Can you see the bloke out of Tears For Fears?

It’s 1981 and King Crimson has not appeared on a stage in public for half a decade or more. The individual members are now playing in bands like Foreigner, Genesis and Yes, while Robert Fripp, the driving force behind the band, has done session work and collaborations with Eno, Peter Gabriel and Daryl Hall. He feels a little antsy, though, for a bit of complicated guitar music and has been playing with a couple of guitarists in The League of Gentlemen and toying with a new band.

Discipline. What a great name for a band. Bereft of the bombast of prog, away from the anarchy of punk, the name signifies something rigorous, highly ordered and more than slightly intimidating. The eventual album cover has no oversized screaming skull, just a spherical and very complex knot on a deep red background. From the last Crimson lineup Fripp retains Bill Bruford on drums, but the band takes a different shape with the addition of an American guitarist (late of Frank Zappa’s band) fresh from his work with Talking Heads, name of Adrian Belew[1]. He offers quirky; did anyone ever do quirky while singing about summoning down fire witches before? Then there is Tony Levin, who plays bass but prefers playing a ten string guitar thing called a Chapman Stick, played by hitting the strings with your fingers.

The Chapman Stick, pictured yesterday.

They book a show in Bath, in an upstairs bar room called Moles Club, April 1981. There were, it seems, only about seven people there, or something, but this release in the increasingly-costly-to-me Collectors’ Club series (number 11 for those of you keeping up with a bingo card) allows us to hear what went on when people went to see this band they called Discipline.

In fact, it will be called Discipline for a tiny while[2] before Fripp decides to bring the King Crimson moniker out of corporate retirement[3]. For now, there must have been a certain amount of uncertainty before the band took to the tiny stage.

It needed to be said way before this that this recording is not great; while unsure of the provenance of the tapes, I can safely say it doesn’t have the widest of soundstages and can be quite murky at times. It’s hard to hear what’s being said onstage (not too much anyway) and the crowd is very close to the stage. Levin writes the short but sweet sleevenotes, where he draws our attention to one of the photos taken on his camera during the show and now replicated on the cover of this release; sure enough there’s Curt Smith out of Tears For Fears in the front row, looking like every teenage musician looks when he wants the bass player to notice that he knows how to play bass and ask him to play Stairway or Sowing the Seeds of Love, or whatever. The trepidation remembered by Levin most certainly does not come across on the disc, though, which is amazingly muscular and controlled throughout.

The entire album is played, if out of order, and arrives almost completely formed. From the outset the power and precision are apparent. Discipline is, as the album cover indicates, knotty, similar in intensity to the second number, Thela Hun Ginjeet (an anagram of Heat in the Jungle, made-up-words fans). This track may not have the immersive paranoia of the final recorded version but what is here is a well-drilled quartet that doesn’t seem to have treated this warm-up as a rehearsal in any way. An indication of where Fripp saw this in the King Crimson canon comes next with one of two old songs. Red, all drum fills and power riffing, is right up there with the mad, aggressive version of the band from 1974, but with a dynamic range offered by the tom toms which replace the old crash cymbals[4]. I read that Bruford was encouraged around this time to play on a kit with no cymbals and the drum sound is appropriately busy and claustrophobic here. The other old track is Lark’s Tongues in Aspic Part II, very much the basis for much of Fripp and Belew’s guitar work in this incarnation of the band.

The set is short enough, a nice, expansive version of The Sheltering Sky on which Levin’s influence can be heard in the looping rhythm and the ever-wonderful Matte Kudasai (it means “wait please” in Japanese) the only respite from the pounding, complicated twin guitar lines and cascading toms. It’s not quite heavy rock, not new wave, too metrical to be jazz but too melodic to be proggy. I suppose that defiance of category is why this band were such a well-kept secret, but in a place like Moles Club it must have been a blistering experience to hear the new direction the band were taking, and word of mouth soon took over.

[1] Weird King Crimson connections, no. 75 in an occasional series: Belew co-wrote Genius of Love with the Tom Tom Club, so presumably makes money whenever Mariah Carey sells some more copies of her song Fantasy.

[2] April-October 1981.

[3] The party line states that this was a collective decision, but you try doing something with the words King and Crimson without Fripp’s imprimatur.

[4] Those ardent to turn the kids onto Crimson usually say about now that Kurt was obsessed with Red, but I’ve never really put this together with what Nirvana did. Not to my ears, I’m afraid.