“They didn’t want to piss me off, because I had too much power at that point”: Why the Police’s label didn’t want Andy Summers making an album with Robert Fripp
1982 saw the first of two collaborative albums between The Police guitarist Andy Summers and King Crimson legend Robert Fripp.
I Advance Masked – which was followed two years later in 1984 by Bewitched – eventually made the US Billboard charts, but the project was initially met with scepticism by some close to the two guitarists.
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In an interview in the new print edition of Prog magazine, Summers and Fripp look back on how the project came to be, and how it enabled each of them to explore new musical territory.
“Working within King Crimson, my musical focus became increasingly defined and specialised,” Fripp says. “So what made Summers and Fripp work is that Andy was more able to move to me than I was to him.”
Summers concurs that the project worked because he and Fripp were “disparate” guitar players.
“My biggest influence was jazz,” he says. “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.
“Robert and I are very disparate players. He ain’t gonna play the blues with you. He’s really good at playing these [sorts] of polyrhythmic lines. I’d never heard anybody else play quite like that. So I regarded his multi-rhythmic lines as the bones of the skeleton, and my function was to put on the flesh.”
Despite the pair’s budding musical chemistry, label executives weren’t expecting big things from an instrumental guitar album.
“A&M, who the Police were selling trillions of records for, didn’t want me to do it at all,” Summers reveals. “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.”
Listen to I Advance Masked’s title track below:
In other news, Robert Fripp suffered a recent heart attack while on tour in Italy. While on the mend, in classic Fripp style, he humorously quipped: “I was in A&E not knowing what was going on – and an orderly came along and shaved my balls!”
The post “They didn’t want to piss me off, because I had too much power at that point”: Why the Police’s label didn’t want Andy Summers making an album with Robert Fripp appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
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