“He ain’t gonna play the blues with you!”: Andy Summers reveals what it’s really like trading guitar licks with Robert Fripp
Back in 1982, two unlikely guitarists joined forces. I Advance Masked saw The Police’s guitarist Andy Summers and King Crimson legend Robert Fripp working together, combining their respective new wave and prog rock stylings for a mystical instrumental record.
Despite making its way into the US Billboard charts, there were some obstacles while recording the album. In a new interview with Prog, Summers notes that the pair were “very disparate players”, with Fripp rarely venturing outside of his areas of expertise. “He ain’t gonna play the blues with you,” he admits. “But he’s really good at playing these sort of polyrhythmic lines – I’d never heard anybody else play quite like that.”
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It’s something even Fripp admits was a challenge for him. “I’d always aimed to be a broadly based player, although I was nowhere near as successful at that as Andy,” Fripp admits in the same interview. “Working within King Crimson, my musical focus became increasingly defined and specialised.”
Rather than being frustrated, Summers realised the perfect way to work together was to play to their strengths. “I regarded his multi-rhythmic lines as the bones of the skeleton, and my function was to put on the flesh,” Summers notes. “We were figuring it all out as we went along!”
Summers rarely struggled to overcome the pair’s differing styles. “It was all very amenable,” he says. “Robert and I had no idea what we were going to play – we just sat with out guitars and various bits of equipment, and started to discover what could be made between us.”
In Fripp’s mind, Summers’ versatility was the real reason their collaborative debut worked. “What made Summers and Fripp work is that Andy was more able to move to ME than I was able to move him,” he insists.
With a background in jazz, Summers’ was weaned on music that flourished under pressure, relishing in innovation and improvisation. “My biggest influence was jazz,” he explains. “Growing up, I was listening to people like Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell and Jimmy Raney. And I played classical guitar for years, so I was very schooled in harmonics.”
Following on from their 1982 debut, the pair would even go on to work together again in 1984 on the album Bewitched. It’s fair to say the collaboration was a success – despite musical peers doubting whether it would work at all.
“A&M, who the Police were selling trillions of records for, didn’t want me to do it at all,” Summers says. “But they didn’t want to piss me off, because I had too much power at that point.”
“Robert and I were both famous guitar players in our respective groups, so I thought there’d be a lot of interest in it. Then it went into the Top 60 in the US Billboard charts, so I was right all along. It was a real sort of fuck-you to the record company.”
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