“We used to spend hours doing this!” The pastime Robert Fripp and Peter Giles enjoyed pre-King Crimson
If one thing’s for sure, it’s that anyone who passes through King Crimson’s ranks is as technically proficient as they come.
In a new interview with Prog, bass player Peter Giles recalls his first impression of guitarist Robert Fripp, and how practicing reading music together nurtured their budding friendship in the late ‘60s.
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“He had a nice, droll sense of humour, and his chops were really good, his chords and stuff. He was hot,” Giles recalls when asked about his first impression of Fripp.
“He’d been playing with some older musicians at the Majestic Hotel in Bournemouth, and you learn a lot from those people. We thought London was the place to be. It’s a lot easier to do it from London than bloody Bournemouth.”
Giles goes on to recall Giles, Giles and Fripp, the short-lived rock group consisting of himself, his brother Michael on drums, and Robert Fripp on guitar between 1967 and 1968.
“My brother was working in the evenings in dinner dance stuff, covering the Top 40,” Peter remembers.
“I used to work in Frith Street in the heart of the West End in a restaurant with an Argentinian guitarist and blind organist who used to play everything in F sharp. Fripp was teaching. But Gile, Giles and Fripp never did any gigs together.”
Giles also remembers making a habit of sourcing old pieces of sheet music with Fripp, with the pair going over them together to hone their musical skills.
“We used to go to the La Gioconda Café in Denmark Street where all the music publishers were. We’d go into some of them and ask if they’d any old sheet music. We used to get handfuls of this bloody stuff and then go back home and stick it up with Fripp reading the top line and the chords, and I used to read the bass parts. We’d have a go at it.
“We used to spend hours doing this! [laughs]. That’s what we did all day apart from writing and recording. Whenever one of us had a song or an idea, the three of us would chip in. My brother is a very good ideas man, not just a drummer. I mean, he has a lot of brilliant ideas, melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic.”
King Crimson fans got excited recently when guitarist Jakko Jakszyk revealed they were recording their first new album in 20 years. But Crimson manager David Singleton was quick to dispel the rumours – at least partially – when he said “getting excited is somewhat premature”.
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