In the early 1980s, Andy Summers and Robert Fripp – each of whom represented two opposite ends of the electric guitar playing spectrum – formed an unlikely partnership and joined forces for a string of avant-garde albums that jammed together their distinct worlds of stadium rock and prog.
In the new issue of Guitarist, Summers sits down to discuss how the obscure and unexpected guitar duo came to be thanks to a “cosmic connection” – even if he never particularly warmed to some of Fripp’s previous work.
“I wasn’t into King Crimson at all. Definitely not my kind of music,” Summers recalls when asked about the collaboration’s origins, before recalling how the pair swam in similar sonic circles when they were growing up.
“But Robert and I come from the same area of England,” he goes on. “I was part of the Bournemouth music scene and you heard about this ‘weird kid’ out in Wimborne – and it was Robert Fripp because he has a certain style.
“At 16, I got a job as a guitarist in a hotel band with some very stellar jazz musicians. I eventually left and went to London with Zoot Money – actually, I got fired for trying to pick up hotel girls – and Robert took over the ‘guitar seat’, let’s call it. So there’s a sort of cosmic connection there, I suppose.”
Years later, after Summers had flown to America to study music at university, the soon-to-be Police guitarist was in need of reconnecting with the music scene, and it was none other than Fripp who helped him do that, hooking him up with drummer Mike Giles, who was about to go on tour with Neil Sedaka.
Success with The Police soon followed, but before long Summers was on the hunt for another creative outlet to flex his experimental six-string muscles.
“I subsequently became the world’s most famous guitarist with The Police,” he goes on. “And being the kind of searching musician I am, I started looking around.
“I was starting to feel somewhat musically hemmed in by being in that band. I wanted to stretch my legs and play with somebody else, just to see how I’d do, almost like an experiment on myself.
“At that time, Robert was living in New York and I was there all the time. So he popped into my mind: ‘Oh yeah, Robert Fripp, he’s a good guitarist. Maybe we could do something together.’ It started with a fairly casual hook-up, when we went to practise in a photographer’s flat in Soho.”
Those casual jams turned into two albums – 1982’s I Advance Masked and 1984’s Bewitched – and a previously unheard compilation of material named Mother Hold The Candle Steady, which was recently unearthed and released for the first time as part of The Complete Recordings reissue.
Visit Magazines Direct to pick up the latest issue of Guitarist to read the full interview with Andy Summers.
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