. What stopped me was the realisation that I'd then have to buy more DVD-audio discs to justify the purchase. Ha! Temptation, I'm wise to your wiles.

MusicBrainz entry for this album Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album Some metadata about this album at Last.fm

Comments

[Fred Stagg]

DVD audio disc? May I direct your attention to the comments of January 1, 2011. Oh yeah, no denying, this album is great.

[Mike]

Get a universal player like the Oppo BDP-80 and you're set for pretty much everything on disc: http://www.oppodigital.com/blu-ray-bdp-80/. I'm very happy with mine.

[David]

Thanks, Mike, just the sort of advice I was looking for. Unfortunately, the Oppo's seem to be really hard to find in the UK, and the page you pointed me to says "Due to a shortage of major components, we have ceased production of this model". I can't believe there isn't demand for this kind of player, so I wonder what's really making them so rare on the market.