King Crimson - Lizard

On December 11, 1970 "King Crimson" released their third studio album "Lizard".

The arrival of "Lizard" marked one of the strangest, boldest and most fragile moments in the history of "King Crimson". Only Robert Fripp and Peter Sinfield remained from the groundbreaking debut period, and the version of the band that recorded "In the Wake of Poseidon" and especially the monumental debut “In the Court of the Crimson King” had already dissolved. What rose in its place was something else entirely, a studio born collective built from jazz musicians, classical players and rock experimenters who were never meant to stand together on a stage. "Lizard" became the sound of a band rebuilding itself while simultaneously falling apart, a fever dream captured on tape.

The circumstances around the album were as eclectic as the music itself. After the exhausting early years, Robert Fripp shifted deeper into composition, letting go of the symphonic rock framework of the first albums and drawing inspiration from free jazz, chamber music and abstract improvisation. Except saxophones and flute player Mel Collins, and his old schoolfriend Gordon Haskell who sang vocals in one song from the previous album, Fripp surrounded himself with new collaborators, among them drummer Andy McCulloch, pianist Keith Tippett and a full brass and woodwind ensemble whose presence gave the album an otherworldly, theatrical tone. Recording took place at "Wessex Sound Studios", with Fripp and Sinfield building the album like a painter and a poet rather than a conventional rock team. No one in the room really imagined these songs being performed live. They were too strange, too complex, too fragile.

The opening track "Cirkus" immediately reveals the shift. Dark mellotron swells, Tippett’s restless piano lines, woodwinds that slither like shadows and Haskell’s deep, haunted vocal create a world that feels closer to avant-garde theatre than to progressive rock. Sinfield’s lyrics are at their most vivid, filled with illusion, masks and a constant sense of danger just outside the frame. It is one of the album’s more accessible pieces, but even here "Lizard" sounds like a universe detached from what came before.

The mood then turns inward and crooked with "Indoor Games", playful on the surface but constantly undermined by strange harmonies and rhythmic jolts. Fripp’s guitar jumps between delicate acoustic figures and sharp electric lines, while the horns and reeds poke and tease like characters in a surreal carnival. "Happy Family" takes that feeling even further, with its processed vocals and cryptic words that many listeners read as a warped reflection on "The Beatles". The song seems to grin and grimace at the same time, catchy and unsettling in equal measure.

A moment of fragile beauty arrives with "Lady of the Dancing Water", one of the gentlest and most intimate pieces in the entire "King Crimson" catalog. Over a delicate acoustic guitar line, the flutes and trombone float like soft brushstrokes across a watercolor landscape. Sinfield’s imagery becomes tender rather than surreal, painting a scene that feels suspended in time, like a memory you’re afraid to touch in case it dissolves. Haskell delivers one of his warmest and most understated vocals on the album, letting the melody breathe without forcing emotion.

The heart of the album is the side long suite "Lizard", a 23 minute journey built in movements like a miniature opera. It opens with "Prince Rupert Awakes", sung not by Haskell but by Jon Anderson of "Yes", whose bright, glassy tone floats above the music and adds a sudden streak of purity, which continues with the beautiful "Bolero – The Peacock's Tale", before the piece descends into murkier waters. From there the suite moves through courtly motifs, jazz-rock eruptions and melancholic interludes. In "The Battle of Glass Tears" (divide to 3 parts) the band lets everything fracture, with horns exploding in frantic bursts, Tippett’s piano tumbling in cascades and the rhythm section pushing forward in tense, almost chaotic patterns. The closing section "Big Top" feels like the circus tent collapsing at dawn, a brief and ghostly coda that leaves you wondering if the entire show you just heard was real or imagined.

When "Lizard" was released, the world did not really know what to do with it. Critics were confused, fans were divided and even Robert Fripp himself later admitted that he struggled with the album for many years. There were no tours to cement these songs on stage, no live versions to tame their strangeness, and the lineup that created the album dissolved almost as quickly as it had been assembled. For a long time "Lizard" felt like a lost chapter, an odd studio fantasy filed between more famous incarnations of "King Crimson".

Time, however, has been kind to "Lizard". Modern listeners hear it as one of the most daring statements of the early progressive era. Its mixture of jazz improvisation, chamber music precision, rock energy and surreal storytelling has almost no parallel in the history of the genre. It is the sound of a band tearing itself apart in order to reinvent itself, the strange bridge between the early symphonic Crimson of “In the Court of the Crimson King” and the harsher, more angular lineups that would later record albums like "Larks’ Tongues in Aspic".

More than fifty years after it came out, "Lizard" still feels like a secret door in the "King Crimson" catalogue. It demands time, patience and openness, but for those who step through it and stay there for a while, the album reveals a fantastical world filled with colors, tension, beauty and fearless imagination.

For Listening: Spotify, Apple Music

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