The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  Polygram wanted a new band. With Palmer on contract, the Lake-Emerson duo recruited Cozy Powell, a journeyman British drummer. The jokes told themselves—here was ELP, with an all-new “P”—and Emerson couldn’t stand it. “We do not refer to ourselves as ELP,” he told a journalist. “We are Emerson, Lake, and Powell.”38

  Indeed, they didn’t; the Emerson, Lake & Powell album was released under that name, the old and iconic logo left behind at some Manticore rummage sale. “The Score” was the album’s epic track, and “Touch and Go” was its single. Both shone a different hue from anything that had appeared under the ELP name. “In the ‘old days,’ Emerson would have launched into a gonzo synth solo over the underlying chord progression of the verse,” wrote ELP scholar Edward Macan in an analysis of “The Score.” Instead, Emerson was playing sustained chords.39

  Critics, who were skeptical of the idea that this was not a cash-in, found it easy to punch around the album. “These guys are literally the only ones left in 1986 who still have the balls to serve up vintage crap like this,” wrote Rolling Stone. “Pomp fans shouldn’t worry; the short ones have just as much hot air as the long ones.”40

  The ELPowell tour did not go well. In San Antonio, they got three thousand at a venue where ZZ Top had gotten fifteen thousand. Emerson took that as an affront. “It’s bordering on impudence that a simple band like that can draw so much more people than we can,” he said.41

  The corporate birth of Emerson, Lake & Powell gave way to a very corporate breakup. “By the time it came to making a second album, there wasn’t any money left,” said Emerson. “And Greg said, ‘Well, if there isn’t any money left, and Polygram isn’t interested in putting any more money up, I’m not interested.’ And, of course, Cozy was being offered jobs and he got fed up with the indecisions and said, ‘I’m leaving.’ ”42

  The three of them returned to side projects, picking up largely where they’d been before the quasi reunion. It was important to Emerson, and difficult, that he move faster than the pace of musical change. “I really need to get my own identifiable sounds again now that I’ve lost the GX-1,” said Emerson. “It’s like Eric Clapton’s guitar; nobody sounds like that.”43

  KEVIN AYERS HAD less to do, and less of a stated interest in doing it. “Between the ages of 17 and 40 I had a great time, no grounds for complaint whatsoever,” Ayers said in 1992. “My problem is just that I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life.”44

  The 1980s found Ayers back in Spain, where he would stay, occasionally recording a new album through a lazy haze of alcohol. In 1983 he released a new collection of songs titled Diamond Jack and the Queen of Pain. The closing track, “Champagne and Valium,” imagined a series of distracted scenes, including a visit to a worried doctor. “Can’t taste no wine if you don’t drink,” Ayers sang. Years later, he would admit that he could not remember recording the album.

  In 1987, Ayers reconnected with Mike Oldfield for what would be Ayers’s last stab at the charts for the rest of the century. “He liked to enjoy life, take it easy and not take things too seriously,” said Oldfield in 2013. “Unfortunately, his attitude was not suited to being tremendously successful in the music business, in which you do need a lot of drive, savvy and street smarts. If you don’t have those things, there are so many people who either take advantage of you or don’t listen to what you have to say because you didn’t sell enough albums the last time out.”45

  The product of the Ayers-Oldfield reunion was “Flying Start,” an evocative pop song with lyrics that referred forlornly to Ayers’s career. “You lost your dream in a bottle of wine,” Ayers sang. The chorus included a cheeky reference to the early times: “Made the Whole World sing, they had no choice.”

  The album cracked the top forty, as did the single. In 1988, a revised version of “Flying Start” appeared on Ayers’s Falling Up, a clearheaded comeback album. But that was all he did, for years. “In the 1960’s he was lovable, passionate, a brilliant compulsive songwriter and driven to succeed,” said Daevid Allen. “In the 1970’s after the Soft Machine tours in the US, he had become damaged, domineering, and self-centered. After that he was nervy, extremely abrupt, impatient, and highly sensitive to the quirks of Murphy’s law, which in the performance space appear at every turn. Sadly for me, who loved him deeply, he had become almost impossible to work with.”46

  ON AUGUST 25, 1982, Marillion signed with EMI. There would be no change in style and no obvious search for a single. The proof that none was necessary came whenever the band played live. At that summer’s Reading Festival, Marillion was low on the bill, sandwiched between comfortable, identifiable heavy metal groups. “We were showing our influences maybe a little too clearly,” shrugged Rothery. “It was clumsily done, but it was sincere. It wasn’t done to be pompous.”47

  The Reading set sounded like no one else. There were moments when Rothery’s guitar supplied only colors. “He Knows You Know” asked an audience of metalheads to meditate on a dark story of addiction, the only solace coming from a swinging keyboard hook.

  Marillion’s lineup, now set, was confident in its talent and its approach to music. Under the trappings of old progressive rock, there was rawness, postmodern honesty. “Script for a Jester’s Tear” was inspired by a Fish breakup. “When I was doing the vocal I actually cried in the studio, it hit me that bad,” he told an interviewer.48

  “There were plenty of similar bands around,” said Mark Kelly. “The difference was that the lyrics and musical content were always more important to us than how much we could show off. We weren’t in the same instrumental caliber as Yes or ELP. But we knew how to construct a song, whereas I don’t think ELP have ever written a song in their lives.”49

  Still, Marillion trusted its sound to one of the elite group of producers who could connect them to the first stirrings of progressive rock. David Hitchcock, who had produced their favorite Genesis records, said he was ready to go, and ready to shake up his approach for the 1980s. David “said he would do anything to avoid getting a sound like Genesis or Camel,” Fish said.50

  “Script for a Jester’s Tear,” the opening and title track from the album, leaned into everything that had been judged and found uncool. It began with a soft Fish vocal and arpeggiated piano, which led into a waltz-time section starting about a minute in, with vocals over keyboard and bass. When the full band rushed in, playing in 7/4 time, the echoes of Genesis were unmissable.

  The song shifted into straight 4/4 time then, in a hard-rocking section at the 2:30 mark (complete with wailing guitar solos), which was interrupted by a quiet, waltz-time section with bass, acoustic guitar, and synthesizer. Something new was being built; it harked back to what the band members had grown up on, but it showed off the edge of pop metal.

  “He Knows You Know” was the single, at number thirty-five. “Marillion think the Peter Gabriel incarnation of Genesis was shit hot, so much so that they feel compelled to hobble into a recording studio to transfer their necromantic urges to record,” declared Edwin Pouncey in Sounds.51

  The disbelief at something like this—something wrenched out of time and thrust into the 1980s—was a ready source of amusement. Fish delighted in poking the interviewers who probed him. “I stay in the bath for too long,” Fish would tell an interviewer for NME. “Nothing cosmic. Look, I’m too aggressive to be a hippy. I go straight for the throat. I do not take shit.”52

  “Judging by the band’s dreadfully corny costumes, Marillion’s budget doesn’t stretch very far,” quipped the reporter Bell.53 “The effect Script for a Jester’s Tear will have on one section of the public ought not to be understated,” Bell wrote in another review for Sounds. “At least, it’s the coming of age of an exciting new British talent. At best, it could instigate a new musical awareness among the whole post-punk generation.”54

  “Complete with boils in his ears and harlequin pants, he [Fish] acted the part of the court jester, getting off to a healthy start with sexist jokes about herpes,” wrote
Lucy O’Brien in a review of a Bournemouth show. “Unfunny jokes directed at poufters, queers and ‘pathetic girls in Chelsea bedsits with Marks and Spencer duvets and a letter from the bloke they first slept with’ raised a few guffaws, though most of the crowd (90 percent men) remained, in Fish’s words, ‘unnaturally quiet.’ ”55

  The band leaned into the image. Whenever he was asked about his influences, Fish not only rattled off progressive groups, but spotted dishonesty in the bands that would not admit their fan base. “You’ve got your Yes, Genesis, Soft Machine,” Fish told an interviewer. “A lot of Floyd stuff. King Crimson. Gentle Giant. That’s what I was brought up with. The punk thing made it embarrassing for anyone to stand up and actually say that ‘I like Genesis or Floyd. . . .’ But we stood up right at the beginning, and said our influences are ’70s bands. I was too young for the Beatles. The Beatles and the Stones were somebody’s big brother’s music, you know? By the time I was switching on the radio, it was the new album by Tangerine Dream or Topographic Oceans.”56

  In command of his own band, Fish was a taskmaster. After Mick Pointer blew his part on “Charting the Single,” Fish demanded that he be fired, and Pointer went. “I was playing Hammersmith Odeon one night and two weeks later I was standing in the dole queue,” Pointer said. “I had my dream taken away from me.”57 Many years later, Pointer would say, “They are part of my past, and I’m happy about it, but I’ve moved on.”58

  Andy Ward, whose work with Camel gave Marillion a link to progressive history, lost favor over his drinking. “They had a ridiculous opinion of themselves,” Ward assessed, years later.59 (Ward declined to be interviewed for this book.)

  “The audience hated us,” said Mark Kelly. “I remember one guy standing on a seat in the front row with his trousers down.”60

  The group was welcomed more warmly by the bands that had clearly been its inspiration. Peter Hammill lent Fish an album that inspired the song “Assassing.” It was more of a problem for aspiring “third wave” progressive acts. The music press’s aperture was small; so, went the belief, was that of the potential market. Pallas, another revivalist group, enjoyed the full support of EMI for its first album, only to see the label’s enthusiasm vanish with the second. “We were supposed to be the flagship for the relaunch of Harvest,” Pallas’s Mike Stobbie told the author Paul Stump. “Whether they thought it was too much competition for Marillion and the market wouldn’t support two bands, I don’t know.”61

  In November 1984, as the breakout band of the new scene, Marillion went back into the studio. “We were so useless at coming up with starts and finishes to songs,” admitted Kelly.62 The noodling led to some successful, wide-open songs. It also began to lay the seeds of a band split. “Fish grabs me and holds me up against the wall, screaming that I’m holding back the best songs for my solo album . . . and here’s a six foot six Scot hurling abuse at me!” said Kelly. “Any friendship that was left in me for Fish went away at that moment. It was like a switch flicked off.”63

  To the rest of the world, outside of the band, Marillion was finally breaking through. The painful studio sessions produced the album Misplaced Childhood, which gave up none of the band’s pretensions but carried two melodic, radio singles. “Kayleigh” became a hit; the album itself broke past the critical consensus and went to number one.

  Marillion’s crossover fan base was like nothing else in the 1980s. The singles brought pop fans. The prog anoraks had always been there. But there were metal fans too. During the band’s 1986 tour, Fish’s voice started to go. “Something had to give,” said Fish. “I ended up paying for my sins by losing the use of my voice for a month.”64

  The band truly started to fray after the long tours ended and EMI was owed a follow-up. Clutching at Straws would be a concept album, the story of a character named Torch who was remarkable for being sadly unremarkable. “Warm Wet Circles” and “That Time of the Night,” interlocking songs that stretched over ten minutes, were about nothing larger than “getting trapped in the 9–5 syndrome.”65

  Of Fish, Mark Kelly said, “He used to stay long enough to tell us the music we were working on was ‘shite’ and then leave. To be fair, we were as complimentary about the lyrics he showed us.”66

  When the tour was over, Fish acted on years of impulse and packed it in. He would remain with the label; the band would have to move on without him. “The musical directions of the band have diversified to such an extent I realized the time had come to embark upon a solo career,” Fish wrote in a message to fans. “We weren’t as devastated as people might have thought,” said Kelly. For Rothery, it felt like a weight had been hefted off his shoulders.67

  ROBERT FRIPP’S LATEST “small, mobile unit” avoided the pop dynamics of the 1980s. It had been several years since anything was recorded under the name “King Crimson.” The guitar had not changed in that time, though Adrian Belew, like Fripp, had been an experimenter. The bass had changed, with Tony Levin bringing the Chapman Stick, a fretless instrument with greater diversity of sound, into the studio. And Bill Bruford had begun adding electronic drums to the repertoire.

  With his typical combination of aplomb and mystery, Fripp announced the new band to the media as a happy accident, a reformation that he had not intended. “King Crimson has a life of its own, despite what its members say and do,” he said. “Any thought-form which attracts interest becomes partly iconic and since the group ‘ceased to exist’ in 1974 interest has continued. At the beginning of rehearsals during the first week of April, I recognized this potential hovering behind the band, an available energy if we chose to plug in.”68

  Bruford was the only member familiar with how Fripp really worked. Levin, wrote Fripp in his diary, seemed to have no stress at all about the group’s improvisational approach. Bruford knew what he was in for. “It starts out as a stream of negatives first off, which cracks many a lesser man,” said Bruford. “ ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that, and I suggest you don’t do this. By the way, I also recommend you don’t do that.’ You’re in a prison and you’ve got to find your way out of things. I quite like that. I must be a masochist or something, but I don’t feel right unless I’m imprisoned and told to find a way around it.”69

  Belew became the closest collaborator in songwriting—a process that involved intimate time in the studio, trading ideas, and being ready when one was trashed. “The difficult part being me and Robert sitting down hours and hours and hours every day trying to figure out how to do something and how to make a two-man guitar team something,” said Belew. “Then me going away with anything that’s supposed to turn into a song and figuring out how to do that—ha, ha, ha! How to write a melody over some of these crazy figures we were coming up with and odd time signatures.”70

  In his diaries, Fripp expressed a joy about what the band was writing—the vindication of the “Drive to 1981.” He and Belew would throw notes to each other. One might lay down the tricky melody of a piece; the other would strike out with a solo. “Elephant Talk,” which became the first song on the new band’s album, began with the low flutter of Levin’s bass, which picked up speed and then slowed, like a dropped coin spinning around a sink. The guitars slowly joined in, over a Bruford drum pattern that crashed at the end of every bar. Belew, the new vocalist, introduced himself with Sprechstimme. “Talk, it’s only talk,” he sang. “Arguments! Agreements! Advice! Answers! Articulate announcements! It’s only talk.” Ninety-nine seconds into the song came the revelation of the name. As Fripp clipped out notes, Belew strangled his guitar and coaxed a sound that really did approximate the moan of an elephant.

  “Discipline” synthesized everything Fripp had done in his postprog years, with some of the ambient experimentation replaced by Belew’s pop. “Thela Hun Ginjeet” was the band’s first dance song, albeit one with Belew describing a mugging attempt where one might have expected to hear vocals. “Matte Kudasai” was an elliptical love song, with its lover saying the title phrase (Japanese for “please wait a second�
�) to a boisterous American. “The interest from foreign press is remarkable, while the English press contributes permanent cynicism,” Fripp wrote in his diary, portions of which were published by Musician magazine.71

  Like the new Yes, the new King Crimson threatened to split before anyone could see it. Levin worried about the opportunities he was pushing off in order to tour as a full band member—a new experience for him. Belew, with his more melodic, Beatles-esque tendencies, deeply felt material, sometimes went around the unwritten rules of the unit. “AB has written lots of ‘simple, commercial songs’ which seem out of place with the ‘serious, influential’ people he works with,” said Fripp. “He needs to record them and get them out of his system.”72

  The deal, quickly reached, would allow Belew to record his own solo albums in between his Crimson duties. With no other problems to sort out, the band was able to release Discipline in September 1981, seven years since the end of the band’s previous lineup, and four since the Drive to 1981.

  Critics, who could be so harsh to the old progressive groups and the revivalists, knew that Fripp was building out something else. There were holdouts; Melody Maker turned its lasers on “The Sheltering Sky,” an instrumental track in which Belew pulled notes that sounded like a Muslim call to prayer, labeling it “a drippy, overlong piece of doodling that should have Genesis fans closing their eyes and muttering phrases like ‘distinguished musicianship’ while the rest of us fall asleep.”73

  The problem inside King Crimson, at that moment, was not that anyone agreed with the critics. It was a creative tension that usually aided the band, and occasionally caused it to split. After one disagreement during the recording of Beat, the second album, Fripp bolted the studio and had to be begged back by Bruford. “Heartbeat,” a Belew composition more easygoing and melodic than almost anything else in the catalogue, held no interest for Fripp, who considered his solo “limp.” “I had nothing to do with the mixing of ‘Beat,’ nor did I feel able to promote it,” said Fripp.74