On 5 July 1969 a five-piece who had played their first proper concert eleven weeks earlier walked onto a wooden stage in Hyde Park and opened for the Rolling Stones in front of an estimated quarter of a million people. The Stones were memorialising the death of Brian Jones with a free show. King Crimson, completely unknown outside a small London club circuit, did not yet have a record deal that mattered, did not yet have a producer, and had not yet recorded the album that would invent progressive rock. Two days later they began work on it.
By 13 August they were finished. Initial sessions with the Moody Blues' producer Tony Clarke had collapsed inside a fortnight; the band, in an unusual concession from a major label, had been allowed to produce themselves. They tracked the entire record on a one-inch eight-track tape machine at Wessex Sound Studios, used up to five tape generations to layer Ian McDonald's Mellotrons over each other until the recordings became orchestral, and handed the finished masters to Island Records along with a sleeve painting by a 24-year-old computer programmer who would be dead before the album was a year old. In the Court of the Crimson King arrived on 10 October 1969, eight weeks after the last note was tracked, and changed the shape of rock music for at least the next decade.
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Artist | King Crimson |
| Album | In the Court of the Crimson King (subtitled An Observation by King Crimson) |
| Release Date | 10 October 1969 |
| Label | Island (UK), Atlantic (US), E.G. |
| Producer(s) | King Crimson (self-produced after Tony Clarke sessions abandoned) |
| Studio(s) | Wessex Sound Studios, London (recording, 7 July to 13 August 1969) |
| Genre / Subgenre | Progressive rock, art rock, with jazz, classical and symphonic influences |
| Track Count | 5 |
| Total Runtime | 43:54 |
| Billboard 200 Peak | 28 |
| UK Albums Chart Peak | 5 (UK Rock and Metal: 3; UK Progressive: 9) |
| Other Notable Chart Peaks | Australia 7, Canada 27, Japan 96, Italy 89, Germany 73 |
| Certifications | Gold (RIAA, BPI 2004, RIAJ); 2x Gold (SNEP France); Platinum (Music Canada); Gold (FIMI 2004) |
| Estimated Sales | Over 1 million worldwide on certifications alone |
| Key Singles | "The Court of the Crimson King" (October 1969, UK) |
Cultural Context
The autumn of 1969 was the moment rock music decided it was no longer a singles business. The Beatles had just released Abbey Road; The Who had spent the summer touring Tommy; Led Zeppelin's first album was a few months old and their second was being mixed; Pink Floyd were a year past A Saucerful of Secrets and a year away from Atom Heart Mother. Album-as-statement had displaced the 45 as the unit of artistic ambition, and a great deal of money was now flowing through long-form rock that did not need a hit single to find an audience.
Into this opening King Crimson dropped an album with one track that ran twelve minutes, another that ran almost nine, no obvious chart cut, and lyrics about a sun-bleached Schizoid Man, a Crimson King and the death of beauty. There was no precedent for this kind of record sitting on the same shelf as the Beatles. Procol Harum had made gestures at fusing rock with classical music. The Moody Blues had hired an orchestra. Frank Zappa had been splicing avant-garde tape collage into rock records since 1966. None of them had produced anything that combined symphonic sweep, jazz harmonic vocabulary, art-college lyric writing and the heaviness of a band that could swing into something resembling early heavy metal at a moment's notice. In the Court of the Crimson King did all of those things at once on a debut, and the rock press began rewriting its definitions of what a rock band could be the week the album landed.
Hendrix is widely reported to have called King Crimson "the best group in the world" after seeing them at the Revolution Club in London that summer. Pete Townshend's endorsement arrived from the opposite end of British rock:
"An uncanny masterpiece. King Crimson are the most happening group of the seventies."
Pete Townshend, quarter-page advertisement in Melody Maker, October 1969
Both endorsements arrived inside three months of release, from the two most influential guitarists in rock, on opposite sides of the Atlantic. The album was not just well-received; it was treated by the people whose opinions mattered as a quiet revolution.
The Band's Story Up to This Point
King Crimson coalesced in late 1968 out of the wreckage of Giles, Giles and Fripp, a baroque-pop trio whose 1968 album The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp had failed to dent any chart. The Giles brothers, drummer Michael and bassist Peter, had brought guitarist Robert Fripp down from Bournemouth in 1967 hoping to find a singer; the singer they eventually found was Ian McDonald, who arrived as a multi-instrumentalist and brought with him his then-girlfriend Judy Dyble, formerly of Fairport Convention, and Dyble's friend, a lyricist named Peter Sinfield. By the end of 1968, Peter Giles had departed, Sinfield had stayed on as full-time lyricist and lighting designer, and a new bassist and second vocalist had been recruited from a teenage Bournemouth scene Fripp knew well: Greg Lake, who had been singing in a beat group called The Gods.
The new band took their name from a Sinfield poem in which the figure of the Crimson King appeared as a symbol for the corrupting power of authority, the syllables suggested to him in turn by what he later described as "Beelzebub" reduced to a phonetic English approximation. Sinfield is on record as saying the band's name and the album's eventual title both came out of the same writing session.
The first concert under the King Crimson name was on 9 April 1969 at the Speakeasy Club in London. Word travelled inside a fortnight. By June they were the talk of the London underground; by late June Mick Jagger had agreed they should open the planned free Hyde Park show on 5 July that turned, after Brian Jones's death three days earlier, into a wake. Crowd estimates for that afternoon range from 250,000 to 500,000. Jagger read from Shelley. Hells Angels minded the stage. King Crimson played for half an hour at lunchtime, including a version of "21st Century Schizoid Man" they had not yet recorded, and walked off as a national act. Two days later they were in Wessex Studios.
Pre-production and Demos
By the time the band reached Wessex they had been playing the Hyde Park set for at least three months, in clubs that included the Marquee, the Speakeasy and a Sunday-afternoon residency at the Lyceum where Mellotron, sax, flute and Fripp's guitar passed lead lines around inside arrangements that were already, in essence, the album. "21st Century Schizoid Man" had been written collectively, with the central mirror-aligned riff coming out of a Fripp-McDonald jam in early 1969. "I Talk to the Wind" was older still: McDonald and Sinfield had written it for Giles, Giles and Fripp before King Crimson had been imagined, and a 1968 demo with Judy Dyble singing lead exists on bootleg. The title track "The Court of the Crimson King" began life, according to McDonald, as a piece he and Sinfield had attempted with an earlier band called The Creation, originally pitched closer to country and western, before the King Crimson treatment turned it into the album's most baroque arrangement.
The band's earliest sessions for the album, in spring 1969, were produced by Tony Clarke, the man who had just shepherded the Moody Blues' run from Days of Future Passed through On the Threshold of a Dream. Clarke was an obvious match on paper: a producer who knew how to record orchestral textures inside a rock arrangement, and who had recently demonstrated that the Mellotron could be made to sound, on tape, like an actual string section. The match did not work. Sources differ on why. Fripp's later recollection was that Clarke wanted a more conventionally pop record and the band wanted to capture what they were doing live. Whatever the friction, the early sessions were scrapped, the tapes shelved, and Island Records made what was, at the time, an extraordinary concession: they let an unproven band produce its own debut.
"We had a lot of self-confidence. The reason we wanted to produce ourselves wasn't that we thought we could do it better than anyone else; it was that we knew what we wanted, and we couldn't get a producer to give us what we wanted."
Robert Fripp, Rolling Stone, on the Tony Clarke sessions, 2019
Creating the Album
The Wessex sessions ran from 7 July to 13 August 1969, five and a half weeks of work that produced one of the most architecturally ambitious rock records ever made. The studio was an Edwardian church hall in Highbury that had been converted to a recording facility in the late sixties; its high wooden ceiling and live acoustic gave the room a sound that would later define every record made there from London Calling by The Clash to Queen's News of the World. Robin Thompson engineered, with Tony Page assisting. The desk and machine were modest by 1969 standards: a one-inch eight-track tape machine, no automation, no thirty-second reverb plates, none of the studio luxury that producers like George Martin or Glyn Johns were already taking for granted by 1969.
The eight-track limit shaped the entire record. McDonald, the band's principal arranger, was running a Mellotron Mk II, a flute, an alto saxophone, a clarinet, a bass clarinet, a vibraphone, a reed organ, a piano and a harpsichord across the album's five tracks. Stacking those parts inside an eight-track session required serial bouncing: McDonald and Thompson would print Mellotron strings to two tracks, bounce them to one, free up two tracks for the next overdub layer, and repeat. Some passages went through five tape generations before they were committed to the master, with all the noise floor and slight loss of high end that implies. The famous Mellotron crescendo that closes "Epitaph" is one of those layered passes; so is the orchestral pivot at the end of "The Court of the Crimson King", which is essentially McDonald's Mellotron multitracked into a thirty-piece mock-orchestra and then bounced down to a single stereo image. Without the bouncing the record could not have been made on the equipment available.
The band tracked everything live in the room and overdubbed afterwards. Lake's bass and Giles's drums were captured together; Fripp's guitar was usually live too, with overdubs only for the doubled lines on "Schizoid Man" and the harmonic guitar work on "Moonchild". McDonald's woodwinds and Mellotron were largely overdubs. Lake's vocal, the most pristine element on the record, was tracked late and double-tracked sparingly; on "I Talk to the Wind" McDonald takes co-lead vocal with Lake in close harmony, the only place on the record where two voices are foregrounded. Sinfield, who had no instrumental role on the album, supervised lyrics, packaging and the band's stage lighting rig, and is credited as a producer on the album's sleeve.
The recording is dry by modern standards. The reverbs are short. The Mellotrons are foregrounded but not drenched. The drums are close-mic'd and bright. Andy Wallace, decades later, would name the album as the recording that taught him how layered overdubs could be used to imply orchestration without ever using a string section, an observation that Steven Wilson, who has remixed the album twice, has echoed. The eight-track limitation, in retrospect, forced a kind of arrangement discipline that more sophisticated equipment in later years would gradually erode out of the genre.
Personnel and Credits
| Role | Player | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Core band | ||
| Electric and acoustic guitar, production | Robert Fripp | Acoustic on tracks 3 and 5; the band's only constant member through every subsequent lineup |
| Reeds, woodwinds, keyboards, vibraphone, vocals, production | Ian McDonald | Alto sax (1), flute (2, 3, 5), clarinet and bass clarinet, vibraphone (4), Mellotron Mk II (3, 4, 5), reed organ, piano, harpsichord, backing vocals (5) |
| Lead vocals, bass guitar, production | Greg Lake | Co-lead vocal with McDonald on "I Talk to the Wind"; backing vocals on the title track |
| Drum kit, timpani, vocals, production | Michael Giles | Timpani on "Epitaph"; backing vocals on the title track |
| Lyrics, illumination, production | Peter Sinfield | Wrote every lyric on the album; designed the band's stage lighting; suggested the band's name |
| Production and engineering | ||
| Producer | King Crimson | Self-produced after the Tony Clarke sessions were abandoned |
| Recording engineer | Robin Thompson | Wessex Sound Studios staff engineer |
| Assistant engineer | Tony Page | |
| Artwork | ||
| Cover and gatefold paintings | Barry Godber | Computer programmer, friend of Sinfield; modelled the screaming face on his own reflection in a mirror; died February 1970, aged 24 |
| Rumoured / disputed | ||
| Earlier producer (sessions scrapped) | Tony Clarke | Produced initial spring 1969 sessions for Island; tapes were shelved and the band was permitted to re-record under its own production credit |
Two pieces of background round out the personnel list. Fripp later took possession of the original Godber painting after recovering it from E.G. Records' offices, where he believed it had been left exposed to bright light and was at risk of fading. The painting is now in his private collection. Tony Clarke, the producer who lost the album, went on to produce the Moody Blues' To Our Children's Children's Children later in 1969, a record that came out the same week as In the Court of the Crimson King and competed for shelf space with it through the autumn.
The Songs
| # | Title | Writer(s) | Length | Single? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 21st Century Schizoid Man (including "Mirrors") | Fripp, McDonald, Lake, Giles, Sinfield | 7:24 | Sinfield's lyric is a Vietnam-era condemnation of war and political corruption | |
| 2 | I Talk to the Wind | McDonald, Sinfield | 6:05 | Predates King Crimson; Sinfield's favourite of his own lyrics | |
| 3 | Epitaph (including "March for No Reason" and "Tomorrow and Tomorrow") | Fripp, McDonald, Lake, Giles, Sinfield | 8:47 | Mellotron-driven elegy; covered by ELP, Bauhaus and others | |
| 4 | Moonchild (including "The Dream" and "The Illusion") | Fripp, McDonald, Lake, Giles, Sinfield | 12:13 | Two-and-a-half-minute song followed by a near-ten-minute improvised ambient interlude | |
| 5 | The Court of the Crimson King (including "The Return of the Fire Witch" and "The Dance of the Puppets") | McDonald, Sinfield | 9:25 | Yes (UK) | Began life as a country-and-western piece for The Creation |
"21st Century Schizoid Man" is the most influential opening track on any debut album in rock. The unison riff, doubled by Fripp's guitar and McDonald's saxophone in a dissonant augmented interval, has been described in retrospect as the first heavy metal riff, the first art-rock riff and the first jazz-fusion riff, in turn, by writers from each genre arguing that their tradition was born here. Lake's vocal is treated with a deliberate distortion that owes more to John Lennon's "Tomorrow Never Knows" than to anything in contemporary blues-rock. Sinfield's lyric, by his own account, is a direct comment on the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration's domestic surveillance, and the political climate of late-sixties America as seen from London. The song's middle passage, "Mirrors", is a free-jazz unison line played at virtuosic speed by Fripp, McDonald and Lake; very few bands in 1969 had the technical command to play it cleanly.
"I Talk to the Wind" is the album's most conventionally beautiful song and its most textually slippery. McDonald and Sinfield wrote it for Giles, Giles and Fripp before King Crimson existed; Judy Dyble had recorded a version of it in 1968 with the trio. King Crimson's version, with Lake and McDonald in close harmony over Giles's brushed drums and McDonald's flute solo, is one of the rare moments on the record where the band sound entirely English-pastoral, a register the next generation of progressive rock bands, particularly Genesis, would build entire careers on. Sinfield has said in multiple interviews that the lyric, which depicts a "straight man" trying and failing to communicate with a "late man" who only talks to the wind, is the favourite of his own lyrics he ever wrote, a remarkable claim from someone who would go on to write hits for Celine Dion and Cher in his later career.
"Epitaph" is the album's keystone, the song that resolved the question of whether the new arrangements could carry a real ballad without descending into kitsch. Lake's vocal is unguarded; the Mellotron strings build through three verses to a chorus, "Confusion will be my epitaph", that is one of the most-quoted lyrics in progressive rock. Giles's timpani tracking, used as a kind of compositional accent rather than a rhythmic backbone, is one of the things younger drummers, Neil Peart of Rush included, would later cite as a turning point in their sense of what a rock kit could do.
"Moonchild" is the album's most-divisive track and probably the one most responsible for the long-running argument over whether the record is a flawless masterpiece or a flawed one. The first two and a half minutes are a delicate Lake vocal over McDonald's vibraphone and Fripp's chiming harmonics, a piece as close to chamber jazz as any rock band had recorded to that point. The remaining nine and a half minutes are a free-form ambient improvisation, with Fripp on guitar harmonics, McDonald drifting on Mellotron, Lake's bass intervening at long intervals and Giles painting the whole space with brushes. It is either the album's most patient, contemplative passage or its single overlong indulgence; almost no two listeners agree, and the band themselves later edited it for live performance.
The title track closes the album in full pageantry. The arrangement is the most overtly orchestral on the record: Mellotron strings, McDonald's flute, Lake's lead vocal carrying a lyric about a Crimson King and a Fire Witch that reads like a Sinfield distillation of every Pre-Raphaelite painting he had ever sat under. The pivot in the closing minute, where the band drops out and McDonald's Mellotron returns alone to play out the album's title theme, has been described by Steven Wilson and others as the single moment that defined what a "progressive rock ending" should sound like for the next ten years. On certain pressings of the original vinyl, a hidden track runs from 9:41 to 10:00, a brief reprise that is missing from most CD pressings before the 2009 remasters.
B-sides, Outtakes and Lost Songs
Unusually for a record this celebrated, very little material was left on the cutting-room floor. The Tony Clarke sessions, recorded in spring 1969 at Morgan Studios, did capture early versions of "21st Century Schizoid Man", "I Talk to the Wind" and the title track, but those tapes were shelved and have been only partially recovered. Steven Wilson's 2009 40th Anniversary box and his 2019 50th Anniversary box together released the surviving Clarke-era material in some form, alongside a series of alternate mixes and instrumental versions. There is no famous lost song from the Wessex sessions; the band recorded the album they had been playing live, and the album they had been playing live was the album that came out.
The only outtake that has acquired the status of legend is "Drop In", a song Fripp and McDonald wrote during the Wessex sessions but did not finish in time for the album. It was repurposed for the band's second album In the Wake of Poseidon as "The Devil's Triangle", in radically reworked instrumental form. McDonald's later band Foreigner would, in the late 1970s, occasionally play fragments of unrecorded King Crimson material from his time at Wessex, but no studio version of any of those pieces has ever surfaced.
Album Artwork and Packaging
The cover is, with The Dark Side of the Moon, the most-recognisable visual artefact in progressive rock. Barry Godber, a 24-year-old computer programmer and friend of Sinfield, painted the front and inner gatefold images in his bedroom. The screaming face on the front is Godber's own, painted from a mirror; the calmer, older figure on the inside, the Crimson King himself, is a more conventional portrait. Fripp has described the artwork in interviews:
"Peter brought this painting in and the band loved it. The face on the outside is the Schizoid Man, and on the inside it's the Crimson King. If you cover the smiling face, the eyes reveal an incredible sadness. What can one add? It reflects the music."
Robert Fripp, Rock and Folk, on Barry Godber's painting
Godber died of a heart attack in February 1970, four months after the album's release, aged 24. The cover was the only finished painting he ever completed. Fripp recovered the original from E.G. Records' offices in the early 2000s after noticing it had been left exposed to bright light, and the painting now lives in his private collection. The gatefold housed Sinfield's hand-printed lyrics; the album's subtitle, An Observation by King Crimson, appeared on the spine. No territory has ever been issued with an alternate cover. The 2019 50th Anniversary box restored Godber's original colours from a high-resolution photograph of the painting itself, after decades of reissues had drifted progressively further from the source.
Release and Reception
The album was released on 10 October 1969 through Island in the UK, Atlantic in the United States and through E.G. Records as licensee in subsequent territories. The British press, predisposed to be generous to a band that had just opened the Hyde Park Stones show, was nonetheless surprised by the record. Nick Logan in the NME described it as "totally original and always captivating" and predicted King Crimson "have it in them to be huge". Melody Maker conceded the album did not capture the live band but said "this is one you should try to hear". Disc and Music Echo called it "a brilliant mixture of melody and freakout". John Morthland in Rolling Stone told American readers the band had "combined aspects of many musical forms to create a surreal work of force and originality". Cashbox called it a "tour-de-force" with "no loose ends". Billboard singled out the title track for the band's "depth and deliberateness".
"Spitting in the face of British rock conventions, In the Court of the Crimson King is a landmark in prog rock history. Surreal, dark and unpredictable, the album was unlike anything that had come before it at the time. Arguably the original prog rock album, it remains one of the best to this day."
John Cunningham, WhatCulture, 2022
The lone serious dissent came from Robert Christgau in The Village Voice, who awarded the album a D-plus and dismissed it as "ersatz shit", a verdict he has never publicly recanted in five subsequent decades of writing about rock. Pitchfork, on the album's 50th-anniversary remix in 2019, awarded it ten out of ten, the highest score the publication ever awards. AllMusic, Mojo, All About Jazz, the Encyclopedia of Popular Music and Classic Rock have all settled on five stars in their definitive reviews.
Commercially the album reached number 5 on the UK Albums Chart and number 28 on the Billboard 200, and was certified Gold by the RIAA in the United States. It charted at 7 in Australia, 27 in Canada, 73 in Germany, 89 in Italy and 96 in Japan, and on subsequent reissue acquired Gold certifications in the United Kingdom (BPI), Italy (FIMI), Japan (RIAJ) and France (two-times Gold from SNEP), and Platinum in Canada. The album's commercial peak in the UK was instant; in the United States the record built more slowly, reaching its Billboard peak through the early months of 1970.
Retrospective rankings have been emphatic. Rolling Stone placed the record at number 2 on its 2015 list of the 50 Greatest Prog Rock Albums of All Time, behind only Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon. The Q and Mojo Classic Special Edition Pink Floyd and the Story of Prog Rock placed it fourth in its 40 Cosmic Rock Albums. Classic Rock magazine included it in its 50 Albums That Built Prog Rock. Edward Macan's 1997 academic study Rocking the Classics argues the album "may be the most influential progressive rock album ever released". Paul Stump's The Music's All That Matters: A History of Progressive Rock, published the same year, opens its central chapter on the genre's emergence with the line: "If progressive rock as a discrete genre can be said to have had a starting point, In the Court of the Crimson King is probably it."
Singles and Music Videos
Only one single was lifted from the album, and only in the UK. "The Court of the Crimson King", in a heavily edited 3:36 single edit, was issued by Island in October 1969. It did not chart. The album's other long tracks were either too long for AM radio or too dynamically extreme to be edited without violence. Atlantic in the United States declined to issue any single at all from the record, treating it from the outset as an album-only release, which was an unusual commercial decision in 1969 but one that fit the moment when album rock was decisively replacing singles rock at the top end of the industry.
There are no original-era music videos. King Crimson's first surviving promotional film, a clip of "21st Century Schizoid Man" recorded for Belgian television in 1969, has surfaced on subsequent reissue packages and on YouTube uploads of varying provenance. The band's televised performances during the album's release window were minimal; they declined the BBC's Top of the Pops invitations in line with Fripp's well-known suspicion of the format, a stance he would maintain through almost the entirety of the band's subsequent career.
Touring and Live
The original lineup that recorded the album lasted barely two months on the road after release. Their first US tour began in October 1969, with dates including the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles in December, where they were captured on a multi-track recording that Fripp would much later release as Live at the Whisky a Go Go. Tensions between the brothers Giles and the rest of the band had been building since the studio sessions; McDonald, who had been the album's principal arranger, was struggling with the demands of touring and reportedly homesick. By the end of the US run in mid-December, both McDonald and Giles had handed in their notice. They left the band in early 1970, before any recording for a second album had begun, and went on to record the McDonald and Giles album as a duo in 1971.
The departures were a body blow. Lake stayed long enough to sing on the bulk of the second album In the Wake of Poseidon, but had effectively left to form Emerson, Lake and Palmer by the time the record was released. Sinfield stayed for the next three Crimson albums before being asked to leave in late 1971. Fripp was the only member of the original five to remain, a continuity that has held for every subsequent King Crimson formation through to the present. The lineup that recorded In the Court of the Crimson King never returned to the studio together. The band performed full shows of the album live for the first time only in 2017, with the lineup of the time, as part of a multi-album set that combined the debut with material from across King Crimson's catalogue.
In TV, Film and Media
"21st Century Schizoid Man" has been the most-licensed track from the album by some distance. Buffalo 66, Children of Men, the trailer for The World's End and a handful of other independent films have used the song as opening or end-credit music. "Epitaph" has been used in the closing scene of the BBC's 1990s adaptation of The Singing Detective and, more famously, in the closing montage of HBO's The Sopranos episode "Down Neck". "The Court of the Crimson King" appeared in the 2014 film Lords of Salem, directed by Rob Zombie, who has cited the album as a long-running personal touchstone. The album as a whole is one of those records that almost any music supervisor working on a project set in late-sixties London will reach for first; its sonic shorthand for "the world is ending" remains unmatched.
Controversy, Censorship and Lawsuits
The album was never censored on release. Sinfield's lyrics, dark as they are, attracted no parental-advisory attention in 1969 and have not since. The most-substantial legal controversy attached to the album dates from 2010 and Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The opening track of that album, "Power", samples the central refrain of "21st Century Schizoid Man" and is built around the vocal phrase "21st century schizoid man" lifted directly from the King Crimson recording. Sample clearance was negotiated through E.G. Records' successor in title and through the publishing chain; Fripp himself approved the use after asking to hear the finished song.
In April 2022 Declan Colgan Music Limited, the company that owns the mechanical-licence rights to "21st Century Schizoid Man" through its purchase of E.G.'s catalogue, sued Universal Music in the New York district court alleging Universal had distributed "Power" without a properly executed mechanical licence and without paying the appropriate royalties. The case did not contest the use of the sample but argued the licensing chain had broken down. The case settled out of court in May 2024, terms undisclosed.
Covers, Samples and Tributes
"21st Century Schizoid Man" is among the most-covered tracks in progressive rock history. April Wine, Voivod (whose 1990 cover on The Outer Limits was a fan favourite for two decades), Ozzy Osbourne in his solo live shows, Trey Anastasio of Phish, Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers and a long list of metal and prog acts have recorded versions. "Epitaph" has been covered by Emerson, Lake and Palmer themselves on the band's solo records, by Bauhaus's Peter Murphy and by Marillion. "I Talk to the Wind" has been covered by Pat Coil, Susan Wong and a cluster of jazz vocalists who have rediscovered the song decade by decade since release.
The most-prominent sample remains Kanye West's "Power". Smaller hip-hop and electronic uses of the album's textures, particularly the closing Mellotron of the title track, have appeared on records by Diplo, El-P and a number of less-mainstream sample-based producers across the 2010s and 2020s. The album's role as influence-by-citation is more substantial than its role as direct source material: every prog rock band of the seventies, the early-eighties Canterbury revival, the post-rock movement of the nineties and a sizeable proportion of the modern post-metal scene have at some point credited the record as foundational.
Reissues, Remasters and Anniversaries
The album's reissue history is unusually substantial and has, more than once, been defined by the loss and recovery of the original tapes.
- 1982 Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab half-speed-mastered vinyl edition, cut by Stan Ricker.
- 1989 First CD remaster by Robert Fripp and Tony Arnold, part of E.G.'s "Definitive Edition" series. Sourced from a multi-generation copy master because the originals were missing.
- 1999 30th Anniversary Edition remaster by Simon Heyworth, Fripp and David Singleton, using 24-bit and HDCD encoding.
- 2002 The original 1969 master tapes are rediscovered in the Virgin Records archives, complete with splicing tape between songs and the segue between "I Talk to the Wind" and "Epitaph" not yet finished.
- 2004 "Original Master Edition" remaster by Simon Heyworth, the first to use the rediscovered first-generation tapes.
- 2009 40th Anniversary edition with new stereo and 5.1 surround mixes by Steven Wilson, released in three packages including a 5-CD/1-DVD box.
- 2010 200-gram vinyl reissue cut by John Dent at Loud Mastering.
- 2019 50th Anniversary 3-CD/Blu-ray box with new 2019 Wilson stereo and 5.1 mixes encoded at 24/96, plus the 2004 Heyworth master, instrumental versions and an alternate-take edition of the album.
The 2019 box is currently the definitive edition. Wilson's 2019 mix corrects a small EQ artefact present on the 2009 mix, restores the original tape edits where the 2002 rediscovery had revealed splice points missing from later masters, and benefits from the substantially more sophisticated archival processing techniques Wilson had developed across his decade of work on King Crimson, Yes, Tull and ELP catalogue projects.
Legacy and Influence
The list of artists who have explicitly cited In the Court of the Crimson King as foundational is staggeringly long for a record that sold modestly on release:
- Pete Townshend and Jimi Hendrix, both publicly, within weeks of release.
- Yes, whose Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman both came up listening to Crimson at the Speakeasy.
- Genesis, who lifted both the Mellotron-as-orchestra trope and the multipart-suite format wholesale.
- Rush, whose Neil Peart named Michael Giles as one of three drummers who taught him what was possible.
- Premiata Forneria Marconi and the Italian prog scene, who treated Sinfield as a guru and eventually hired him.
- Marillion, Tool, Porcupine Tree, Opeth and Mastodon, the modern prog and prog-metal lineage.
- Steven Wilson, whose entire mixing-and-archive career has been shaped by the album.
- Russian Circles, Sleep and a generation of post-metal bands citing the title track as a structural model.
Robert Plant has said in interviews that Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy was, in part, an attempt to do for Zeppelin what Crimson had done for themselves on this record.
The album defined a vocabulary that did not exist before it: the multipart suite as a rock-album convention, the Mellotron-as-orchestra trope that Yes, Genesis and Tull would all build careers around, the sci-fi-philosophical lyric register that has run from Sinfield through Roger Waters to Maynard James Keenan to the contemporary post-metal scene, and the use of jazz harmonic vocabulary inside an otherwise rock arrangement. Edward Macan's argument in Rocking the Classics that the album "presented an example of every significant element of a mature progressive rock genre" before the genre had matured is the most-cited single critical claim about the record.
The album's cultural reach now extends well outside rock. Hip-hop's borrowing of the riff through Kanye West's "Power", the song's appearance as introductory music for live wrestling, mixed-martial-arts and football events, and its enduring use in film trailers when a director needs a 1969-coded "the world is ending" cue are all signs that In the Court of the Crimson King has crossed the threshold from rock landmark to general-purpose cultural shorthand, in the same way The Dark Side of the Moon and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band did before it. The album that five players, some of whom had been together less than six months when they entered the studio, made on an eight-track desk in five and a half weeks remains, fifty-six years after its release, the founding document of progressive rock.
Things You Might Not Know
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| The first concert was eleven weeks before recording began | King Crimson played their debut at the Speakeasy Club on 9 April 1969. They began recording at Wessex on 7 July 1969. The album was finished by 13 August. |
| They opened for the Stones two days before recording started | King Crimson's set at the Hyde Park free Stones concert on 5 July 1969 was, by most accounts, the moment they crossed from club band to national act. The audience is estimated at between 250,000 and 500,000. |
| The producer who got the album wrong was the Moody Blues' producer | Tony Clarke, fresh off Days of Future Passed and On the Threshold of a Dream, helmed initial spring 1969 sessions which were scrapped. The band were then permitted to self-produce. |
| It was made on an eight-track machine | Wessex's tape machine was a one-inch eight-track. Some passages went through five tape generations to fit Ian McDonald's layered Mellotron and woodwind overdubs. |
| The cover painter was a computer programmer | Barry Godber, a friend of Peter Sinfield's, painted his own face from a mirror. It was the only finished painting he ever made. |
| The cover painter was dead within four months | Godber died of a heart attack in February 1970, aged 24. Robert Fripp later recovered the original painting from E.G. Records' offices and now owns it personally. |
| "I Talk to the Wind" predates the band | The song was written by McDonald and Sinfield for Giles, Giles and Fripp before King Crimson existed. Judy Dyble of Fairport Convention recorded a 1968 version. |
| The title track started as a country and western song | "The Court of the Crimson King" began as a country-and-western piece McDonald and Sinfield had attempted with an earlier band called The Creation. |
| Hendrix called them "the best group in the world" | Jimi Hendrix is widely reported to have made the remark after seeing the band at London's Revolution Club in summer 1969. |
| The lineup never recorded a second album together | Ian McDonald and Michael Giles handed in their notice in December 1969, two months after release. The original five never returned to the studio. |
| The original master tapes were lost for more than thirty years | The first-generation 1969 masters were missing from 1969 until 2002, when they turned up in the Virgin Records archive with splicing tape still on the reels. |
| Ian McDonald formed Foreigner | After leaving Crimson he played briefly with Mike Giles, then in 1976 co-founded Foreigner with Mick Jones, becoming a multi-platinum AOR star on a different musical continent. |
| Greg Lake formed Emerson, Lake and Palmer almost immediately | Lake stayed for parts of In the Wake of Poseidon but had effectively left to form ELP with Keith Emerson and Carl Palmer by mid-1970. |
| Kanye West's "Power" sample sparked a 2022 lawsuit | Declan Colgan Music sued Universal in 2022 over the licensing chain for the "21st Century Schizoid Man" sample on Kanye's 2010 single "Power". The case settled in May 2024. |
| Pete Townshend bought a magazine advert to praise it | Townshend famously took out a quarter-page advertisement in Melody Maker shortly after release, calling the album "an uncanny masterpiece". |
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