Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/12/13/the-no-fcuks-given-isolation-fun-of-toyah-wilcox-and-robert-fripp.html
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There’s something comforting about seeing Robert Fripp using a Snark clip-on tuner.
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Toyah is certainly full of beans.
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Needs more cowbell
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Another data point to support my hypothesis that Robert Fripp’s at his best when his quiet, introverted weirdness is contrasted to someone else’s exuberant, extroverted weirdness. Here it’s Toyah, but the KC albums with Adrian Belew are fantastic because they contrast Fripp’s ordered, logical playing with Belew making elephant noises and dive-bombing tremolo-arm action.
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They seem to have a full size, walk-in safe at their place.
(I wonder if Beschizza is jealous.)
I do wonder why or how they came to have this, though.
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Toyah has a painting in her attic.
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I love this.
It’s good medicine.
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It’s wonderful seeing Robert and Toyah having such fun. Just this Saturday my BF was discussing their videos with a friend who’d studied guitar with Robert.
Discipline is one of my favorite albums, and I always thought of it as Art Rock, whatever that means. (Maybe it means Eno and Friends.) I got a copy as a high schooler, not long after its release. The original vinyl copy disappeared, replaced with a CD after more than a decade. It was shocking to hear that Elephant Talk had since been bowdlerized!
The song originally ended with, “Expressions! Editorials! Explanations! Exclamations! Ejaculations! It’s all talk! Elephant Talk!” The track on my CD had “ejaculations” replaced with “exaggerations,” and I could even hear a tiny editing glitch! Geez, extremely well-paid studio guys, I did better edits as a teenage girl in my bedroom using a far-from-top-o’-th’-line dual cassette player that wasn’t even a separate component! grrrrrrrrr
I have come across an unedited version of that track only once since buying that disc, and think the file’s now lost.
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We always used to think that she had bats in her belfrey back in the 70s. 
Just like 2020.
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No way! Wow, that’s a great big TIL. And it seems so quaint to edit it for that reason.
Discipline is one of my favourites too, and to a lesser extent Three of a Perfect Pair. I was introduced to KC by a friend who was a huge fan of the Court of the Crimson King era but wasn’t fond of these, but for me it was part of a Zappa/Talking Heads/King Crimson continuum and pretty much defines my musical memories of the early 80’s.
A friend who’s studied guitar with Fripp? Wow, that must have been awesome! I imagine him as a hard task master - he’s the guru of harmonic anal-retentive, small interval arpeggios and his playing is always perfect, if his choice of notes is almost always unsettling. “Well-rehearsed” doesn’t begin to describe it.
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Something along the lines of what you first described, makes Beat my favorite from that trio of albums. To me it has the most… humanity? Soul? (ETA: But Three… was the first of these that I purchased.)
I don’t think I ever noticed this! I first had the cassette (purchased 1988), then the CD (1992?).
Someone at the guitar store where I was taking lessons hipped me to them. At that point I’d figured KC was something along the lines of Jethro Tull and I wouldn’t have had much interest. But by then I was into Bowie, and through him I learned more about Fripp and Brian Eno.
But speaking of the Zappa continuum, the same guy who told me about KC was pointing out that Steve Vai was on the (then) new PiL album. He also told me about Ornette Coleman, who was from Ft. Worth, just a few miles away (at that point Song X would’ve just come out, although Caravan of Dreams had just opened a few years earlier, too)
He used to (maybe still does?) teach these Guitarcraft classes; I missed out on one when they had it in Austin. I was told that everyone came away sounding like Robert Fripp, but whoever told me that didn’t make it sound like a bonus.
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Another old favorite artist doing quarantine shows is Jorma Kauokonen.
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that would explain the thunder in the mountains…
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That’s so stupid because (as I’m sure you know) ejaculations also means
something that someone says or shouts suddenly
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That’s why I was horrified. I didn’t even snicker at it when I was an immature AF 15-y-o.
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Lovely couple, but give it another 6 months.
Wow, thanks Gar!
I can dig it.
King Crimson’s ‘In The Court Of The Crimson King’ completely turned what I thought of as ‘pop’ music inside out. Growing up in the 60’s, I was used to hearing the Stones, the Beatles, later on Jethro Tull, Simon and Garfunkel etc on the radio, but then a classmate of mine brought an album to school, with a cover unlike anything I’d ever seen before. He let me borrow it, I put it on the record player, and what I heard changed my life, as far as my understanding of what music could do. That was fifty-one years ago, and last year I managed to see ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’ played live at London’s Royal Albert Hall on KC’s 50th Anniversary Tour. It was an emotional moment. Astonishing concert, too, with the current lineup.
Oddly enough, ‘Discipline’ led to me missing seeing KC play in my home town! I’d bought ‘Discipline’, and quite liked it, and KC were playing a venue called Golddiggers, an old cinema, which a lot of bands used as a rehearsal space before starting a tour, then play a gig there. I’d heard that Fripp was refusing to play any of the old material, so I stupidly decided not to go. It would be thirty-eight years before I finally got to see them play live!
Thinking back, I regularly say to myself, ‘what a fuckwit!’
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