Watch Robert Fripp perform King Crimson’s Red with Daryl Hall unrehearsed
According to Fripp, the track used to take King Crimson three days to rehearse fully.
Image: C Brandon / Getty
King Crimson frontman Robert Fripp has appeared on a recent episode of Live From Daryl’s House, a long-running series in which popular artists perform with Hall, known as 1/2 of duo Hall & Oates, and his own band.
In Episode 87, Fripp performed King Crimson’s Red from the band’s 1974 album of the same title, without any rehearsal with the group beforehand. As Hall says in the video, it used to take King Crimson three days to practise the track before a live performance.
Elsewhere in the episode, viewers are treated to three songs from Hall’s 1980 debut solo album Sacred Songs – NYCNY, Babs And Babs, and The Farther Away I Am – all three of which Fripp had served as a producer on.
They also play You Burn Me Up (I’m A Cigarette) from Exposure, Fripp’s first solo album, and a cover of David Bowie’s Heroes, of which Fripp played guitar on the original recording.
In the intro for the video, Fripp and Co. sit around a dinner table, and Hall recalls how the two of them first met. He remembers the pair first meeting backstage in Toronto, and then again when Fripp came to a Hall & Oates show in Bournemouth in 1974.
Later, Hall says ahead of the performance, “I wanna tell everybody we still have not rehearsed.” As the show then moves to footage of the band setting up, Hall asks them if they have gone over the track beforehand: “A little bit,” they say as he laughs. Hall later praises the band for playing the track without any former practise in the ending credits.
Watch the performance below:
Since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020. Fripp has been performing popular songs from his kitchen on YouTube with his wife Toyah Wilcox. The pair named the series Sunday Lunch, and it went on to earn such high numbers of viewers that the duo eventually took it on the road as a live show.