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Classic Rock MARCH 2023 - by Stephen Dalton

IN THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING: KING CRIMSON AT 50

Robert Fripp and bandmates assess King Crimson's legacy in this tragicomic progumentary.

A gently probing film about the domineering egos and tortuous power relations that afflict almost all veteran rock bands, In The Court Of The Crimson King is comedy tinged with tragedy, an observational backstage documentary with inevitable echoes of This Is Spinal Tap. Shot around King Crimson's fiftieth anniversary tour in 2019, this talk-heavy fly-on-the-monitor portrait is unlikely to win the proggy jazz-metal titans any new converts. But anyone who has spent time hanging around sound-checks and dressing rooms will recognise the volatile mix of grinding tedium, deadpan humour and occasional musical alchemy captured here.

Commissioned by Crimson main man and sole remaining founder member Robert Fripp, director Toby Amies takes an unorthodox approach to the band's five- decade story, mostly using contemporary interview footage rather than the standard archive-heavy rockumentary format. There are actually snippets of twenty-eight classic Crimson tracks woven into the film's soundtrack, but most of the musical segments glimpsed here are backstage jams and rehearsals. A monkish perfectionist with a Zen-like philosophy about music as a kind of sacred ritual, Fripp insists on practising four or five hours a day, and becomes tetchy when his routine is disrupted by travel delays or pesky filmmakers.

Respect to Fripp for initiating and promoting this project, because Amies has not made a flattering puff piece. Recalling his "incredibly unhappy" time in earlier Crimson incarnations, the frosty guitar guru brands the original line-up "a bunch of cunts" while he was "the only sane man in this asylum". Presented with the grievances of former members, he merely shrugs them off. While the current line-up mostly handle their inscrutable boss with diplomatic caution, various ex-band interviewees are less polite. "Some of us went through hell," one complains.

But the film is not just a voyeuristic exercise in bitchy backstage soap opera. There's also a poignant thread of melancholy running through this late- career portrait of musical heavyweights in their autumn years, with mortality hovering just outside the frame. The most deceptively cheerful interviewee here is drummer Bill Rieflin, who discusses his terminal cancer diagnosis on camera with matter-of-fact levity. Rieflin died soon after the shoot, in March 2020, aged just fifty-nine. Amies dedicates the film to him and to his own late mother, lending extra emotional heft to a quietly fascinating film about lingering wounds and unresolved tensions, both creative and personal.