Robert Fripp 3: The League Of Gentlemen

At a brisk pace to realize his musical vision in his self-imposed “Drive To 1981”, Robert Fripp’s next trick was to get funky. Well, not really; to his mind the natural extension of discotronics would be music that would move your body as well as your mind, and you needed a rhythm section for that. He’d already shared some of this vision on the Under Heavy Manners half of his last album, so he found Barry Andrews, fresh from XTC, to play organ, plus Sara Lee on bass and Jonny Toobad on drums, and thus the League of Gentlemen was formed.

Four months of work on and off the road resulted in something of a repertoire that would make up their one and only album, except that the drummer turned out to have substance abuse issues, so he only played on two tracks of what would be released as The League Of Gentlemen. The other tracks were handled by Kevin Wilkinson, who’d played in the band that had opened up for the League, which is how he learned the songs. To flesh out what he already deemed less than an accurate representation of what the band could do, Fripp took a nod from Exposure and inserted various spoken word sections, some taken from lectures by his spiritual guide J.G. Bennett, some from various Roches, some of a woman in ecstasy, and some lifted from the radio a la My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. The effect is very much like Zappa’s Lumpy Gravy, and just as strange.

One of these collages opens the album, with “Inductive Resonance” providing relief in an actual musical composition. “Minor Man” is another groove of sorts, but with Danielle Dax mewling over the top. While likely impossible to request by name, “Heptaparaparshinokh” is a bopping little number named after a “cosmic law of seven”, as is the easier-to-pronounce “Dislocated”. “Pareto Optimum I” appears to be synth-based, building slowly on repeated notes, almost Frippertronic-style, while “Eye Needles” is back to the whole combo again. Another collage appears to discuss Fripp’s prowess in non-musical areas, ending side one.

“Pareto Optimum II” continues the experiment of the first, and then “Cognitive Dissonance” is another band track overlaid with Bennett lecturing. The grooves in “H.G. Wells” and “Trap” are also marred, frankly, by voices and moaning where they didn’t need any, but if you listen closely you can hear predictions of the next King Crimson album. That’s it for the band; “Ochre” is a more melodic exploration on the “Pareto Optimum” ideas, and another collage closes us out.

Fripp has maintained that the album was a compromise to meet a contractual obligation, so The League Of Gentlemen has never been reissued in any form; the seven tracks that featured the whole band were included, with extraneous commentary mixed out, on 1985’s God Save The King compilation, which also sampled rejigged tracks from Under Heavy Manners. This limited availability only underscored the original album’s shortcomings.

Besides, the band was at its best live. Years later, once his own DGM label began plundering his archives, Thrang Thrang Gozinbulx presented a compilation of performances by the original combo from club shows in the months before they attempted to put together the album proper. It’s accurately dubbed an “official bootleg”, as the source cassettes were from the back of the venues, with lots of crowd noise competing with the band. Unfortunately, the crowd sounds so rapturous and the size of a stadium crowd, almost comically, to the point of sounding canned.

That said, the music cooks. Besides demonstrating a lot of energy—somewhere between the B-52’s and Metal Box PiL—they seem more like they’re playing together, displaying dynamics missing in the studio. We also get to hear pieces that didn’t make the original album, including three variations of the title track, the more measured “Boy At Piano”; the deceptively titled “Christian Children Marching, Singing”; “Ooh! Mr. Fripp”, which predicts the type of thing he’d play in his next band; and the much slower but still groovy “Farewell Johnny Brill”. Hidden all the way at the end of the disc, following a lengthy silence, are various onstage announcements by Fripp beseeching the band to party and the audience to dance. (Other gigs from the original Gents are available in decent-for-bootleg quality for download at Fripp’s website, as well as in the Exposures box. There we can hear the crowd was certainly receptive, but more engaged beyond mere cheering. Steven Wilson’s modern mixes of the studio tracks, including the God Save The King selections and some unreleased, are also in the set.)

Robert Fripp The League Of Gentlemen (1981)—2½
Robert Fripp/The League Of Gentlemen God Save The King (1985)—2½
The League Of Gentlemen Thrang Thrang Gozinbulx (1996)—3