In the Court of the Crimson King is the album that invented progressive rock — five tracks of jazz, Mellotron, medieval grandeur and apocalyptic fury, made by a band who had existed for less than a year. Released in 1969, it announced a new art form, and it broke its makers apart within weeks.

The short version

In the Court of the Crimson King (1969) is the debut album by King Crimson, self-produced at Wessex Sound Studios. The original five are guitarist Robert Fripp, multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald, bassist and singer Greg Lake, drummer Michael Giles and lyricist Peter Sinfield, a full member who also designed the sleeve and ran the lights. From the ferocity of ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’ to the Mellotron majesty of the title track, it defined a genre at a stroke.

Eleven months

King Crimson first rehearsed in January 1969. By July, playing only their seventh concert and with no record to their name, they opened for the Rolling Stones at the free Hyde Park concert, before a crowd numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Word spread across Europe and America, and when the album appeared in October it was an immediate success. The name was Peter Sinfield’s: historically a crimson king was a monarch under whose reign came civil unrest and bloodshed, which suited the music exactly. Sessions with an experienced producer had already been abandoned; the band recorded themselves. And by December, after eleven months, it was over. McDonald and Giles left in San Francisco, Lake soon after. Fripp called it heartbreaking, and rebuilt King Crimson again and again in the decades that followed.

The sound

Nothing had sounded like this. Ian McDonald’s Mellotron pours orchestral strings and choirs over the record, while his saxophone and flute carry it from ferocity to pastoral calm. Robert Fripp’s guitar is angular, precise and unlike any of his contemporaries. Michael Giles drums with a jazz musician’s touch and a rock musician’s power, and Greg Lake sings with a beauty that makes the darkness bearable. Peter Sinfield’s words summon madness, war and empty courts. Across five tracks the album swings from proto-metal to chamber music to free improvisation, and holds together perfectly.

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The songs

‘21st Century Schizoid Man’ opens the album in howling distortion, an anti-war protest wrapped around a jazz-metal middle section that Ian McDonald had first written during his years as an army bandsman. It was the last song recorded, and the entire instrumental backing was captured in a single live take. ‘I Talk to the Wind,’ the only piece carried over from the band’s earlier incarnation, is a flute-led lament that Sinfield thought his finest lyric. ‘Epitaph’ is Mellotron-drenched grandeur, ‘Moonchild’ drifts into twelve minutes of free improvisation, and the title track closes the record like a coronation.

Reception and legacy

Pete Townshend called it an uncanny masterpiece, and Rolling Stone ranks it second among the greatest progressive albums ever made. Its influence is beyond argument: the Mellotron, the long-form ambition, the fusion of jazz and classical with rock aggression, all begin here. The cover has become as famous as the music — a screaming face painted by Barry Godber, a computer programmer and friend of Sinfield, who used his own reflection in a mirror as the model. It was the only album cover he ever painted. Fripp has said the sleeve and the record belonged together, both strange, both powerful, both classics.

The verdict

In the Court of the Crimson King is essential listening, and the only sensible place to begin with King Crimson — indeed with progressive rock itself. It is fierce, beautiful, frightening and tender, often within the same minute, and more than five decades on it has not aged a day. Come for the shock of ‘21st Century Schizoid Man,’ stay for the ache of ‘Epitaph’ and the splendour of the title track, and hear five musicians conjure an entire genre out of nothing at all.

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