When King Crimson’s debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King, was released in October 1969, it was greeted with amazement and disbelief, with the Who’s Pete Townshend hailing it as “an uncanny masterpiece”.
Its overwhelming mix of psychedelic, jazz, folk and classical influences made it a benchmark in the story of progressive rock. Peter Sinfield’s lyrics were an integral part of its success, and they teemed with imagery by turns savage, mystical or melancholy.
Sinfield, who has died aged 80 following a period of declining health, also coined the band’s name, and recruited his friend Barry Godber to create the album’s fascinatingly grotesque sleeve artwork. Godber died shortly after the album’s release.
Perhaps it was too good, since King Crimson could never quite equal it thereafter, but Sinfield’s role in the group continued to expand over their next three albums, In the Wake of Poseidon, Lizard, and Islands. He co-produced the first two of these. While did not play an instrument with the band, as well as writing all the lyrics he ran the light show during their concerts and used a VCS3 synthesiser to add sonic effects.
However, Sinfield found himself increasingly at odds with the band’s dominant character, Robert Fripp, about their artistic direction, and in early 1972 he moved on.
Sinfield recalled how Fripp told him that “one of us has got to go, and I’m not leaving”. His skills were in demand, however. He was tasked by EG Management, who managed King Crimson, to work with their new act Roxy Music. He produced their first single, Virginia Plain, and their eponymous debut album, and both were sizeable hits.
On a solo album, Still, Sinfield played 12-string guitar and synthesiser. He had production assistance from Greg Lake, also an ex-member of King Crimson. This led to Sinfield being recruited by Lake’s new outfit, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, to write lyrics for them. He featured on the albums Brain Salad Surgery (1973), Works Volume 1 & Volume 2 (1977) and Love Beach (1978), the band’s last album before they split up. They would make a belated comeback in the 1990s.
Other projects included writing lyrics for two albums by the Italian band PFM (Premiata Forneria Marconi), Photos of Ghosts (1973) and The World Became the World (1974), both released on ELP’s Manticore label. He co-wrote several songs for No More Fear of Flying (1979), the first solo album by Procol Harum’s Gary Brooker. In 1974 he published Under the Sky, a collection of his lyrics and poems.
Born in Fulham, south-west London, Peter was the son of Deirdre and Alan Sinfield; after his parents divorced he lived with his eccentric mother. She ran a hair salon and a burger bar, and Peter was often cared for by their German housekeeper, Maria Wallenda, who was a member of the Wallenda family of high-wire walkers and acrobats.
Speaking about the song I Believe in Father Christmas, which he wrote with Lake and which reached No 2 in the charts at Christmas 1975, Sinfield described how “it was tied up with a loss of innocence – finding out that I didn’t have a normal family. The people surrounding me were all my mother’s friends. Our German housekeeper kept up the spirit of Christmas and then suddenly it was taken away from me at the age of eight when I was sent off to boarding school.”
The song would continue to receive airplay every Christmas, and Sinfield estimated that it earned him about £20,000 a year in royalties.
The boarding school in question was Danes Hill in Oxshott, Surrey, where, with the encouragement of a teacher, John Mawson, he developed an enthusiasm for literature, especially the poetry of William Blake, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. He subsequently attended Ranelagh grammar school in Bracknell, Berkshire, but left at 16. After working as a trainee travel agent, he landed a job with a computer company where he would check printouts from Pye Records showing how much money their recording artists were making. “It’s possible that planted a seed, though it was certainly not the main reason I became a songwriter,” he reflected.
Inspired by friends who attended the Chelsea School of Art, he learned to play the guitar and wrote poetry, and spent time travelling in Spain and Morocco. Back in Britain in 1967, he formed the Creation (not the same Creation who had a Top 40 hit with Painter Man in 1966). The group featured his future King Crimson comrade Ian McDonald. “I thought I’d found Mozart,” Sinfield said. “He could play anything.”
For his part, McDonald told Sinfield that “I don’t think your band is much good but you write some interesting words,” which spurred him to focus more on songwriting.
In 1968 McDonald joined the brothers Michael and Peter Giles on drums and bass and Fripp on guitar in Giles, Giles and Fripp. Later that year Peter Giles left, Sinfield and Lake joined, and King Crimson was born. “I became their pet hippy, because I could tell them where to go to buy the funny clothes that they saw everyone wearing,” he recalled, having spent time selling his own handmade clothing on market stalls.
In the late 70s Sinfield moved to Ibiza with his first wife, Stephanie Ruben, and for a time lived the life of a tax exile. In 1979 he narrated Robert Sheckley’s In a Land of Clear Colors, an audio sci-fi story with music by Brian Eno.
He returned to London in 1980 with his second wife, a Spanish model, and was introduced by his music publisher to Andy Hill, a songwriter. This launched a new chapter of his career, as he combined with Hill to write a string of big pop hits, including Bucks Fizz’s UK No 1, The Land of Make Believe, Have You Ever Been In Love by Leo Sayer (which won them an Ivor Novello award), and Celine Dion’s Think Twice, which topped charts around the world and won another Novello.
In addition, Sinfield teamed up with Billy Livsey to write Five Star’s hit Rain Or Shine, and they also composed Love in a World Gone Mad for Agnetha Fältskog’s album I Stand Alone.
Sinfield underwent heart surgery in 2005. In 2014, Fripp asked him to update the lyrics to 21st Century Schizoid Man for the new incarnation of King Crimson that he was putting together.
At the time of his death, Sinfield had been living in Aldeburgh in Suffolk. He once commented that on his gravestone he would have “I Talk to the Wind”, the title of a wistful ballad from King Crimson’s debut album. “It’s about the young men we used to be in ’69, struggling to wake up and wondering what to do with the day, as if nothing mattered and everything mattered at the same time.”
Adam Sweeting
• Peter John Sinfield, lyricist, producer and musician, born 27 December 1943; died 14 November 2024
