In the Wake of Poseidon is the album King Crimson made without a band — Robert Fripp and lyricist Peter Sinfield left alone with a hit record, a record company and nobody to play the music. Released in 1970, it follows the shape of the debut so closely that it has been argued over ever since, and it went higher in the charts than its predecessor.

The short version

In the Wake of Poseidon (1970) is the second studio album by King Crimson, produced by Robert Fripp and Peter Sinfield. Greg Lake sings almost all of it, Michael and Peter Giles play drums and bass, and saxophonist Mel Collins and jazz pianist Keith Tippett arrive for the first time — all of them as session musicians. Reaching number 4 in the UK, it consciously echoes the debut, from the ferocious ‘Pictures of a City’ to the Mellotron epic of the title track.

A band that no longer existed

The debut had made King Crimson famous and then destroyed them. Ian McDonald and Michael Giles walked away after the American tour, and Keith Emerson soon carried Greg Lake off to form Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Fripp and Sinfield were the only members left. They made the record anyway, seven months later, hiring their departed colleagues as session players. Lake agreed to sing, negotiating to be paid with the band’s PA equipment. The Giles brothers came in on drums and bass. Keith Tippett was invited to join properly and declined. And at one point an unknown singer named Elton John was actually booked for the sessions, before Fripp thought better of it and cancelled.

The sound

The shape is deliberately familiar: a savage opener, a fragile ballad, a Mellotron-drenched epic, then a stranger second side. Robert Fripp, filling Ian McDonald’s shoes as well as his own, plays some of the heaviest Mellotron ever committed to tape, and his guitar is rawer and more airless than before. Michael Giles drums with extraordinary grace, his brother Peter is fluid and melodic beneath him, and Mel Collins’s saxophone and Keith Tippett’s spiky piano push the music toward jazz — a direction Crimson would follow for the next two albums. Greg Lake, halfway out of the door, sings magnificently.

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The songs

Three brief pieces called ‘Peace’ bind the album together. ‘Pictures of a City’ is a snarling, brass-driven cousin of ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’; the wistful ‘Cadence and Cascade,’ a portrait of two women who follow a touring musician, is sung not by Lake but by Gordon Haskell, Fripp’s friend since the age of eleven, with Fripp himself on celeste. The title track is the band’s most Mellotron-heavy recording. ‘Cat Food’ is a lurching, comic single, and the sprawling ‘Devil’s Triangle’ adapts Holst’s ‘Mars’ — renamed because the composer’s estate forbade the original title.

Reception and legacy

It reached number 4 in Britain, higher than the debut. Contemporary reviewers admired the playing and thought it better produced than In the Court of the Crimson King; later critics have been harder, faulting its reliance on that album’s template. Both are right, and the argument has never stopped. The album also delivered curiosities: the band mimed ‘Cat Food’ on Top of the Pops, their only British television appearance until 1981, and a fragment of ‘The Devil’s Triangle’ turned up in a Doctor Who serial the following year. Gordon Haskell returned as singer and bassist for Lizard, and Mel Collins stayed for years.

The verdict

In the Wake of Poseidon is not the first King Crimson album to hear — that will always be In the Court of the Crimson King — but it is far better than its reputation as a copy, and it is the obvious next step. Approach it as a companion piece rather than a sequel, and its virtues emerge: the towering Mellotron, Michael Giles’s drumming, Greg Lake’s finest vocal for the band. Come for ‘Pictures of a City,’ stay for the title track, and hear one man rebuild a band from nothing.

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