June 25, 2000
	Olympia    Paris, France

Crimson In Paris   April 13, 2005
Written by John Bungey

OF THE once pioneering bands of English progressive rock, King Crimson
are the great survivors. While Yes, Genesis and the Moody Blues long ago
gave up musical adventures for the gentler pastures of Radio 2,
nostalgia or the golf course, Crimson are still hacking their way down
unfamiliar paths.

Not that Robert Fripp, the hugely gifted, notoriously prickly guitarist
leading this umpteenth incarnation would thank you for lumping his
efforts under the dread label "prog rock". Certainly in Paris we are a
world away from the dopey concept albums and terrible trousers of the
genre's heyday. Crimson 2000 are a lean and mean four-piece, whose agile
manoeuvres - from heavy metal to ambient to avant-garde - at no point
threaten a return to the Court of the Crimson King.

Fripp sits on his customary stool expressionless, refusing to
acknowledge the audience, only his hands moving. As he clangs through
Lark's Tongue in Aspic Part IV it's hard not to sympathise with those
who wonder how a happily married, middle-aged man living in a Dorset
mansion can produce music of such fury.

The rest of the team is American: Adrian Belew is the genial front man,
Pat Mastelotto plays electronic drums which sometimes sound like the
future, sometimes like dustbins being thwacked, and are probably a
mistake. The bass parts and a lot else come from Trey Gunn playing a
ten-string super-guitar.

The band's musical interests lie in intricate guitar interplay and
dense, shifting rhythm patterns, with melody and harmony rather lower on
the agenda. Fripp once grandly announced that Crimson was an experiment
to see how Hendrix would have sounded playing Bartok, and as he skitters
through the dissonant breakneck run of FraKctured (sic) from the new
ConstruKction of Light album you understand what he's aiming for.

Of course, what this approach also means is that you don't get that
traditional rock show staple, the hummable tune. Belew's voice has to
negotiate determinedly obtuse melody lines in Into the Frying Pan and
ProzaKc Blues, a brutish mutated 12-bar. Nor do the band play the old
repertoire. Only during the three encores do Crimson perform anything
from earlier than 1994, ending with a mighty rendition of David Bowie's
Heroes, a tune on which Fripp played guitar back in 1977.

The current tour won't be coming to Britain - save for a lone date at
the Shepherds Bush Empire, London, on July 3. Economics and Fripp's
long-held distrust of the English music press and, indeed, the
expectations of English audiences, have conspired to keep the band away.
It's a shame because far from the gaze of the czars of popular taste,
this wayward outfit is conjuring up utterly individual, occasionally
astonishing music.

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