DVD REVIEW: Inside King Crimson 1972-1975 (Classic Rock Productions)
When I got back from my excursion, a small brown paper packet was waiting for me on the mat. Yes, this "controversial" DVD has finally been released and I have a copy held tightly in my grubby, little mitt. After all our travelling, the first thing we did when we got home was put on some tea, make a sandwich and watch this. I made The Missus watch the DVD too as I wanted an unbiased opinion.
I'm going to keep this relatively short because there's no point deconstructing a DVD that deconstructs a band's music. The DVD itself is full of talking heads sitting down and talking your way through the career of KC covering this time period. They talk about the three albums from this period and kind of go through each album in a song-by-song way. It's hard to guage who this is aimed at because there's only snatches of musical analysis. The people involved are a couple of music journalists that I am aware (one of which I actually worked with and spent drinking time with) and some musicians and record producers that I am totally unaware of. What do they bring to the proceedings? Not a lot. They are a bunch of numbskulls who sit there and state the bleeding obvious. There are a couple of glaring mistakes (like the one where a journo claims that Book of Saturday was written by Pete Sinfield), but in all the information is correct.
What makes this a worthwhile purchase is the inclusion of a recent interview with David Cross. He talks about his time with the band and how the group dynamic worked. Cross also gets out his electric violin and demonstrates for the camera. For diehard fans, it is worth seeing just for him.
The funny thing is that I really like the way this DVD was put together structurally. There's some good use of archive footage (Beatclub and "Easy Money" taken from an EG/Atlantic promo tape) and the creative way that CRP uses still images over live recordings to give you a feel of the live act. Now if they had only dropped all the numbskulls and included me to gibber over the footage, it would have made for a much more entertaining and factually accurate (and enlightening) DVD. But they didn't...
If I had gotten this DVD when I was 17, it would have got a full five star review because no information was available for the band and it includes a rough basic explanation of what KC was about at the time. For a beginner just getting into the band, it would be a good road map for someone with no knowledge of the band whatsoever. But if you are a complete anal gimboid, you will turn your nose up at the screen and exclaim "pooey, pooey!" when the idiots blather on. By the end of the DVD, I was wondering if any of them had actually LISTENED to the albums from this period and that they were just reciting pub talk that their better-informed chums had spouted at a previous sitting at the local hack watering-hole.
It's good for one sitting and for the sight of a flabby John Wetton slaughtering Red and Starless with his band, but after that it will sit on your DVD collection gathering dust. But saying that, there will be people out there who will enjoy this. Like those, who have never seen the old footage before or who are new to KC. (The talking heads do talk highly of KC and of RF and how underrated the band is and how influential they are, so it partially redeems itself there). The Missus thought it was good, but got bored of the heads saying the same old thing over and over again.
As the DVD usually a star rating out of five to rate each of the KC albums critiqed on the disc, I shall return the favour. I will give it a MOR:
*** out of *****
And here's a little taster of one of the best bits from the DVD. It's David Cross playing some violin and talking about his induction into the musical monster, King Crimson! :D