King Crimson

King Crimson formed in London in 1968 around Robert Fripp, Michael Giles, Greg Lake, Ian McDonald and Peter Sinfield, and then lasted decades by refusing to stay the same band. Fripp is the only constant. Everything else, the instrumentation, the personnel, the rhythmic language, was demolished and rebuilt several times over.

The first record did the damage. In the Court of the Crimson King arrived in 1969 with a mellotron loud enough to sound like an orchestra falling down a staircase, and the early progressive movement, Yes and Genesis included, spent years working through its implications. Crimson meanwhile kept moving away from what it had started. By 1973 the group was a violin-and-percussion improvising unit playing something adjacent to free jazz at volume; by 1974 it was one of the heaviest bands in England; in 1981 it returned as an interlocking, gamelan-influenced new wave group that sounded like none of the above.

That refusal is why the audience keeps growing instead of ageing. Fripp's discipline is the constant and it is an unusual kind: precise, unsentimental, hostile to nostalgia, willing to end the band outright rather than let it coast. The cult around them is largely a twenty-first-century phenomenon, built by listeners arriving at fifty years of catalogue all at once.