My life as a professional musician changed irrevocably from that point…
Wednesday 23rd. December, 1998; 15.50
I met Karin Durbin when she was writing an article on The Roches for the Village Voice. Karen was interested in interviewing the producer of their debut record on Warner Bros., and through Karen I met M. Mark. These two sharp, sophisticated and articulate women, and living in the city of New York, were a liberating and catalysing experience for an unsophisticated guitarist in their early thirties, recalibrating a course through life.
New York freed me from the stultifying external pressures of England and Englishness: a requisite affectation of mediocrity; a culture of envy, negativity and passivity; stinginess as an art form; the demand to apologise for my / our work - "getting above ourselves a bit, aren't we?"; cliched perceptions and trite commentaries to fix me / us in a (perceived) orbit and place in life - "who do you think you are?"; these manifestations of Englishness had no currency or necessity in New York City.
One defining moment: a Saturday afternoon in March 1978, during brunch at M.'s small apartment in the Village with Karen and M., and a visiting writer / editor from the West Coast, I took a decision: I was no longer prepared to censor my intelligence.
New York provided the geographical cure. The personal cure, reconciling and freeing myself from the internalised and archaic forms of Englishness, took longer. But this decision, one Saturday afternoon at M.'s, was crucial.
Karen had an apartment on West 20th. Street, which provided a home for her and for Fripp & Eno. That is, Karen's two cats, Fripp & Eno. And Eno eat his brother's food (Karen). Sometimes, when visiting New York (I returned to Wimborne and acquired Fripp World HQ in December 1979), this Fripp slept on Karen's Chelsea couch. As daylight came into the apartment would Fripp & Eno become frisky, hurtling in brotherly play around the lounge. Sometimes they ran over my head, as on one morning in July 1981 about 08.05. I sat up, seeing how it was that music comes into our lives; and, accompanying this seeing, a brief sense / glimpse of what lies behind music. My life as a professional musician changed irrevocably from that point.
