UK journalist Ian Ravendale caught up with Fripp in 1982. In an unpublished interview, Fripp outlined why Frippertronics was an important corrective in a music industry that was out of kilter. “The first was the escalation in the size of the rock event. Initially Crimson would pay at the Marquee to five hundred people packed in where one could savour the odours of everyone else in the room, to large events at the top, nearly three-quarters of a million. Playing in a theatre to even three and a half thousand people is, for me, remote. Secondly, because of the increasing acceptance of rock music, as with the theatre films and so on as being spectator sport, to be passively enjoyed.

And thirdly because of the vampiric relationship between the audience and the performer, where each humours the individual pretensions of the other. And the artiste goes through a series of manoeuvres that enable the audience perhaps to vicariously enjoy certain aspects of life, and in return, the star is humoured in terms of his personal conceits, aspirations financially, and so on. In terms of that professional level, Frippertronics seeks to return to an intelligent world by three steps: Limiting the scale of events to record shops, offices, canteens, restaurants and so on. . . reducing the scale of the event somewhere between the scale of two hundred and two hundred and fifty people. Secondly by putting forward the idea of active listening, which gives the listener the same importance or status of the performer. And thirdly by declining to humour the pretentions, each way.”

12/08/2024