When Police guitarist Andy Summers got together with King Crimson mastermind Robert Fripp, they were just looking to have some fun as two like-minded guitarists who were perceived to be similarly innovative with what they did.
“At that age, we were dicking around in the studio, trying out everything and trying to make exotic sounds that worked,” he explains in an interview with UCR. “It’s very much a reflection of the era.” The pair released two albums, 1982’s I Advance Masked and 1984’s Bewitched and to their surprise, they found there was an audience keenly interested in hearing what they’d done together. “The first one went inside the Billboard Top 50, which was amazing for an instrumental record like that.”
The Complete Recordings 1981-1984 collects the work that they did on an expansive 3 CD / 1 Blu-ray set. It’s exhaustively comprehensive, thanks to Summers, who held on to two-inch analog masters of all of the material that the two recorded together. But even he was surprised to find a trove of previously unreleased material, so much so, that they were able to assemble a third album, Mother Hold the Candle Steady. “I was sort of shocked that we had never used them,” Summers says now. “You know, we must have been very persnickety about what we were putting out, but the [recordings] were really nice. They really constitute a third album.”
During a recent conversation, he discussed his working relationship with Fripp.
How did you first meet Robert?
You know, it’s a good question, because we’re both from the same town [Bournemouth] in England. We used to go to the same guitar shop, this is when we were kids. I know that Robert went in and out of there. I don’t know if I ever met him in that period. I certainly knew of him, it was a small town. I was one of the guitar players and he was one of the other ones. He’s definitely a figure in my life, because we were from a small area. Of course, he’s King Crimson and I’m in the Police. Somewhere in there, we met. I don’t know if I contacted him or what. But we met one afternoon in New York, when we were at a photographer’s apartment and we discussed what we might do, without even picking up guitars. We just sort of said, “Well, we’ll have a go” and agreed to do it. There’s a friend of ours [Tony Arnold,] in fact, from the same small hometown, who had become a recording engineer and had a little studio [Arny’s Shack]. So we said, “Well, we’ll go there and do it there.” We really didn’t have much of an idea about what we were going to do, but as pretty experienced guitar players and guys who had been in bands, we kind of made it up in that studio. It was like, “If you play that, I’ll play this.” Or, “Keep playing that and I’m going to do a few different things on top of it.” It was that sort of thing, just working it out in the moment.
Listen to Andy Summers and Robert Fripp’s ‘Skyline’
Based on what you knew about Robert, what intrigued you about getting the chance to work with him?
Well, I knew he was the famous guitar player, the guy who had started King Crimson and had done all sorts of things. Obviously, he was very used to being in musical situations, being in the studio and making stuff work. Which is just the same as me. He’s different stylistically, I mean, Robert had a very certain way that he played and he only really did that. It was mostly polyrhythmic guitar lines that he’s very good at and that’s what he did. He didn’t play jazz or blues or anything like that. He had that certain approach that he was very good at. Musically, I think I’m more broad in my approach to the guitar. I play more different kinds of music. But my job that I felt was to use that way he could play and layer it out with other things like harmony chords and rhythmic approaches on top of what he was already doing. Once we got to that realization, it wasn’t so difficult. These are the records that came out of that.
Revisiting these albums, it feels like you both have a lot of common ground, for example, just how you like to experiment from a sonic standpoint. Both of you weren’t afraid to try random things.
No, no. It was very open, you know. That period of the ’80s was wide open. We were getting more things, like, the whole guitar pedal technology was coming along and people were excited about it. So it was a time when you could still sort of pull off new stuff that people really hadn’t heard yet. I’m proud to say that we were pretty cutting edge in what we did with those two records at that particular time.
It’s also a time where you would hear people play something and wonder, “How are they doing that?” How much did that happen for you with Robert. Were there things you were curious about?
The simple answer to that, it was all in his hands. He really had this thing and he had good chops, as we say in musician circles. He could actually play quite fast. The thing that was almost weird with him and more difficult for him, was to play in 4/4 time or straight ahead. [Laughs] It was always 5/4 and all of these different kind of [time signatures]. So I thought, “Okay, well, that’s what he does. We can mess around with that sonically and do it differently.” I felt like the way he played were the bones of a piece and I would put on the flesh, as it were. That’s the way we kind of built these pieces up.
That sticks out, listening to something like the title track from I Advance Masked, it just seems like it would have been a pretty fascinating process building these songs out with Robert.
We had a lot of fun doing it, because we weren’t the two most obvious guitar players to put together. But you know, you’ve still both got a guitar in your hands and you’re going to make these noises and if you’ve got musical taste, figure out what’s working. You just changed your path, I see what you did — you dropped that quarter-note at the beginning of the part. Real musical stuff like that. You work your way through it both musically and intellectually and also, [it depends] on what your taste is. Do you like this? Is it exciting or is it boring? What I think we did was that we created our own sort of ethos with the two of us playing that didn’t really sound like anyone else. The way the two of us came together, it came out sounding pretty original.
Watch Andy Summers and Robert Fripp’s Video for ‘I Advance Masked’
It’s always interesting when musicians come together, you know? I’ve made many records — 15 solo albums and many collaborations. But you get together with somebody and try and keep it open. Let’s just see what they can do. I don’t try to lay a heavy trip on anybody. Let’s see what you’re good at. And I go, “You know what? You’re playing a lot of cliches. I don’t like that.” But what I find with, let’s say, drummers and bass players, especially here in Los Angeles, they’re very skillful and highly technical, but they’re not necessarily composers or people who imagine different kinds of music. So I don’t want to get into playing some sort of jazz/rock cliches, I’m trying to find something very fresh and see if I can find somebody who can move their imagination to where I feel the piece should be. The last two records that I made, I made alone, completely. I played the bass and drums on them as well. I found that very freeing in a way, rather than having to instruct somebody or get somebody who is really talented to stop playing cliches and try to find a different way to approach it. When it comes to music making, it’s always interesting.
What are you working on presently?
I’ve actually just come off the road. I got back [recently] from Japan. I did some shows there and I was in Australia and New Zealand before that. So now, I’m stopping for a while. I know I’m going to have to go all over South America in July and August and then they’re lining up some shows in September and October. You know, I’ve been doing a solo show where I play to photography on a big screen. I’ve really enjoyed that and it’s been sold out eveywhere in Australia and Japan. So I’ll be doing [more of] that. It’s almost like a multimedia show, all of these sequences of photography that I show and I have different kinds of music for each section — some solo guitar and some with backing. I do a lot of talking in between and the show gets up to about two hours now, but I look forward to doing it. I need to get in the studio and work on making a new record. That’s my driving urge at the moment.
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Gallery Credit: Nick DeRiso
