IMPORTANT NOTICE
The following news item was posted on the morning of April 1st 2009, which makes it an April fool joke. Everyone at the time had a laugh as you do. However, in the years since this post was uploaded, it's been brought to our attention that it's now being quoted as an accurate KC factoid which it most certainly is not.
For the record in 2022, I can confirm, as the person who wrote the original post, that this is 100% my invention, made up, a lot of hooey - Julian Lloyd Webber did not play the cello on Red, One More Red Nightmare, or any other King Crimson recording. The identity of the cellist on the album remains unknown.
Sid Smith
17th December 2022
PS Thank you to Aymeric Leroy for bringing this to our attention.
Now, back to 2009...
Steven Wilson’s ongoing remixing of the King Crimson catalogue for 5.1 has unearthed some interesting gems. As outlined in a recent entry over on the blog, the appearance of all kinds of previously unknown items have found been found as a result of working with the original multi-tracks.
Whilst there are many aural excitements contained on the tapes themselves, it was the multi-track boxes and the track information which have finally provided the answer to a long standing mystery: the identity of the cello player on Red.
The personnel details for the track Red (whose working title at this point we learn was Burning Candle believed to be taken from Bill Bruford’s favourite expression at the time "oh, yeah that really burns my candle!") are listed by engineer George Chkiantz as "RF gt / BB/ drms/JW bs/ALW:cllo.
Working on the basis that there aren’t too many cello players with the initials ALW it didn’t take long to track down Mr. Julian Lloyd Webber. Though he is best known in the classical world, Lloyd Webber also spent part of his youth as a jobbing session player. "To be honest I don’t really remember much about it. I think it might have been a session out at Barnes but of course we did so many back then.
I do recall one member of the band hasitly writing out a score for my parts and I know they had a couple of other Contra bass players waiting to record parts for another tune they were doing as well. But that’s it really. Sorry.
The only other thing I do recall, was my friend Jon (Hiseman) being suitably impressed when I told him I’d done something for King Crimson when he and I were recording Variations a couple of years later."
