Robert Fripp and a tap-dancing mouse.

June 16, 2020 12:05 AM

"Toyah has described Fracture as being like a mouse on caffeine tap-dancing." (Links to a short video on Mrs Fripp's Twitter account.)
posted by Paul Slade (12 comments total)

They've been doing one of these every Sunday for a while: Swan Lake, Unicorn Bolero, The Showdown. The bees one doesn't seem to be there. There's a bees one, too.
posted by Grangousier at 12:11 AM on June 16, 2020 [1 favorite]

Incidentally, I think he's actually playing Fracture, there, rumoured to be one of the most difficult rock guitar parts to play. I don't think there's an official list of Most difficult guitar parts to play while your wife is dancing around the kitchen. I don't think it would be very him to mime.
posted by Grangousier at 12:13 AM on June 16, 2020 [2 favorites]

The phase I went through of King Crimson fandom largely faded into the background quite some time ago and so I haven't really followed what he's been up to in years but I still can't quite wrap my head around playful Robert Fripp.

But apparently that's on me and this sort of goofiness is nothing new for them (q.v. "These Boots Are Made For Walkin') Good -- they look like they're having fun and I'm glad to see it.

Anyway, maybe it's time to pull out my copy of the Sunday All Over the World album and revisit 1991 for a bit..
posted by Nerd of the North at 12:52 AM on June 16, 2020 [2 favorites]

I had no idea Fripp and Toyah are married. How did I not know this? My world just got a tiny bit brighter.
posted by Jellybean_Slybun at 4:47 AM on June 16, 2020 [2 favorites]

in a better world, they'd be King and Queen of the Empire and we'd all have dance moves of our own for the ditty known as Fracture ... a track which proves, if there was ever any doubt, that no band that ever worked the extremes as thoroughly as King Crimson at their mid-seventies peak, from a whisper to the sort of scream that planets make when they fracture in two. Violent and precise and massive. Fracture being a track that, rumor has it, was a live improvisation, like almost all of the Starless and Bible Black album. And then, because it's the kind of the thing Robert Fripp would do, every effort was made in post-production to remove any evidence that there had been an audience in the room.

The improvisation thing has been disputed, of course, some saying it's outright impossible for such a piece to have been improvised given the subtly erratic complexity of the guitar figure that leads it. I'll leave it to this guy to further explore the implications.

Meanwhile, here's the original recording which is surprisingly listenable (in a planet destroying way) to my untrained ears.
posted by philip-random at 8:06 AM on June 16, 2020 [2 favorites]

KC has long been my favorite band, but I never thought to ask myself "is Robert Fripp married to an adorable weirdo?" (who is also a talented and creative person). I guess I should have asked!

I have shared this with some people in my life who also love King Crimson. they are currently screaming with laughter.

thank you!
posted by supermedusa at 9:49 AM on June 16, 2020

some saying it's outright impossible for such a piece to have been improvised given the subtly erratic complexity of the guitar figure that leads it

I think one of the most wonderful developments in my lifetime is how much YouTube has demolished my ideas about what is outright impossible for a musician to do.
posted by straight at 10:39 AM on June 16, 2020 [5 favorites]

Have to admit I had not heard of Toyah Willcox but I think I'm a fan; now flipping back and forth between these videos and her discography / filmography with a look. And Fripp doesn't have that "wooden false teeth are hurting him" at all. (I see they've been married since shortly after "Three of a Perfect Pair" so it's not recent, just hasn't been any of my business.)





omg Robert Fripp in a black tulle tutu with unicorns in the background 2020 is apologetically trying to right the cosmic balance
posted by away for regrooving at 12:06 AM on June 17, 2020

I realised yesterday I used to have a picture I'd cut out of the Sunday Times Magazine of Toyah in Derek Jarman's The Tempest as part of my obligatory teenage wall collage, and that was before Toyah the band got famous. The first Toyah track that really grabbed my attention was Ieya, but it was only recently I found out the story behind it:

A lot of my band were Jewish, and we all found it particularly offensive that the NF would recruit at concerts - they'd go around the audience intimidating the youngest, the smallest, the scrawniest boys into joining the NF By the end of this concert in Bath, the NF were chanting 'Sieg heil' at the back. Charlie Francis, our bass-player, found this intolerable, and Joel kept taking his guitar off to go and beat them up, which we all had to stop him from doing. Instead we just shouted back 'Nazi scum' and got the audience to chant 'Nazi scum'. For the fourth encore, all we could think of doing was something that had started as a jam in the sound-check that day, which was 'IEYA'. It was a sequence of chords that grew, so every verse had more chords added to it, and it had a fantastically simple chorus, a chant, 'IEYA'. 'IEYA, I am solar, IEYA I'm the beast.'

"At the end of the concert the NF were so incensed that the police were called and had to get us out via the Gents window at the back and into a police van, because the NF were outside, kicking in cars, waiting for us at the stage door to kick our heads in. A full-blown riot was in progress", Toyah remembered.

Which I never knew, but which doesn't surprise me at all.
posted by Grangousier at 12:26 AM on June 17, 2020 [1 favorite]

Both Fracture and Fractured are composed pieces. I cannot divulge how I know this.
\m/
posted by j_curiouser at 9:43 AM on June 17, 2020

one listen to Lion of Symmetry (credited to Genesis's Tony Banks but featuring a Toyah Willcox lead vocal) and I immediately wished that Phil Collins would split Genesis and she replace him.
posted by philip-random at 5:24 PM on June 17, 2020

I am so fucking jealous right now.
posted by bonobothegreat at 5:54 PM on June 17, 2020