I: Introduction

Islands is the fourth album by King Crimson, released in 1971. Leader/guitarist Robert Fripp replaced two musicians from the previous album, Lizard, for this one: bassist/singer Gordon Haskell for Boz Burrell, whom Fripp had taught to play bass (Boz had a little guitar-playing experience prior to his joining Crimson), and drummer Andy McCulloch with Ian Wallace. Like Lizard, though, Islands continued with the jazz influence.

Though this lineup of musicians (later without lyricist/light-show man Peter Sinfield) continued long enough to do gigs (something the lineups of Lizard and In the Wake of Poseidon were not able to do), it was still part of that period in King Crimson’s history when there was great instability. For at the end of the touring to promote Islands, Fripp ended up replacing all of the musicians, with bassist/singer John Wetton, drummer Bill Bruford, (who’d left the far more successful Yes to join), violinist David Cross, and percussionist Jamie Muir to record Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (they even found a new lyricist in Richard Palmer-James).

The instability of this period had left King Crimson at its weakest. Fripp and saxophonist/flautist Mel Collins play as well as ever. Boz had a good, expressive singing voice (better than Haskell’s, and almost as good as that of original bassist/singer Greg Lake), but Fripp’s having had to teach Boz how to play bass from scratch meant that he lacked the necessary precision. Similarly, Wallace was a capable, aggressive drummer, but he was no Michael Giles, Bruford, McCulloch, or even Pat Mastelotto. As a result, the music of Islands is simpler and, to be perfectly blunt, mostly rather dull, except for the excellent “Sailor’s Tale,” “The Letters,” with its dark themes of jealousy and violence, and the naughty “Ladies of the Road.”

Tensions had been building between Fripp and Sinfield, the two having increasingly divergent views of the direction that the band should have gone in. Sinfield said he “musically wanted to find a softer, Miles Davis-with-vocals sexy package.” In the end, of course, Fripp’s vision won out, and after Islands was made, Sinfield was out. That “package” that Sinfield wanted, however, seems to be what ended up on the album, and accordingly, he has called the album his Islands; Fripp denies this with some justification, though, since he–and not Sinfield–is credited with writing all of the music, and of course, Sinfield didn’t sing or play any instruments on the album…apart from some tinkering with the VCS3 on “Sailor’s Tale” and “The Letters.”

Here is a link to all the music on the album (with bonus tracks), and here is a link to the lyrics.

The cover shows a depiction of the Trifid Nebula in Sagittarius. Why an album with the title Islands (showing neither the name of the band nor that of the album on the original cover used in the UK and most other countries) would have a cover picture of stars in space seems highly odd. Perhaps the point is that the stars are rather like islands in how ‘lonely’ they seem out there.

I make this interpretation because I can see loneliness, alienation, and isolation as major themes in Sinfield’s lyrics, as well as there being a dialectical tension between being alone and being with other people. Note, in this connection, how isolate is etymologically linked with island.

II: Formentera Lady

Formentera is, fittingly for the album, part of the Balearic Island chain off the southern coast of Spain in the Mediterranean Sea. So, the “lady” of Formentera could be an actual lover Sinfield had there, or she could be a personification of the island itself. I’ll accept both interpretations, while leaning more towards the former of the two.

The song begins with a double bass, played by South African jazz musician Harry Miller, playing what will be the melody of the verses sung by Boz. This melody, in E minor, starts with a double descension of four notes, the second descension starting a whole tone lower and ending a major third lower. The first time Miller plays it, it’s with parallel perfect fifths below the melody; the second time, he plays single notes sul ponticello. The third time, he goes back to the fifths.

Then, Collins comes in with flute trills, and flurries of piano notes by Keith Tippett (whose jazzy playing was previously heard on Lizard and ITWOP) follow. We also hear chimes from Wallace.

Finally, Boz comes in singing the first verse, in which Sinfield describes what he sees on the island of Formentera: houses, the shore-line, and the vegetation there, as well as a “stony road.” Sinfield seems to be reminiscing about a time when he visited the island while on vacation, remembering the woman he loved while there.

The first two lines of the verses are in E minor, while the second two lines of each are in A minor, and the choruses will be in A major. In his solitude, Sinfield is “musing over man.”

When we hear the choruses, Boz plays a simple motif of two A notes again an again on the bass as he sings of Sinfield’s happiness with his lover. Wallace’s hi-hat and bass drum are heard in the background, with Collins on the flute playing the vocal melody before Boz sings it.

In the third verse, after more descriptions of life on Formentera (the activity of some of the people in particular), Sinfield makes an allusion to Homer‘s Odyssey. He compares himself to Odysseus and his lover to Circe, on whose island he and his men were lured, and many of them were turned into pigs by her magic.

The implication of this classical allusion is that his lady is rather like those ladies of the road, those groupies who tempted the lust of the musicians in King Crimson, turning them into the pigs who oink their lewd thoughts about the groupies on the first track of Side Two–in this sense a parallel of this first track on Side One. Now, however, Sinfield’s Circe is gone, but “still her perfume lingers, still her spell.”

He cannot forget how lovely she was. Without her now, he feels lonely, isolated, and alienated from her. Perhaps this is because when he’d had her, he’d been similarly porcine with her in his lust, making her no longer like him. Now he regrets his lewd acts with her.

Note that in the second chorus, the Formentera lady is a “dark lover,” like “dark Circe,” thus confirming my identification of the one with the other. The sexual union between her and Sinfield/Odysseus, followed by the separation of the two, is an example of the theme I mentioned earlier of the dialectical tension between being alone, like an island, and being with others.

After this second chorus is an instrumental outro that takes up just about all of the second half of the song. Wallace adds more percussion instruments, such as claves and a triangle. Collins solos on the flute, and soon after, on the sax. Fripp plays an acoustic guitar. Miller plucks the strings on his double bass.

Soprano Paulina Lucas vocalizes through most of this, representing the Formentera lady “sing[ing her] song for [us].” Her voice tends to hover from a high A or A-sharp, then descends chromatically to E or thereabouts; this descension is the near-reverse of Fripp’s guitar solo on “Ladies of the Road,” in which a more-or-less chromatic ascent of notes suggests a woman’s sighs during sex leading to orgasm. Perhaps the Formentera lady’s descending sighs are meant to suggest her gradual disappointment with her Odysseus.

We also hear strings play a melody of E, G-G, then E, G-A. We’ll hear this theme again early on in “Sailor’s Tale,” but on electric guitar and sax. The repeating of this theme suggests that the upcoming instrumental is a sequel to “Formentera Lady,” a continuation of the story of Sinfield/Odysseus wandering on the sea after leaving his Circe.

III: Sailor’s Tale

The instrumental begins, as Lucas’s voice fades out, with Wallace tapping the ride cymbal. The rhythm is a horizontal hemiola of alternating 6/8 and 3/4. Since such a rhythm is something of a cliché in Spanish and Latin American music, it is also a fitting way to continue the musical story of “Formentera Lady,” as is the aforementioned theme on the strings from then, and now played by Fripp and Collins. Also, the key of A in the chorus and instrumental outro of the previous track is kept in this one, though it’s in A minor now.

Wallace adds the bass drum and snare to the rhythm on the ride cymbal, and Boz plays A, C, A (an octave higher)-G-E in the upper-middle register of the bass, the up-and-down melodic contour suggesting the movement of the waves at sea. Then Fripp and Collins come in with that theme from the previous track. The switch from A major in “Formentera Lady” to A minor in “Sailor’s Tale” (with a brief change to A major before Collins’s frantic soprano sax solo) suggests the shift in Sinfield’s fortunes of being happy with his lover to being sad and alone without her (the notion of ‘happy’ major and ‘sad’ minor is of course an oversimplification, but the association is fitting given the themes of this album). Fripp is playing sustained electric guitar leads behind Collins’s solo.

In this music, one can visualize the change in Sinfield’s fortunes, from happy to sad, as represented by Odysseus the sailor and his crew being tossed about on the waves of the sea after leaving Circe’s island, ever thwarted by Poseidon. One can imagine the ultimate, horrific fate of the crew when they encounter Scylla, and soon after the giant whirlpool, Charybdis, killing a number of Odysseus’ men.

The middle section of the instrumental has the time signature changed to 4/4, with a slower and less frenetic pace, but a nonetheless ominous one. Boz plays A, C, D-E, G (and variations thereon) on the bass. The passage features Fripp playing splintery, angular, dissonant, and screaming chords on his Gibson, whose tone reminds us of that of a banjo. This would seem apt given the fact that Fripp’s trademark cross-picking technique shares a lot in common with banjo players’.

Pretty soon, we’ll hear Fripp’s Mellotron (string tapes) playing the sustained notes of an A minor 7th chord in the background, behind his relentless screaming phrases on the guitar. Collins will play a flute theme in dissonant counterpoint to the already tense atmosphere. One senses that the sailor (be he Odysseus, or whoever else) is not long for this world. He’ll die alone.

The music returns to that of the original, horizontal hemiola rhythm, with Fripp strumming a high-pitched, screaming A minor chord. The Mellotron comes in full force here, with string tapes and a low A note from the brass tapes. There’s a brief change to D minor, then back to A minor, and back to D minor, but this time much more dissonant and chaotic.

Finally, we hear only Fripp’s splintery, dissonant chords being strummed from up high, then descending until they reach a D minor chord, and a D major one. We sense that the sailor has perhaps fallen into the gaping mouth of Charybdis. The music ends with an eerie shift back and forth in parallel fourths in low A and D to A-sharp and D-sharp on the Mellotron (brass tapes).

IV: The Letters

The melody for the verses that Boz sings is derived from the vocal part for the Giles, Giles, and Fripp song “Why Don’t You Just Drop In,” from The Brondesbury Tapes compilation. The original lineup of King Crimson performed the G, G, and F song live, titled simply “Drop In“; it can be heard on the live album, Epitaph.

This second version sounds even more similar to “The Letters” in how the verses are sung with less consistent instrumental backing than on the first version (Ian McDonald‘s sax, with Giles’s drums later, in “Drop In”; and just Fripp playing soft electric guitar in the background in “The Letters“), and with a similar middle section with sax playing low pairs of notes. The G, G, and F version, in contrast, has a full, conventional instrumental background of guitar, bass, and drums, with harmonized vocals by both Peter Giles (also on bass) and his brother, drummer Michael.

“The Letters” begins softly and sadly, unlike the pop-oriented G, G, and F version, and unlike the jazzy King Crimson “Drop In.” As I said above, Fripp plays softly, in F-sharp minor. When Boz sings, it’s as though there’s no accompaniment at all; he seems all alone, alienated, and stranded on an island after his boat crashed from the sea storm in “Sailor’s Tale.”

Boz doesn’t sing about the pain of sailor Sinfield/Odysseus, though. Rather, “The Letters” is about a man’s wife and his mistress. The latter writes to the former, gloating about how she seduced him and made him cheat on his wife, who’s now insane with jealousy, of course.

Neither of Odysseus’ mistresses, Circe or Calypso, ever wrote letters to Penelope, boasting of having taken her husband to bed; but given her determination to be faithful to him after so many suitors tried to replace him as king of Ithaca, one could imagine Penelope’s rage had Circe or Calypso ever sent her such letters. Comparing the lyric of “The Letters” to such a possible mythical scenario can be evocative of how hot the rage of the betrayed wife must be.

We see in this adultery the dialectical tension between human connection and alienation, how the liaison between man and mistress alienates husband from wife, making her feel as stranded on an island as Odysseus would be after enduring a storm at sea. Could Sinfield have found himself in a jealous conflict between a wife or girlfriend on the one hand, and a groupie/Formentera lady on the other? Is such a conflict the basis of having the first track, “The Letters,” and “Ladies of the Road” on Islands?

The middle, instrumental section is, as I said above, similar to that of “Drop In,” with baritone and tenor saxes playing pairs of low notes in F-sharp. Fripp is playing sustained guitar leads over the saxes. In addition to the F-sharp pairs of notes, we also hear the saxes play a similar motif to that one on the strings in “Formentera Lady” and on the guitar and sax early on in “Sailor’s Tale.” The motif is F-sharp, A, and B, similar to the E, G, and A of the previous two tracks.

The music dies down, and we hear some soft (tenor?) sax playing, building up to a louder climax before the next verse. There’s brief silence before Boz belts out, “Impaled on nails of ice!” The jealous wife writes a reply letter to her husband’s mistress, telling her she’s murdered him and is about to kill herself. While Boz is singing this verse, we can hear Wallace banging about on the drums and cymbals, Collins on the flute, and Fripp’s guitar and Boz’s bass.

For the last four lines, in which Boz sings of the murder/suicide, they start with Wallace tapping on the ride cymbal a bit, then Boz’s voice is all alone. Adultery, jealousy, and killing lead to loneliness.

V: Ladies of the Road

So many rock bands out there have at least one or two naughty songs, celebrations of male lust and objectification of women. One can think of Led Zeppelin’s “Sick Again,” “Motherly Love,” by the Mothers of Invention, or Ted Nugent’s “Jailbait” as noteworthy examples. Even a band as ordinarily intellectual as King Crimson are no exception, as Sinfield’s lecherous lyric here demonstrates.

Yes, this song is naughtier than that second verse of “Easy Money,” the version usually played live. The title of this song makes it pretty obvious what it’s about. “Ladies of the Road” is the kind of song that may limit the number of female fans a band may have. As I myself have been guilty of, we men have to remember that women don’t exactly appreciate it when we write of our sexual feelings for them.

Still, as alienating to women as this song surely is, it is for this very reason that the song fits thematically with the others on Islands. In “Ladies of the Road,” we have another example of the dialectical tension between human connection (sex, in this case) and alienation (the result of treating women in the scurrilous way the song does).

The verses describe sexual encounters with various groupies in increasingly explicit terms. These girls include a hippie, an Asian (stereotypically presumed to be Chinese, and whose ungrammatical English is mocked: “Please, me no surrender”), and a stoner from San Francisco. The last verse frankly describes acts of fellatio and cunnilingus.

The chorus compares the girls to stolen apples, implying the rough, possessive, and sexualizing treatment they’ve been subjected to by the rockers. Nonetheless, these girls “are versed in the truth,” that is, they know what they’re getting into. They have sexual agency: they aren’t wide-eyed, innocent virgins merely being ruined by these lascivious men, and they know the men’s true nature far better than the men know the girls. Perhaps this admission mitigates the song’s sexism, if only a little bit.

The song is in E, with a blues-like feel, though without the standard 12-bar chord progression. Instead, the chords are seventh-chord oriented, in E, A, C, and B for the verses; during the guitar and sax solos, it’s generally in E, and for the twice-heard chorus, there’s a chromatic descension of C-sharp minor, C augmented, E major 2nd inversion, B-flat half-diminished, and A major 7th to G sharp to A major 7th.

At first, Boz sings it with just Fripp’s chordal backing and blues licks on the guitar, and with Wallace shaking a tambourine. In the middle of the second verse, Wallace starts stomping on the bass drum, and Boz starts playing the bass.

Collins does a deliberately grating tenor sax solo after the second verse. I remember hating the harshness of the solo when I first heard it (on The Young Person’s Guide to King Crimson double LP compilation, back in my teens); it didn’t take me long, though, to understand the meaning of the grating sound. I recall a quote from Frank Zappa: “On a saxophone you can play sleaze.” That’s exactly what Collins is doing here. Like Fripp’s guitar solo to come (pardon the expression), Collins’s sax sounds like the squealing voice of a groupie approaching orgasm, which in turn is represented by Fripp’s distorted guitar immediately following Collins’s solo.

During the sax solo, we fortuitously also hear that motif of the fifth, flat seventh, and upper root note, the motif heard in all three songs on Side One that I mentioned before, though here it’s B (6 times, like the sax in the middle section of “The Letters,” though 8 times there), D (flattened a bit), and E. The motif is later buried during the verses in Boz’s bass line, just where the chord goes up from E to A, hence E, G, and A.

During the second playing of the chorus, the flute sound we hear isn’t played by Collins: as it says on the credits for this track on the inner sleeve of The Young Person’s Guide to King Crimson, Fripp plays a Mellotron (flute tapes), while Collins only plays sax, and he and Wallace sing backing vocals. Note also how the music during the verses and solos is all the masculine stereotype of sexual aggression, while the music of the two choruses is all gentle and pretty, the feminine stereotype. Would it be any other way?

VI: Prelude: Song of the Gulls

The harmonic progression at the beginning of this classical-music-oriented instrumental is derived from another, of the same musical style, from The Cheerful Insanity of Giles, Giles and Fripp–namely, the slow middle section of Fripp’s “Suite No. 1.” The progression is one of tonic major, mediant, sub-dominant, and back to tonic: E major, G-sharp minor, A major, and back to E major.

The first three chords of this progression, incidentally, are also a slight variation on that E, G, A motif I keep bringing up, the only difference being the sharpening of the G. There is a group of session string players (also heard playing the E, G, G and E, G, A motif toward the end of “Formentera Lady”) who are playing arpeggiated pizzicato notes of the backing chords, while strings also play the E, G-sharp, A, F-sharp, and E melody arco, with Robin Miller‘s oboe playing a harmony line in thirds above it–G-sharp, B, C-sharp, A, and G-sharp. Note how the intervals of the first three notes in the oboe line parallel those of the E, G, A motif.

Rhythmically, the music is in a slow, waltz-like 3/4 time. There is a melancholy to this music, especially when it shifts to the relative minor, in C-sharp, and those pizzicato arpeggiated notes are now played arco.

This melancholy will become clearer when we come to the final, title track of the album, on which we hear Boz singing, “Gaunt granite climbs where gulls wheel and glide/Mourfully cry o’er my island.” The sadness of the song of the gulls is an expression of the loneliness one feels when left alienated and isolated, as if left on an island, for alienation and isolation are the central themes of Islands.

VII: Islands

The song begins with a soft piano chord by Tippett in C-sharp minor. Boz sings of Sinfield being “encircled by sea” on his island, where “waves sweep the sand” (i.e., pull the sand off the land and into the sea), implying a slow eating away of himself in his loneliness and isolation. Remember that this C-sharp minor is the same key as the shift to the melancholy relative minor in the previous track.

His “sunsets fade,” and he’ll “wait only for rain.” “Love erodes [his] high-weathered walls/Which fend off the tide…[on his] island.” Love and heartbreak are eating his heart away. The next verse includes the reference to the gulls that “mournfully cry o’er [his] islands.” The piano continues to back Boz’s voice, as does a bass flute played by Collins.

The melodic contour of Boz’s vocal part is to an extent the inverse of his vocal line for the verses of “Formentera Lady.” On that track, his voice did two descensions of four notes, recall, the second of these a whole tone lower; in “Islands,” it’s two ascensions of three notes, the second of these also a whole tone lower. It’s as though “Islands” is the opposite in mood to “Formentera Lady,” which happily reminisces about Sinfield’s lover. In “Islands,” he is just sad and alone without her on his island, like Odysseus on Calypso’s island of Ogygia, missing his Penelope.

The chord progression for the verses is C-sharp minor, G-sharp minor, F-sharp minor, and G-sharp minor. The chorus has a chord progression of E major to A major, going back and forth three times.

Above, I mentioned a pair of three-note vocal ascensions. These occur during the verses, on the G-sharp minor and F-sharp minor chords, and they can be heard as variations on the E, G, A motif, though here the notes are G-sharp, A, and B, then F-sharp, G-sharp, and A…or root, minor second, and minor third, rather than root, minor third, and perfect fourth.

So, what can this motif be said to represent? I’d say it represents a stepping up from the water onto the shore of an island, which in turn represents a moving away from human connection to loneliness, alienation, and isolation.

To go back to the lyric, Sinfield’s “dawn bride’s veil…dissolves in the sun, love’s web is spun.” Is the bride his Formentera lady, who left him, thus dissolving in the sun, or was she his wife or girlfriend, having left him after learning of his affair with the Formentera lady? In any case, “love’s web” drew him in like a fly and caught him, and now he’s alone. In this connection, who are the prowling cats, and who are the running mice–the rock band and groupies, respectively, or vice versa?

The chorus seems to give us a happy resolution for the lonely islander. Boz sings of “infinite peace” under the water, where “islands join hands ‘neath heaven’s sea.” I’d say this is his wish-fulfillment, a fantasy of rejoining the social world as a hallucinatory cure to his loneliness. “Heaven’s sea” is that infinite ocean of all-unifying Brahman, to link his Atman with the pantheistic Absolute (it can also represent human connection). To attain this state of nirvana, though, one mustn’t go around lusting after groupies. In any case, “islands join[ing] hands” is yet another example of the dialectical tension in this album between human connection and isolation.

After the first chorus and some soft piano, we hear Mark Charig‘s cornet over a pedal harmonium played by Fripp. After Boz sings the chorus again, the piano comes back with Miller’s oboe, then Boz sings the next verse.

The melancholy of lonely Sinfield comes back in this third verse, with such imagery as “Dark harbour quays like fingers of stone/Hungrily reach from my island.” He’d hungrily reach for and clutch at the “words, pearls, and gourds” of sailors (i.e., the love of human company), items of love “strewn on [his] shore,” if only they were real and not a product of his imagination. Instead, all that he has on his island will just “return to the sea.” He’ll even lose what little he has there, in his desolation.

That wish-fulfilling chorus is repeated, then the cornet returns with the pedal harmonium and piano accompaniment. Fripp will add Mellotron (strings tapes), while Wallace softly hits the cymbals. The song ends with a slow fade-out on the pedal harmonium.

VII: Once With the Oboe, Once Without It, and Then, We’ve Finished

I’ll bet Fripp had fun pretending to be a conductor, counting out the time and waving an imaginary baton for the orchestra to start playing.

People speak of an epidemic of male loneliness these days. It shouldn’t be trivialized, but what a lot of men need to understand (as I wish I had, during my own lonely and embittered youth), is that a reactionary, disrespectful attitude towards women and everyone/everything else won’t cure that loneliness. In our alienated world, a lot of women are lonely, too. One should punch up at the ruling class responsible for that loneliness, divisiveness, and alienation, not down at the “girls of the road.”