Andy Summers is best known as The Police's guitarist. However, his résumé goes beyond that and includes a very intriguing two-album collaboration with King Crimson's Robert Fripp. He recently talked about his longstanding relationship with Fripp and how the two recorded enough material back in the '80s to release a brand-new record in 2024.
“Well, Fripp and I, that situation was not normal. We both came from the same town in England, and he was this other guy that I'd heard about, but I'd never met him. I don't think I did… Maybe I met him once in the town I came from in England. There are a few bands, rockers, and young kids with guitars who want to be guitar players” he tells Ultimate Guitar.
“The weird thing was I played in this hotel. I was like 16 years old, and I got a gig and became a professional musician at 16 in this hotel group, until they threw me out for chasing the girls there, and Fripp took over from me. It was a weird kind of karma.
“He became the next guitar player and he was a very different player, and I can't remember much else in between, except many years later, he helped me out. He got me a gig before I was in The Police.”
Fast-forward to Police fame, and Summers felt he needed to try something else outside the band’s repertoire.
“My interest in music obviously was urging me to try other forms and other ways of playing. Then I had this idea of trying to do a guitar duet with Robert, particularly because we had this local tie-up in our lives from the same town. He was famous, I was famous, there'd probably be an interest in it.”
He continues, “So we got together in New York. Actually, I remember we got together in someone's apartment in the Village and were jamming, trying to see what we could come up with and what the music would be. I could do what I could do, and Robert has got his particular style too, that sort of polyrhythmic way of playing the guitar.”
“And then we went back to our hometown in England. There was a little recording studio, which was also run by a guy that we grew up with. It was called Arny's Shack, a peculiar little recording studio. He was a sort of eccentric. He smoked a pipe while he recorded. We got there, and then we just started working things out.”
While the pair released two albums, 1982's I Advance Masked and 1984's Bewitched, they had enough material for a third installment. These tapes were recently unearthed after someone who knows both Fripp and Summers encouraged the Police guitarist to dig into his archives.
“He was very agitated about it — he works with Robert. I said, ‘Yeah, well, I've got them, but they're all in storage.’ All the two-inch tapes, we put them away. He said, ‘I'd really like to listen to those. Can you get them?’ So we kind of had to go through the motions but eventually, the tapes got out of the storage. They got sent and he got them in England. He reduced them down to whatever. And there's about 12 other tracks.”
Summers admits he was “kind of knocked out” when he heard the tracks, which ultimately led to the decision to release the third installment.
“I went, ‘God, why didn't we do this? Why was I throwing those out?’ Because I was essentially the producer. But listening to some of these songs all these years later, I thought I'd listen to them and think, ‘Oh, my god, well, I see why. They were no good. They're terrible. That's why we didn't use them.’
“But they weren't. They're all really much like the other tracks that we actually put out. And my god, it's a good album.”
A release date for the new/old material has yet to be announced.
