Back in 1969, King Crimson made its reputation as a live band – initially with the hipsters, scene setters & other musicians who frequented the likes of the Speakeasy & The Marquee in London, then, more broadly, with a breakthrough gig to a vast mainstream audience as guests on the bill with The Rolling Stones in Hyde Park in July of that year. So it’s appropriate that the current incarnation of King Crimson was to be found just opposite the entrance to Hyde Park at the end of June 2019 almost 50 years on from that concert, playing a trio of packed gigs at the Royal Albert Hall. Then, as now, it’s the live performance that’s key to the band.
The current line-up – the longest surviving in Crimson’s half century of existence – started touring in September 2014 & hasn’t stopped since. Now routinely spoken of in terms of ‘best live band in the world’, the band’s reputation has been further enhanced via a series of live releases beginning with the “Live at the Orpheum” mini-album (2015) & running to last year’s 3CD/Blu-Ray “Meltdown” set, drawn from a series of concerts in Mexico in 2017.
With a vast repertoire covering material from the debut album “In the Court of the Crimson King” (including ‘Moonchild’ which was never performed in 1969) through to works from “Lizard” which, likewise, was never performed at the time, Crim classics from “Islands”, “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic”, “Red” & other studio albums, through to compositions from Fripp’s solo album “Exposure” (‘Breathless’), radical reinterpretations of 80s material (‘Neurotica’, ‘Indiscipline’), to songs from the current KC band precursor album by Jakszyk, Fripp Collins (‘A Scarcity of Miracles’, ‘The Light of Day’) and newly written pieces for this line-up, (‘Meltdown’, ‘Radical Action’), this 5CD set provides a comprehensive overview of 5 years’ worth of concerts – one year per CD – with performances selected from that first concert in Albany New York in 2014, to the band’s penultimate 2018 concert in Tokyo.
CD1is fully mixed from multi-track tapes by Robert Fripp & Jakko Jakszyk, while the other 4 CDs are taken from the band’s stereo soundboard recordings, the most accurate recorded representation of the live band in the opinion/ears of many of the band’s hardcore fans