King Crimson has been described as popular but never populist. Just as King Crimson has been, for more than half a century, an atypical rock band, this film is a refreshingly atypical music documentary.
Toby Amies’ film about one of rock music’s most enduring, but simultaneously elusive, bands, ‘In The Court of the Crimson King – King Crimson at 50’ provides a unique insight into the working process of a complex touring band, interspersed with contributions from previous band members to provide a contextual backdrop to the band’s past, as the most recent (2014–2021) line-up tours the world just before and during its 50th anniversary.
As King Crimson producer and band manager, David Singleton observed of the film: “All of life is here, not just music, and certainly not just rock. It has rightly been described as going beyond King Crimson into a ‘universal, inspirational study of what it is to work or dream to work as an artist’.”
While director Toby Amies writes of the experience: “In the Court of the Crimson King is not a film that wants to tell the audience what to think, rather it presents several different points of view about the creative process and what it means to be in this most unusual band; leaving the audience with a sense of both how complicated it all is, but also just how incredibly rewarding the King Crimson experience is both for the musicians and its fans.” R
obert Fripp announced that King Crimson had “moved from sound to silence” on social media after their final date in Japan in December 2021, making this release all the more poignant as a unique record of the band’s longest lasting line-up with tantalising glimpses of the band’s history.