“I remember calling Bill from Olympic Studios…and agreeing to tell our respective bands,” says Wetton. “London was like a village then and everyone knew everyone else and if something happened in a recording studio, like in Olympic where I was recording, it would very quickly get to Advision, where Bill was recording. So we had to do things at the same time." 
There was a conscious decision to break away from the old Crimson repertoire. This was a band which, alongside their often skull-crunching riffs and occasional soothing ballads, took the calculated risk and blind faith involved in improvisation as far as it could go. “There were long stretches where anything could happen and frequently did” laughs Wetton.  “A lot of the time, the audience couldn’t really tell the difference between what was formal and what wasn’t because the improvising was of a fairly high standard. It was almost telepathic at times. Extraordinary. Those kinds of things don’t happen very often.” The only familiar point of reference was the inclusion of 21st Century Schizoid Man on the set list, delivered as an encore, almost as a reward to the audience’s patience and trust.  

Critical reaction to Crimson’s return to the live stage bordered on the ecstatic. The NME’s Tony Tyler described the “spiritual impact” of the group as being comparable to the first Crimson.. Ian Macdonald wrote in the same paper that Crimson produced at least half an hour of the most miraculous rock he’d ever heard, while Melody Maker’s Richard Williams extolled the virtues of their “90-minute barrage of phenomenal creativity”. 

The real challenge facing this Crimson, as it had been for previous line-ups, was somehow bottling all that ferocious energy and getting it down in a recording studio - in this case the less than popular Command Studios. “In command is one thing you definitely were not in that studio!” Wetton recalled. Despite this, in just five short months, echoing the meteoric trajectory charted by the 1969 incarnation, five musicians from different backgrounds and influences distilled their collective experience to create a rock band and album that stood out and, largely, stood alone in the musical landscape of the day. 

 “There’s a Crimson way of doing things you know. And it’s a fairly intense emotional relationship in the band.” Bruford said at the time. “It’s exhilarating to be part of and could produce magical music that will change people.”

In another unhappy mirroring of 1969, however, by the time of the release of the Larks’ Tongues in Aspic album on 23rd March 1973, Jamie Muir had announced his departure from the band. The four remaining members continued touring for the next 16 months – playing a further 162 concerts, many now released as live recordings. They also recorded the second “studio” album of the period “Starless and Bible Black”.

“Between 1973/4 KC had an increasingly loud bass player of staggering strength and imagination, arguably the finest young English player in his field at the time.” Fripp wrote later. “ Whenever he went to The Speakeasy he was offered yet another a job with yet another famous English group. The drummer had the temperament of a classical musician who wanted to be a jazzer and worked in rock groups. He found in King Crimson a group which gave him the freedom to spread, experiment, grow, move about and hit things hard and often. So he did. I'm not sure that Bruford/Wetton were a good rhythm section but they were amazing, busy, exciting, mobile, agile, inventive and terrible to play over. At one point I put a sound screen between myself and the rhythm section. They lead the group from the centre and I lead the group from the side. They won.”

The sheer volume placed David Cross, the violinist, in an increasingly impossible situation. A musical and personal distance began to open between him and the rest of the group. In July 1974, Fripp, Wetton and Bruford, now a three-piece entered the studio to record the seminal album “Red”. 

The albums features several guest appearances, Perhaps the most significant of which was the re-appearance of KC founding member, Ian McDonald. Wetton in particular was keen to see join him the line-up on a permanent basis: “My thinking was that Ian in the band would have possibly pushed us into Pink Floyd territory, out of the cult status that we were just beginning to move out of." 

If the closing track, “Starless”, was partly an elegy to Crimson’s past, saluting the grandeur that had made such an impression in 1969, then “Red” was definitely a prediction of things to come.