King Crimson - 2014 NYC CD Due 10th June

For King Crimson, New York was never just a tour-stop – it was a recurring stage in the band’s mythology. Starting with the 1969 Fillmore East breakthrough and running through those early-’70s returns, climaxing in the Larks’-era farewell to that chapter at Central Park in 1974. 

And when Crimson kept mutating, the city kept calling them back: Robert Fripp later pointed to the six nights at the Savoy in 1981 (after rehearsals tucked away in the garment district) as a high-water mark, and later line-ups - the Double Trio, Double Duo, and a 2008 quintet with newly recruited Gavin Harrison at the Nokia Theatre  continued the Manhattan connection, right up to a major reset at the same venue (by then the Best Buy Theatre) in 2014.

That 2014 band looked like nothing else on the circuit: three drummers lined up across the front - an idea Fripp described as a sudden “point of seeing - turning rhythm into a moving, interlocked engine”. 

Crucially, they didn’t treat the back catalogue like museum pieces; they played it as living material, rebuilt with microscopic attention rather than copied note-for-note. The “drumsons” delivered a choreographed surge and uncanny unity (Harrison joked it felt like “one drummer with six legs and six arms”), and a calmer group chemistry let the seven-piece hit with brute force and fine detail at once - refreshing older classics and giving newer pieces extra muscle. 

In New York, moments like “Starless,” framed with a deliberate red-light nod to 1974, landed as proof that Crimson could honour its past without slipping into nostalgia: a band that kept reinventing its own language, still pushing forward with no obvious limit.

From 2014 to 2021 King Crimson played music that was, in keeping with Robert Fripp's approach, "new whenever it is performed", freshly minted each night for a new audience to hear. The band would frequently stay in one city for more than one night so that demand for tickets could be met while still appearing in venues where all of the audience could both see and hear fully. 

1. Introductory Soundscape
2. Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (Part I)  
3. Pictures of a City
4. A Scarcity of Miracles
5. The Letters
6. The Sailor’s Tale 
7. The Hell Hounds of Krim 
8. Red
9. Improv: Hoodoo 
10. The Talking Drum
11. Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (Part II)
12. VROOOM
13. Coda: Marine 475
14. The Light of Day
15. 21st Century Schizoid Man