Going Mobile:

How we came to have the name Discipline Global Mobile. 

It was October 1990 and Robert Fripp and the League of Crafty Guitarists were in Seattle rehearsing on a break in their extensive North American tour. After numerous club dates that year, and a spot on the New York Central Park Summerstage, they had recently played a blinding set at the Victoriaville Festival in Quebec, which was recorded and would later be released on the now hard-to-find CD Live II. They had built up an experienced team of good players, there was only one problem: their sound man had just abruptly left. With the next leg of the tour commencing in a week’s time, long-term Crafties Hernan Nunez and Ralph Gorga were dispatched to find a solution. They made a call home.

Back in the UK, up until July 1989, Guitar Craft had been based at Red Lion House in Cranborne, Dorset, with residential courses ongoing for the core team of committed students. Just down the street, recording engineer Tony Arnold had his Courthouse Studio in the village’s former police station. Tony had been working closely with Robert Fripp on various projects since the time of The League of Gentlemen album in 1980. This had been followed by recording sessions with Fripp and Andy Summers for I Advance Masked and Bewitched, the remastering of the King Crimson catalogue for release on CD, and now the various recording projects of The League of Crafty Guitarists. Also working with Tony at the Courthouse from time to time, and at that very moment upstairs in the control room recording with a Dorset rapper, was another West Country-based sound engineer, David Singleton.

The League of Crafty Guitarists recording at the Courthouse in 1988.

David had studied philosophy at Cambridge University. During his time there he had been involved with student entertainments and numerous musical projects, and had self-released a 7” of his own compositions If You Can Sing In Tune / Lazy Bugger. After completing his degree, he briefly followed in his father's footsteps and went into teaching, but his true vocation had always been a musical one, and this led him to acquire a large ex-local-authority dental clinic caravan which he fitted out with £20,000 worth of recording equipment. If that sounds a bit mad well it's not really. Mobile studios had been around since the 1920s and most of the big names, EMI, Decca, IBC and Pye, had a mobile unit or a truck as they were commonly known. These were frequently used for recording classical music on location at the various concert halls. Eddie Kramer, who would go on to engineer much of Hendrix’s work, had begun his career as an assistant on the Pye mobile, recording classical concerts. George Chkiantz, who would later record King Crimson with the Record Plant truck on various dates on the 1974 tour, remembers Olympic’s mobile in 1964 as being housed in a former ambulance. In the early days equipment was taken in to venues and set up wherever it was suitable to do so. In some cases dedicated recording booths would be left in situ by the studios, but in most cases remote recording involved a lot of heavy lifting, which had led to innovations such as split consoles, making their removal that bit easier.

The first modern mobile studio, with the control room built in, was the Rolling Stones truck. This did away with all the carting of heavy equipment in and out of the locations, with just the microphones, and cables and fold back needed. This was basically a control room on wheels, an idea that the Stones’ piano man, Ian Stewart, had come up with. After this, mobile recording proliferated, with a number of bands owning their own vehicles, and renting them to their peers who might now prefer to get it together in the country and occupy a stately home for a few months, rather than be watching the clock at Abbey Road. Or, if they were doing really well, head off to France as tax exiles and let the recording truck, and their trusted engineers, come to them. There was also the essential live album that bands would typically release after they had put out three or four studio albums, requiring the services of a mobile recording facility. Further advancement came with The Manor Mobile, Richard Branson’s state-of-the-art 24 track, the first of its kind. Simon Heyworth, later responsible for the King Crimson 30th Anniversary series remasters, was one of the engineers. So, in those pre-digital days, mobile recording was a booming part of the industry.

David, in a clipping from the Bournemouth Daily Echo, pictured with his wife Indeg in front of the mobile studio.

Thus David Singleton set himself up as Dorset’s answer to the Rolling Stones truck, or perhaps the Ronnie Lane Mobile would be a better comparison, (the ex-Faces bassist having famously brought an Airstream trailer back from the USA - apparently the curved shape was great for eliminating standing waves - and good enough to record the Who’s Quadrophenia). David’s caravan was hitched to a Land Rover and as part of an equipment sponsorship deal where he would make community recordings in exchange for discounted gear, a host of local string ensembles, school choirs and brass bands were lining up to be recorded. With his services also being made available to the pop and rock acts of Dorset, he established himself as a producer, doing business as The Mobile, and based at the Courtyard Craft Centre in the tiny village of Lytchett Minster. 

When fitting out his vehicle, he had first encountered Tony Arnold as a supplier of high-end audio gear from the latter's Gentlemen’s Toy Shop recording equipment emporium in Wimborne. In time, the mobile studio caravan would see an upgrade to a Leyland Sherpa van, equipped with a Fostex B16 multitrack machine as well as two additional 2 track recorders, (dual tape machines to allow for overlapping recordings were essential to avoid gaps when changing reels), an Allen and Heath mixing desk with 16 ins and outs, and monitoring via JBL speakers, plus a range of outboard gear. As it stated in the advertising brochure, “All that is needed is a 13 amp power point and parking space near the chosen location. A single cable carries the sounds from up to 16 microphones into the studio, and allows direct two-way communication between studio and venue”.

So when Tony Arnold picked  up the phone and responded to Hernan and Ralph's call for help, he knew just who to recommend as the new sound man for the Crafty tour, this despite the fact that David, although not a tax-exile, had recently acquired a property in France where he planned to develop a residential recording facility. In no time, David was saying goodbye to his wife and young family in France and getting on a plane to Seattle and a rapid acclimatisation to the sonic, as well as philosophical, worlds of Fripp and Guitar Craft. It was the beginning of a working relationship with Robert that endures to this day, beginning as sound engineer, and evolving to become producer, label manager, business partner and personal manager.

With the Robert Fripp String Quintet touring party in the USA, 1992 (David back row, centre).

For the tour in 1990 the problem had been solved. Except things were about to get a whole lot worse. At the start of the new year, the EG dispute hit. Musicians depend on their royalty payments, which typically arrive twice yearly, and Robert was no exception. When it came to funding the Guitar Craft tour, it was Robert who paid.  But EG had stopped paying their artists. Unknown to those signed to the label, the directors Sam Alder and Mark Fenwick had diversified their business interests into property investments, and the lure of high returns (with commensurate high risk) had led to them becoming Names at Lloyds of London insurance brokers. Like the proverbial house of cards it had all come tumbling down and, in at least one of their cases, would ultimately lead to personal bankruptcy. In an effort to cover their losses, EG sold the King Crimson catalogue to Virgin in April 1991 and the publishing to BMG in July.

By 1991, Robert had been running Guitar Craft courses for 7 years. To keep the tour going he had had to sell one of his rarest guitars. It was on a tour of Europe with the League of Crafty Guitarists that he faxed his resignation to his managers on April 8, 1991.

“My final meeting with Messrs. Alder and Fenwick took place in Mr. Alder's office on Tuesday 16th. April, the day following my return from Seville on Air Iberia (itself a triumph over adversity). At this meeting I was, amongst other matters of commentary, badinage and exchange, threatened with legal action to force me to remain with EG Records as a recording artist. This threat marks the actual termination of my relationship with EG. It also clearly delineates the distance travelled from the original relationship between artists and advisers in the first form of EG Management, and the later”.

Most readers will be familiar with Discipline as the name chosen by Robert when he put together a new band in 1981 with Adrian Belew, Tony Levin and Bill Bruford, and later when that lineup had morphed into the new King Crimson it became the title of their album. “Discipline is never an end in itself, only a means to an end” is a quote from the back of the album cover. In the world of Guitar Craft, developing competence and a flexible technique is the foundation of a personal discipline. “Once established, discipline enables us to become effectual; that is to honour a commitment in time”, says Robert.

A long-running legal battle to recover the rights to the King Crimson catalogue lay ahead, but the beginning of turning the calamitous situation around was to return to the Courthouse Studio with Tony Arnold, now with David Singleton on board, and begin work on material to which Robert still had control, the archive of live recordings. The result was The Great Deceiver boxed set containing concert recordings by King Crimson from 1973-74. It was licensed to Virgin but went out under the name Discipline Records with the catalogue number KC DIS 1. Then it was discovered there was already a label of that name releasing hardcore metal acts, Extreme Noise Terror, Chaos UK and more. A new name would be needed.

DGM came about out of necessity. David had been living a double-life for two years, live-mixing and studio editing for various Robert Fripp projects, while simultaneously trying to maintain a home life in France. The decision was made to rent out his property in St Hilaire des Loges and to return to live in England to found the new record label with Robert. It was the Crimson guitarist who coined the name, combining their two business ventures, with an added aspiration to world dominance.

Discipline Global Mobile, it was a bit of a mouthful when it came to answering the phone; however, the alternative ‘Hello Discipline’ could sometimes be met with laughter, as though the caller felt that they had ended up in the wrong place entirely. Tony Levin alluded to something similar in the 2019 King Crimson movie when referring to being in a band called Discipline, “I didn’t love that name, it has a kind of negative connotation in America….punishment!”.

Goodbye to all that: the property in France which David left behind (with recording barn on the left). The house was called La Cure (effectively the French for The Vicarage).

At first, the new releases went out as Discipline (GM), and sometimes the name was used in full, before finally settling on the current, more streamlined acronym, DGM. Then, with the advent of the online era of digital downloading, we now have DGM-Live.

Robert and David also entered into a production partnership calling themselves Ton Prob.

“David Singleton and I don't mix as such. Probably, a Ton Prob production presents a particular worldview. We are not neutral, nor purely responsive, nor can we quite direct the action: but all three are involved. Essentially, our aim is to be true to the musical event in its moment. ”

The cottage in Willtshire that was home to DGM in the first five years.

Home for the studio and record company office in its first five years was a charming but modest thatched cottage in a small Wiltshire village. Company stationery of the time also included a far more glamorous-sounding address in Beverly Hills, California, fulfilling the Global part of the label name. In actual fact, an anonymous-looking storefront next to a nail bar on North Heyworth Avenue, just off Beverly Boulevard in the Art Deco Fairfax District of Los Angeles, was the home of DGM's North American mail order operation.

The LA office in 1997.

With David established on a new path running DGM, he eventually sold his, now rarely used, mobile studio. A week after doing so, in a moment of comic misalignment, David Enthoven, King Crimson’s original ex-manager, got in touch to see if David would be interested in making a live location recording for him of his rising star artist, Robbie Williams.

And now the future beckons. David’s new studio is currently under construction. There are no wheels on this one, but as he remarked recently, “This will be the first time I have a properly equipped fully-functioning studio since the days of The Mobile”.

David on a recent site visit to the new studio.

Discipline Global Mobile:  A Small, Mobile and Independent Record Company.

Business Aims:

Want to participate in a David Singleton production?  Life's A Boat

The full story of the breakdown of the EG relationship  from the sleeve notes to Intergalactic Boogie Express

Interested in Guitar Craft?  There's a new introductory course planned.

Listen to Robert Fripp and the League of Crafty Guitarists at Victoriaville - Live II