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The Times OCTOBER 19, 2022 - by John Bungey

ROBERT FRIPP AND KING CRIMSON: "SOME OF US WENT THROUGH HELL"

A new documentary reveals the intense demands made on musicians striving for perfection

It begins in a vast concert hall empty save for a diminutive figure on stage - Robert Fripp, guitar maestro and cerebral leader of the ancient, cultish and thunderously inclined rock band King Crimson.

"The deepest experience I have is within silence - when silence walks in the room and sits down with us," he intones in his soft Dorset-tinged accent. "For silence to become audible it requires a vehicle and that vehicle is music..."

Whew. Just as King Crimson, a band that has repeatedly fractured and reinvented itself over fifty years, is unlike a normal rock group, so In The Court Of The Crimson King: King Crimson At 50 is unlike a normal rock documentary. Toby Amies's film, out this week, records the latest eight-piece lineup touring the world pre-Covid, selling out big halls to ecstatic fans. But it's more - often darkly funny, occasionally deeply poignant, the film ponders mortality, why music matters, and the sacrifices that bringing difficult art to the stage entails. Midway through, the director turns a bizarre moment of silence into a riveting piece of cinema.

Crimson's members have made suffering for your art into, well, an art form. "When I came back from making some of that music my hair had fallen out it was so stressful," says the former guitarist Adrian Belew. The guitar and stick player Trey Gunn twice compares his period of service to a low-grade infection: "You're not really sick but you don't feel well."

"Some of us went through hell," recalls Mel Collins. The saxophonist, nonetheless, has come back for more.

The leader, who is a stranger to understatement, is similarly afflicted. A substandard performance means heartbreak for Fripp. "Like my mother has died, and where that has come about due to a musician's egotism . . . that makes me livid."

Whether onscreen or not, the enigmatic Fripp, famed for his work with David Bowie and Brian Eno as well as for being Mr Toyah Willcox, is the dominating presence. The sole member of every Crimson incarnation, he looks like Mr Pooter; his guitar sounds like Bartok dipped in Jimi Hendrix. In his seventies, he's a cold-shower enthusiast and a man of precise habits. These include practising four or five hours a day to perform a repertoire that has only grown more demanding since the ear-scorching jazz-metal debut of 21st Century Schizoid Man. His Crimson career from 1969 to 2013 was "incredibly unhappy", he says. The latest line-up is vastly better because "this is the first King Crimson where there's not at least one member who actively resents my presence". That seems to mean Fripp's word goes.

All this is in vivid contrast to the straightforward joy of fans for whom a Crimson concert is a transcendent moment in life. Plenty are men of a certain age, but there are women too - notably "the prog rock nun", a Polish nun who talks eloquently in the film about the spirituality she finds in their knotty manoeuvres.

The stakes are high: the band must be on their mettle; the acoustics must be right; the audience must be receptive; the concert hall is "a sacred space", says Fripp (phone cameras have prompted him to walk out). "It's a super-intense experience but the process of getting there is so fragile," says one fan. "It's a quasi-scientific Scientology bullshit freaks club. It's a cult experience," declares another. "It goes over most people's heads but if you get it, you really get it."

With such pressures, it's perhaps no surprise that the band can be crotchety towards the man dogging them with his camera (another running theme, comically played). "Tell him he's talking a load of shite. That's a terrible question," shouts Fripp from across the stage as Amies attempts a perfectly reasonable line of inquiry with Jakko Jakszyk. The co-guitarist heard Crimson aged eleven and still seems bemused that fate has drawn him into the band. Amies faces slammed doors and expletives; Fripp claims that answering questions "affected my playing last night". But mostly rock star-ish tendencies are absent as the team cope with the weight of expectations from the audience and from their leader. (Gavin Harrison, one of no less than three - yes three - drummers in the line-up, was told to rethink completely the way drumming related to a rock group when he joined in 2013.)

Then the film takes a deeply poignant turn: Bill Rieflin, playing keyboards and drums, discloses he has stage-four colon cancer. How best to spend the finite time he has left? By playing on with Crimson though in constant pain. This thoughtful, immensely likeable soul died aged fifty-nine after principal photography was over in 2020.

Fripp commissioned Amies to make this anniversary film after liking the director's previous work, The Man Whose Mind Exploded, about a fragile eccentric in Brighton. Amies says he had no wish to make a hagiography - there are no talking heads telling you what to think - and was keen to air multiple views on the band. Not everyone's a fan, and he talks of meeting "Crimson widows". During a Bournemouth concert he chatted with a woman who'd fled to the bar: "I hate this, I hate this so much," she told him. Amies would have loved to use the clip, she said no.

The fifty-five-year-old director grew up in a musical generation sceptical of prog rock (incidentally, a term the band don't like). However, he was impressed by the virtuosity and pummelling live power. "It's like deep tissue massage. It can be painful but you feel better at the end - though you're not sure why," he says with a smile.

The film has won rave reviews at film festivals, so what's next for Amies? "I'm hoping that someone is going to give me several hundred thousand pounds to make a film and not interfere with the creative process whatsoever - which was exactly how I was able to make this film."

As for Crimson, this may be the last word. After a final Japanese date last year Fripp has let it be known that King Crimson "has moved from sound to silence".

In The Court Of The Crimson King: King Crimson At 50 will be released in cinemas worldwide for one day only on October 19 (everymancinema.com), followed by a VIP screening event live-streamed on October 22 on nugs.net and available video on demand. A DVD/Blu-Ray release will follow