Exposure Giveaway

The winner will be announced on Saturday 16th February. And by way of spooky coincidence here’s an interview with yer man in an article for ZigZag mag in May 1979 written up by Kris Needs.

TO ME, ROBERT Fripp has always meant the nastiest riffs you could wish to cower from. I mean NASTY. Malevolent, grating sounds which fair oozed teeth-grating stark power. And his solos could kill.

Now this is like saying Bowie just sings a decent ballad, or John Noakes is hot in a canoe...in other words, a misrepresentative tiny facet of what that person has actually achieved and is capable of. But different people mean different things to different people. To me, Robert Fripp always meant stomach-churning terror riffs...

But then I’d think about it.

Truly this man’s achievements are awesome in both quality and quantity. The driving force behind King Crimson through years of stormy changes and ups’n’downs, partner of Eno, session man with Van der Graaf, Bowie, Gabriel, Blondie, producer of Gabriel, Roches, Daryl Hall...

His main attribute has always been a fearless exploration of new sounds using his trusty guitar as main machete. And I don’t just mean nasty riffs either. Why, Fripp has produced so many moments of total, um, beauty – one of the few blokes who can make slow, quiet instrumentals pure joy. King Crimson were often overblown, patchy and pompous, but it seems anything they did overtly dominated by Fripp (’Red’, ’21st Century Schizoid Man’ to name two) bore the stamp of greatness. One of the most under-rated guitarists ever (perhaps cos he doesn’t prance and preen in waist-length wig and platform boots falling apart from the floor-shuddering decibels) – just listen to Heroes.

Ten years since I first heard King Crimson comes Robert Fripp’s first solo album, Exposure, complete with flickering Chris Stein sleeve and a brace of contributing players – Eno, Peter Hammill, Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins (don’t worry!), Barry Andrews and Daryl Hall.

It’s a s-t-r-o-n-g work, a 42-minute package of concentrated Frippery which veers between the flat-out ’You Burn Me Up I’m A Cigarette’ to moments of extreme floating calm like ’North Star’ and ’Water Music’. There’s a new version of Peter Gabriel’s v. sad ’Here Come De Flood’, taped conversations popping up all over (and under) the place...not to mention lashings of nasty riffs. Like on ’Breathless’ where guitars spiral up ’n’ up to come crashing back down into a grinding, screwed eye of a riff. Hammill excels himself on ’Disengage’ – careering paranoia of immense complexity which seeths in unison! The father-daughter bickering on ’NY3’ is chilling with its bold upright guitar-battle backing. The title track is booming, cutting DISCO.

And there’s more. Never a dull moment. Expose yourself.

Robert Fripp is wearing the shirt he sports on the LP cover. He’s in a room of Polydor, Promoting His Product. ’Cept Fripp doesn’t really see it that way (though he’s aware of why he’s here). See, Robert loves talking to anybody interested enough to ask about his work, and anything else for that matter. In his soft West Country twang, he’ll expound on anything of interest. A fair chunk of our talk follows...and may I add that I found him a first degree sound bloke.

It’s rare you actually forget you’re interviewing someone – and it wasn’t just the wine!

ZZ: Are you happy with the new album?

RF: Yeah, I think it’s currently fashionable to say "Well, we’re not really happy with the album but we had to make it." No. It’s an incredibly good record and I’ve no excuses. I was given the second opportunity to make it that one thinks six months later that "I wish I could have changed this" and so on. We had the opportunity because of the contractual difficulties involved with one of the singers on the record, and did have the opportunity to remake it, and infinitely improved it, developed an organic consistency which probably wasn’t as well-determined the first time round.

ZZ: It’s great the way you’ve over-rided the ’Robert Fripp and Heavy Friends’ thing that could have been attached to it. It’s like it’s just natural they’re on it.

RF: Well I work best with people. I think that the music of the 80s is the music of collaboration. Increasing mobility between musicians is the key to the new music – whatever it is that anyone is trying to grasp in the sense of "The New Music". It’s inter-reacting with other people to find different chemistries, different whatever, but with this, one can occasionally run into problems with somewhat older-fashioned record companies or management companies or whatever, ones that tend rather to the old world than the new.

ZZ: Yeah, I’ve read about the Daryl Hall album (in case you don’t know, Fripp has made an album with Daryl Hall, half of MOR-soul due Hall and Oates, which is probably the best, most vital stuff the geezer’s ever been allowed to do. Naturally, Hall’s record company – RCA – had kittens at this non-instant unit shifter, and it currently nestles seethingly on a shelf in their US vaults. Fripp suggested a "grass roots movement" to get it released, so get writing to Robert Summers at RCA New York!)

RF: It was very frustrating. Working with Daryl was such a good experience on a musical and personal level. It’s something like wanting to get married to someone you love and the church won’t do it. Having put out a lot of criticism of the different parties that surround Daryl, I think the point has been made, but with a view to contributing positively to the situation, as opposed to continuing to put backs up, I’m simply saying how much I enjoyed working with Daryl, what a successful, personal and professional relationship it was, and hoping that in the future those that own him might release him to do some things other than what they consider appropriate for their particular format thinking.

ZZ: I was very impressed by Peter Hammill’s bits on your LP.

RF: He did very well. This thing about collaboration without pre-conceptions: Peter is a remarkable singer, but as in all these situations where there’s a style of English artist where they’re unproducable. They determine their own situation, nothing can change it. Bowie, Eno, Fripp, Gabriel, Ferry, Hammill – these are the names that spring to mind. No-one could normally come along and put Peter Hammill in a context where he would have to work outside his own way of operating, and since from the conceptual point of view my way of operating is not very far removed from his, he could immediately respond to it.

He’d come in, well-dressed, take off his nice smart trousers, put on this grubby, smelly, flannel dressing-gown and a hefty brandy which he’d brought in himself, and go in. Here’s the microphone, here’s the words, go ’n’ sing. And he did. All he had were the words.

ZZ: I got the impression from your LP that he was set loose in a field, if you like, and ran around (!)

RF: Right, something like that. I must say I enjoyed working with him. I think he’s accepted practically the notion of the Peter principle. You know this one? He has found the signs of success that he needs simply to be a human being, and he needn’t go beyond it. I’ve a feeling he might change his mind actually. I think that he could be put in situations which conceivably could bring him out more and more to where he could even be very successful, not perhaps in the sense of double platinum, but in the sense of having a far wider acceptance for his work than he does now.

ZZ: Yeah, if he could extend the fanatacism he has now (by the way, ZigZag’s long-delayed PH feature soon to come!) I always thought there was a parallel between what you and Van der Graaf were doing.

RF: Yes I know. From my point of view, I always sensed that Peter didn’t always have the musical context which would enable him to spread as much as he was capable of. This is also true of Gabriel, it’s also true of Hall – Daryl always needs a guitarist he can work against as a pole, and I think any creative situation really needs at least two strong poles so the friction between the two, which needn’t be a negative, nasty, sort of type, but just ideas bouncing off ideas in a positive way. For a singer would often be a musician, like a guitarist. Things can happen, things are possible which aren’t with music generated from a singer’s point of view. An obvious example for me is Eno, for Eno, theoretically or superficially, works in a different area to me, but he comes from a different background and Robert is the musician and so on. This really isn’t so. The differences are probably more superficial than real, but what I get from Eno is always good ideas, in whichever field they happen to express themselves, and Eno is, in fact, the only man, other than the Bowie-Eno configuration on Heroes, who’s actually enabled me to find parts of myself that normally I wouldn’t. In other words, they give me all the room I need to discover myself and encourage me to do so.

ZZ: Let’s get back to the album...

RF: It was two years’ work in effect, from writing to recording, and what pleases me is I was afraid, in a way, the album would be an irrelevancy, that it would be an anachronism or whatever, but all I could do was simply to make it and try and be sensitive to how the album was shaping itself, almost as an entity on its own. I would interreact with that, try and be sensitive to how it was going. Eventually this is the album and, although I don’t think there’s anything new about it, in other words there’s no area of music which is wholly novel, it’s nevertheless somehow very modern, do you know what I mean? I don’t quite know how to put it.

ZZ: Right. I know you’ve got two albums scheduled to come out. The Frippertronics set I’ve read about, but its successor, Discotronics, I’d be very interested to hear about, and your attitude to Disco, ’cos I listen to a lot of that.

RF: Alright. Background to disco. First, I enjoy disco. Secondly, I believe it’s now a common currency in that it’s a vocabulary which is accepted as not being a nonsensical musical form. It is a valid musical form. The disadvantage in disco at the moment is, it’s being seized by record companies as successful and is therefore being restricted as a form of expression, which I seek to work against. Although it’s now very popular to analyse Disco, this is how I see it. In the early 60s, anyone who wished to express a critical view of The System was basically optimistic and positive enough to work within The System and change it from within. So in America, for example, there was the Civil Rights movement, a lot of political agitation, but the assumption is we can change things by working within our democratic framework.

After the assassination of two Kennedys, Martin Luther King and Watergate plus at least 101 other examples, this is obviously not so. It’s obvious one cannot work within the political framework we have now to bring about any change. How do we deal with this?

As a sub-theme I see rock music as being a seven-year cycle, each rock generation has seven years. The first year is the Main Statement, then three years later, roughly the beginning of the fourth year, you have the second thrust, which is generally a better articulated, considered and well-rounded expression of the first statement. So around 1975-6 we have the so-called Punk explosion, which basically says ’Fuck the System, it doens’t work’. Very negative, very antagonistic, very critical in a violent way, and New Wave being a more articulated version of the same proposition, implicitly critical.

Now what we have in Disco: instead of saying ’Screw the System, it doesn’t work’, it says ’The System doesn’t work, we will ignore it’, and the political platform is the dance floor. It doesn’t combat a prevailing social-cultural system, it merely ignores it and creates its own terms of reference within itself. In America, the background to disco was two minority groups, both of which suffered considerable prejudice – the gays and the blacks. So from an industry point of view – and the industry, in my opinion, tends somewhat, particularly in America, to a somewhat fascistic viewpoint – it was a question of ’this is the music of queers and niggers’. That was your terms of reference, queers and niggers. So it took four or five years of this parallel development with the kind of energy and feeling expressing itself as New Wave and Punk, but in its own particular way. It simply becomes a parallel form of expression, a subculture which is nevertheless strong enough to sustain itself in its own terms of reference, and after four or five years, it becomes apparent that a sufficient number of people all across America recognise in this obviously some kind of common feeling of complaint. So you get songs like ’Thank God it’s Friday’. Now the current market for Disco in America is 60 or 70 per cent white office-workers, who it seems to me are accepting the same assumption that The System as we understand working in our offices for 40 hours a week does not give us any general sense of a standard of living that we’ve been led for 20 to 30 years to expect as part of our right as citizens in this country, so it’s, if you like, voting with the feet. So for me Disco is a very valid form of operating.

ZZ: A lot of Disco’s acceptance is going to have to be based on battering down prejudices, like people say "If you like punk you can’t like Disco".

RF: I agree.

ZZ: Then again, it goes the other way and becomes trendy to like Disco.

RF: But anyone interested in speaking a contemporary language, and interested in working in the media and talking to people, learns the lingo of the day, the current vocabulary. If one is living in London in 1979 it is inappropriate to speak Chaucerian English. It doesn’t obviate the worth of Chaucerian English for a number of different reasons. It simply means it’s simply easier and better to speak the language you speak today. Summed up, Disco to me is a political movement which votes with its feet.

AND THAT WAS only one side of a C60! Flipping it over, the conversation veers through everything from New York and the Village People to Fripp’s old title as a "Superstud", as MM’s headline put it some years ago!

Fripp also enthused about the Roches, three sisters from New Jersey who’re leading a Greenwich Village folk surge with highly original music. He saw them once, "fell in love with them immediately" and asked to produce them. Now an album’s out in the States and it ain’t just great live reviews the girls are getting.

Fripp says he tried to capture the essence of live Roches. "It’s all there, a few warts ’n’ all. If you played the record now it would be as if they were singing in the room." Now I’m gonna try and grab one of these albums so there’ll be more on the Roches (with Fripp comments) next month.

Ninety minutes had flown and it was time for Fripp to bomb up to Virgin Warehouse for his Frippertronics session. It was then I realised what I hadn’t asked – Bowie, King Crimson, etc – but see the MM whose cover was graced by Fripp, if you want the facts.

Virgin Warehouse’s basement is jam-packed at six o’clock. We all sit cross-legged on the floor like good boys and a few minutes later Fripp takes a seat amidst his low amps. For the next hour multi-layered Frippertronic guitar treatments soar round the room. Very soothing after a hard day. At one point I feel like a banana when I’m the only one who claps, and everyone looks around, but by the end they’re all shrieking. Fripp deals as politely and succinctly with the barrage of questions as he did mine. A sound bloke.

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And after all that, you can read my take on this fabbo album over on the blog.