They wouldn’t take the money, but they put us on the bill because of the sheer brazenness of us. I was happy to give him quite a lot of money. “It was going to be a huge gathering of people and a great opportunity for the band to play to that kind of crowd… and we were trying every means possible to bribe and corrupt dear Pete Jenner.
“Right from the off we knew that the Hyde Park show was absolutely important,” says David Enthoven. As they relocated to the more spacious Wessex Studios, the band prepared for the gig that would seriously accelerate an already fast-track career – supporting The Rolling Stones at Hyde Park on July 5. Something about the sound at Morgan wasn’t working for them. Yet the sessions between June 12 and 18 didn’t go quite as smoothly as expected. The band had gone from complete zeroes to would-be heroes with a cocky master-plan, a double-page spread in the press, a growing reputation for killer concerts, and an album in the works. Fripp talks about doing a double album with one side per track Sinfield wants to ensure that everything – music and album cover – is integrated as a total package. International Times – the counter-culture ‘house magazine’ – interviewed the group at the start of recording, and it was evident that the mood in the Crimson camp was understandably upbeat. With that endorsement still ringing in their ears, in June the band arrived at Morgan Studios with best-selling producer Tony Clarke to begin recording their first album. Shaking guitarist Fripp’s hand, Hendrix declared excitedly to anyone who would listen that Crimson were the best group in the world.
That same month, Jimi Hendrix saw them play at another hip London club, Revolution. In May they recorded a session for John Peel. In April they played their first London gig, at The Speakeasy, to great acclaim. Even now, looking at it from 40 years’ distance, the speed of their progress is breathtaking. It was this impressive combination that turned heads and got the word-of-mouth bush telegraph buzzing.Īlmost every band starting out has a wish-list of hopes and dreams – getting good getting in print getting on John Peel’s radio show, getting big, getting signed getting an album in the Top 10. They were summoning up musical forces not only possessing immense subtlety but also with the power to drive punters into the ground like tent pegs. While many bands were cranking up the volume, as the burgeoning ‘underground’ scene demanded, what distinguished King Crimson from most of their contemporaries was their lethal combination of claw-hammer brutality and surgical precision. “I’ll never forget that he turned to me and said: ‘They’re a bit like the Tremeloes, aren’t they?’ I thought to myself: ‘What the fuck are you listening to?’” “We had taken various people down to see them, and everybody who saw them was blown away by them, apart from Muff Winwood, who was then A&R at Island,” Enthoven remembers. Even before they had played a proper gig there was an expectant buzz doing the rounds about the monstrous sounds emanating from the band’s rehearsal room in the cellar of a café on Fulham Palace Road in west London.Įxactly one month after their first proper rehearsal, on January 13, Decca Records A&R man Hugh Mendl, having been persuaded by Crimson’s managers David Enthoven and John Gaydon to sample the band, arrived at the rehearsal room with Moody Blues producer Tony Clarke, with a view to having Crimson sign up to the Moodys’ own Threshold label. Magic and King Crimson never seemed to be far apart during 1969.
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