After months of struggle, a new Crimson line-up at last took shape. Firstly when Keith Emerson suggested to Fripp that one of his lodgers, Ian Wallace, fill the vacant drum stool. And secondly, when newly recruited singer Boz Burrell picked up a bass guitar that had been left behind by Rick Kemp who had quit KC to join Steeleye Span. It still seems astonishing that, after auditioning countless bass players, Crimson should finally settle on someone who couldn't play at all. But it was agreed that Burrell should be given a week to see how things worked out. "We had had plenty of competent professional musicians come along to audition but they didn't have the feel. Boz felt the bass parts while he was singing, whereas the musicians could play it but couldn't feel it,” Fripp told the NME's, Nick Logan.

In just eleven weeks, Burrell was playing sufficiently well for the new quartet of Fripp, Collins, Wallace and Burrell to go out on a short UK tour, preceded, in April 1971, by four warm gigs at the Zoom Club in Frankfurt, later released as part of the King Crimson Collectors Club.

The bulk of the studio album “Islands” was recorded in between Crimson’s gigs at Command Studios during September with most of the overdubbing and mixing completed in early October. “It is difficult to convey the level of exhaustion during this last week” explains Fripp. “I’d get home about 3-4 in the morning from the studio, pull out a pencil and write orchestral parts for Song Of The Gulls, before getting to bed anywhere between six and eight. Up around ten to leave for the studio for noon. The final night began around 18:00 and never ended for me — Peter bailed in the early hours and I carried on. Then the van arrived after lunch. I got in, fell asleep, we drove to the first show of the tour, and I woke up shortly before we arrived.” 

The final night that Fripp refers to was the same evening that overdubbing on Sailor’s Tale was finished. “The solo was, and is, from some other world” notes Fripp. “Technically, the right hand could only have been developed by someone familiar with the banjo..Other references would include Sonny Sharrock (notably with Herbie Mann) and the idea of Peter Townshend’s flailing…But none of this seems relevant somehow. Late at night, faced with a solo to be played, for which there was no solo available, something happened: a young guitar player was confronted by necessity. And then something remarkable happened.”  The solo makes a break with the symphonic and jazz-inspired leanings of previous albums, clawing its way into a spikier, fractious metal-edged territory. It’s the sound of Fripp hammering out a new map of where he wanted to explore next.   

There are many other standout moments on this musically diverse album; Formentera Lady’s laid-back sunny dreamscapes with lyrics inspired by Sinfield’s recent holidays in the Balearic islands; the free-jazz tussle within The Letters’ chilling melodrama and heavy chorus; the emotional reverie of the title track; the skewed, mutant blues guitar licks and raucous sax of Ladies of the Road, featuring a fine vocal from Boz, heroically singing into a studio fire bucket as he suffered from a raging hangover.

Numerous live recordings by this line-up have been released. "Earthbound", a live album of this group final tour in the Spring of 1972, was possibly the first official bootleg album in rock, using cassette recordings taken from the mixing desk. At the time it received much criticism die to the record’s sound quality, but it has subsequently become a cult classic. Other live shows have followed through the King Crimson Collectors Club, DGMLive and the extensive collection in the Sailors’ Tale boxed set.