Music

King Crimson

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Rob Adams

FOUR STARS

King Crimson always were a band apart. No-one else sounded much like them and they never sounded much like anyone with the exception of classical influences from Elgar and Stravinsky. The stage set-up here also looked like no other band’s, the three drummers out front of stage offering a sense of spectacle, a brilliantly choreographed percussive ballet indeed, in the absence of the more flamboyant characters from the past such as madcap percussionist Jamie Muir and big-suited guitarist Adrian Belew.

Their current UK tour is their first in over thirty years and the setlist went against previous form by including items that had long been jettisoned. With some of the lyrics inducing a cringe or two even back then, there might have been good reason for their being superseded. But with guitarist Jakko Jakszyk taking John Wetton’s rock roadster approach to vocals, rather than Greg Lake’s limp chorister’s, the words became more of a texture in music that otherwise sounded familiar but in no way dated.

In contrast to leader, guitarist Robert Fripp, who sat almost motionless, saxophonist-flautist Mel Collins was a hive of industry. Every time you looked at him he was playing a different instrument as each carefully realised piece developed.

If it tended at times towards the soberly impressive rather than exciting and moving, there was also lots to enjoy including bassist Tony Levin’s sheer presence, Fripp’s rugged chording on Sailor’s Tale, Collins’ tear-it-up soloing, the beautifully crafted Starless, the drummers’ meticulous detail and togetherness, and the stirring, mellotron-aided grandeur and surging edge of seat impetus respectively of The Court of the Crimson King and Twenty-First Century Schizoid Man.