A genius of a musician – it is no wonder that he has featured on over 700 releases. He could take himself very seriously indeed, but instead, as evidenced by the recent “Toyah and Robert’s Sunday Lunch” videos – he isn`t at all stiff upper-lipped. Great man!
Read on!
Fripp as The Sexual Athlete
There was a hint of it last week… and now His Frippship reveals all to Ian MacDonald in an NME Of The World exclusive. Read all about the flat with the thin partition… the bronzed bodies of America… Fripp`s backside… and much, much more.
ROBERT FRIPP paused in a virtuoso display of cross-picking on Francisco Tarrega’s ‘Recuerdos de la Alhambra”, the interlude music he’d chosen between the two parts of this conversation, and remarked:
“I’d have thought that the readers of NME would have been more interested in the sordid and, may I say, high spiritual aspects of my love-life than in what feeble words might be used to describe the music — since the music is there to be listened to and my love-life is not there to be seen.”
Okay, fine, whatever you like. “What,” I enquired, fully expecting a swift back-down, “was the best lay you ever had?”
Fripp stroked his chin, reflectively. “There are about four chicks involved in that — not, in this case, simultaneously, I have to admit. However, return with me if you will to my earliest days as a rock musician. I used to get complaints from Greg (Lake). Not directly, but I used to hear about them.
“You see, we shared this flat which was basically one room divided into two by a thin cardboard screen. It was, as you can imagine, not fit to live in. Anyway, Greg used to complain about the gasps and screams coming from my side of the partition and, I must admit, his women used to get on my nerves too. No comment on Gregory, just his women — but I decided to move out.
“The ensuing period of my homelessness in 1969 was one of the most rewarding of my life. I was continually thrown on the mercies and generosities of tender maidens. Oh those lovely situations. It was quite awful in one way — but quite beautiful in another.”
Momentarily Fripp’s memories overwhelm him. He stares glassily into space, begins to sweat profusely and shudder, his tongue lolling and his eyeballs rolling crazedly back and forth in their sockets. Finally, he pulls himself together and remembers the original question.
“I can’t you know… all these ladies are going to read this.”
Ah, copping out, eh?
“No, but it would be unfair for these ladies’ names or addresses or telephone numbers or even photographs to appear in the NME.”
AT THIS point our banter took a ribald turn into areas incompatible with the middle-of-the-road ethics of a family paper such as this. When we at last returned to within the bounds of propriety, Fripp was vainly attempting to balance the smut with a little moral elevation.
“Of course, when one is young one has all these delusions of being the great stud and one is not interested in a harmonious relationship of giving and taking. But, I’m happy to say, those days for me are now long past and I have spent many fulfiling hours, even on this very lawn upon which I now recline, not only copulating but involved in various other activities.
“In fact I was lying here naked one day, a young lady in attendance, when my next-door neighbour, the chairman of the Rural District Council, popped his head over yonder hedge to inform me that I had Dutch Elm Disease.
“But America is the place for numbers really. We’ve just done all the sunshine areas. Now sunshine, what ever it does to anyone else, has the most alarming repercussions within me. Things happen to my body. I undergo chemical changes.
“I find myself drooling, my tongue hanging out, my mouth snapping together involuntarily, twitchings — obsessive thoughts — the lewd imagination develops.
“In fact, I’ve never seen so many delightful young bodies, both quantity and quality, within such a short space of time as the last month in America. I was overwhelmed. By the end of the tour, I came back unfit for anything, completely exhausted on every level of my being. Oh! Oh!
“Nowadays I say to the rest of the lads: Take my name off the list, lads, put me on the reserve list — only to be called up in dire emergency. Then, after an afternoon in the sun by a swimming-pool with all these young bodies hanging in and out of bikinis, I say: Lads, you’ve got to put me back on the list. And I’ll be called up to action. Oh! Oh! The battles that are fought throughout the holiday-inns of America! Delightful.”
AND ENO? What of the man that the groupies of three continents have come to know as The Refreshing Experience?
“Yes,” nods Fripp, his glazed expression returning. “We’re both incorrigible womanizers, both wonderful examples of young Taurian virility. It may interest you to see a certain picture which will be the cover for our joint recording effort, The Transcendental Music Corporation, featuring us both in a state of undress.
“We were intending to have with us certain similarly unclad females — but, on reflection, decided that this was but a feeble excuse to gaze upon the works of the creator made manifest in the flesh.
“So we decided that it was a far nicer idea to have Eno and myself in the nude as a small way of saying thank you to those ladies who have done what they can in the past to enable us to develop as men — and, hopefully, as an invitation to all those ladies in the future who’d like to help us develop even further.”
And will the Eno-Fripp association ever bear fruit in the shape of actual live appearances?
“Well, I’ve pleaded to be allowed by The Good Captain Eno to join Luana and the Lizard Ladies. I’m interested primarily in the social side of the activities of this putative combo, i.e., seeing the maidens dance.
“Though, at the same time, I’m proud to be a part of anything The Good Captain chooses to encompass in his creative progress. One of these, with reference to The Transcendental Music Corporation, being dirt.”
Could you give me some sort of guide as to the form this enterprise might take?
“Yes.” Here Fripp rose and bent over, pulling down his trunks, and presenting me with a cinerama view of his well-scrubbed posterior and environs.
“At the same time,” he continued, straightening up and covering himself again, “let it not be said that we are oblivious to the higher aspects. I’m very keen for the T.M.C. to support Crimso in their forthcoming British tour. E.G. Management, however, have their doubts on the score that it might spoil Eno’s image.”
STILL RECOVERING from being totally outvibed by Fripp’s sudden cloacinal coup, the additional thought of there being anything that could spoil what must already rank as the most tarnished image in the history of showbiz since Caligula, near o’erthrew my mind.
Slack-mouthed, I blustered forth a garbled enquiry concerning the likelihood of Eno’s publicly-acknowledged sexual preference for the bizarre becoming the foundation of a new movement in rock.
“One should see in the alchemical Eno,” replied Fripp, po-faced, “a knowledge of cosmic events — and his seeming preoccupation with bondage to be no more nor less than a mystical concern with the limitation of the spirit upon its descent into human form.”
Yes, but does he know that?
“What? What? Are you suggesting that the good Eno is unaware of the cosmic implications of what he’s doing? What? What?”
By now I had perceived the cosmic balance of the interview. This was The Silly Half.
“Well”, Fripp drawled, “I like lightness and silliness. As I have hitherto insisted, I possess a sense of humour. I like to balance the higher things with lower things. I mean, who wants to be a doomy intellectual, apart from you?”
Having passively accepted Fripp’s verbal assaults on my journalistic integrity for over 4,000 consecutive words, I feel that now is an opportune moment for me to strike back.
“Why don’t you do a character-portrait of me?” he asked, as he was driving me back to Bournemouth. “I love to know what people think of me and I get so bored with reportage based on my own wit and verbal virtuosity.”
Okay, here it comes.
PHYSICALLY, Robert Fripp is approximately 5 ft. 10 in. and 11 stone 10 pounds, leanly well-built with slightly-thinning light-brown hair and strong, steel-rimmed spectacles. He usually dresses in light smock-shirt and jeans, both black, carries an escutcheon-shaped leather bag full of vegetables, addresses, and cartons of milk, and wears many curious and arcane charms on straps around his throat.
He bustles rather than walks, hails strangers and friends alike with a yokel cry of “Y’allo!”, and bounces back and forth from foot to foot as he delivers his initial subtly-barbed greetings.
He is mild-mannered, but by no means meek and enjoys a good argument. His capacity to find himself endlessly fascinating is exceeded only by a refusal, persistent often to the point of paranoia, to take himself (or anything else for that matter) remotely seriously.
He is punctilious and polite and mutely demands reciprocal behaviour from others. But, though Fripp won’t talk to anyone who isn’t, vestigially at least, civilized, five hours of strenuously counterfeiting breeding, etiquette, and general savoir-faire in order to gain access to the innermost workings of the man’s mind, turns out, by virtue of Fripp’s hidden ability to be accommodating without bearing down on one’s every requirement, to be no strain at all.
Fripp is the equal and, in many cases, the superior of journalists in the art of loquacious discursiveness. Thus he has widely been awe-strickenly misconstrued as an intellectual, a description which, whilst not totally unjustified, is a cardinal misapprehension of a man whose life is so balanced as to render “intellectual participation” but a small, optional part of it.
He is in fact suspicious of anybody who finds satisfaction in the pursuit of abstracts or of information irrelevant to immediate situations.
This tendency towards mental exercise in the guise of esoteric concern, sublimated in others in the pastimes of train-spotting, football, or alcoholism, finds expression in Fripp’s obsession with technique — though he would not admit it.
A man of a firmly structured, albeit self-designed, cerebral architecture, Robert Fripp’s innate love of symmetry (his constant references to “levels” and “harmony” and “balance”) is reflected throughout his music — particularly so in a new Crimso piece called “Fractured”.
If he were not a civilized hippie, he’d be commuting into the City doing The Times crossword and solving problems in lateral thinking. Rock’s gain of an idiosyncratic musician and a truly eccentric personality was British industry’s loss of a great economist.
Fripp is also daft and sex-crazed.
BUT THE best thing about Fripp is his honesty. It’s his bluntness — ex-members of King Crimson will prefer to call it tactlessness — that makes him charming, for Robert Fripp’s complexities remain internal and, for the purposes of interpersonal communication, he is a very simple man.
“On my 27th birthday,” says Fripp, carefully slotting in another anecdote that is currently strolling the landscaped garden of his mind, “Bill told me that the band were thinking of getting a younger guitarist with the new licks and with tricky, sexual postures to replace me in my redundant implied sexuality.
“And, I thought, he’s quite right. I’m no longer the uptight little pop-star that shakes gently on my stool, I thought. It’s time for me to develop.”
All young ladies interested in aiding Mr. Fripp’s development are hereby invited to apply, care of NME, to The Transcendental Music Corporation of Britain — photographs included.
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