Robert Fripp will not bring King Crimson back into business

About five years ago, at the Orchard Hall in Tokyo on December 8, 2021, it was held King Crimson’s last concert as the final stage of their “Completion Tour”. After that event, Robert Fripp declared that the group had “gone from sound to silence”. Now, the musician still seems stuck with that decision stating that there are no plans to bring the legendary formation back into activity progressive rock.

In a recent conversation with “Uncut”, the same one in which he recalled the hospitalization and the two operations in Bergamo which he underwent last year for an injury, saying “They attached me to a monitor and immediately afterwards this dear man shaved my balls. But why, if I have a heart problem, were they shaving my balls?”, the 80-year-old musician reiterated that the band will not be returning and explained in more detail why. During the chat Fripp stated:

“When you play according to the standards I have set for myself – which, speaking of King Crimson, mean “Fracture”, “Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, Part Four”, “Frame By Frame”, or semiquavers at 156 or 158 beats per minute – we are talking about an Olympic guitar level, from a purely physical point of view. The difficulty is that, after a year’s break due to Covid, it is very difficult to recover that level. There is a certain type of playing that Now, I have to accept it, it represents a huge challenge. Today I no longer feel the need to perform in public.”

As recently as last year, rumors were circulating about a possible new King Crimson album. However, Fripp assured “Uncut” That the band isn’t working on anything. “The drummers thought that even though we had recorded each concert for the archive, the sound would be much better if they recorded their parts separately,” Robert Fripp pointed out: “So the drummers re-recorded their tracks, and the idea was that we could also record our parts, keeping the spirit of the live performances but with a much, much more compact sound. It was supposed to be Jakko Jakszyk who took the project forward, but I think Jakko was involved in other work and in the end it didn’t it never reached me. So the moment has passed, and with it a new King Crimson album“.

While considering the King Crimson experience to be over, Fripp underlined that he was “completely in favor” of the numerous derivative groups that continue to perform the band’s repertoire. Regarding the heart attack that struck him last yearand for which he was forced to undergo emergency heart surgery, the musician made it known that today he is much better and views that traumatic experience almost as a blessing in disguise. He said: “I consider her benevolent redefining my life. I go to the gym regularly. In this period I can deadlift up to one hundred and twenty kilos, I do bench press with seventy five kilos, squats with weights, stretching, balance exercises and yoga. I haven’t felt this healthy or this present to myself in decades, maybe it’s never happened to me.”