Robert Fripp welcomes Uncut into his research with a pleasant wave, and an alarming haircut. From his customary all-one-length trim, the 75-year-old King Crimson guitarist has these days detoured into full Mohican: razored shut on the sides, what stays of his distinguished white hair now operating like a skunk’s stripe down the centre of his head. And this, he continues, solely represents the type in repose.
“It was spiked up yesterday!” he says, earlier than confiding that his genteel residential location can not all the time allow this. “Right here the place we reside within the coronary heart of a Georgian market city, we’ve got a really massive aged inhabitants,” he says. “We have now the very best common age of any city in England. And had been I to exit on the road in full spike there could be some among the many aged inhabitants who could be shocked.”
It was within the sleepy city of Bredonborough*, in winter 2017, that Fripp started the newest chapter in his exceptional 50-year music profession. Entertaining visitors for Christmas drinks, Fripp and his spouse Toyah Willcox obtained speaking to a different native, the filmmaker Toby Amies. Amies had not too long ago made a documentary movie referred to as The Man Whose Thoughts Exploded in regards to the extraordinary lifetime of Brighton eccentric Drako Oho Zarharzar, a former muse to Salvador Dali, who had misplaced all short-term reminiscence following a highway accident. Fripp had seen and appreciated the movie, and so Amies informed him in regards to the newest growth with it: he had not too long ago acquired a message through Instagram bearing shocking information.
“It mentioned: ‘…You don’t know me however we’ve began a intercourse cult in San Francisco based mostly on the thought of ‘Cosmic Fuck’. ‘Cosmic Fuck’ was one of many tattoos that the primary character in my first movie had on him. They usually’ve all obtained tattoos of it.”
Amies made the purpose to Fripp that when an artist’s work goes out into the world, it turns into the possession of the viewers – they usually make utterly what they need from it. On Christmas Eve, Amies woke to an electronic mail from Fripp asking him to pop spherical as a result of there was one thing he wished to debate. “It was clearly one thing,” Amies says.
The thought Fripp was forming was, what with folks all the time asking the band to make a movie and the band’s fiftieth anniversary being on the horizon in 2019, that he would take part in, and Amies ought to direct, a movie about King Crimson. He had extra ideas: it must be referred to as ‘Cosmic FuKc’ and it ought to have a subtitle gleaned from a 1995 headline from a damaging US overview: Prog Rock Pond Scum Set To Bum You Out.
