As I indicated in an earlier post, I’ve been going on a bit of a King Crimson tear of late, which is to say, a Robert Fripp trip, I suppose. I’ve also gone back and given a fresh listen to records like Fripp’s 1979 solo outing Exposure (more on this soon), his Eno collaborations and the League of Gentlemen, Fripp’s new wave group. It’s a great catalog to lose yourself in. A reader mysteriously named “Uncle Skittles” sent me this, an 1981 interview from Musician magazine with both Robert Fripp and the Clash’s Joe Strummer which was recently posted at the Arthur blog. It’s a lost classic:

Musician: Maybe it’s too late to save the system as we know it, but maybe that’s the point – that if things fall apart, there’ll be a chance to build something better. That’s the kind of hope I hear in your music.

Fripp: If I can address some of these questions—Marx was something of an old fart. He was an authoritarian and a centralist, and what he proposed was essentially the same as capitalism, except with a different set of people in charge. In any kind of realistic political change you have to start on the inside, by changing the central value system. You can’t start by changing the structure, change has to be a personal choice.

Musician: Meaning you can’t have a just and equitable structure if the individuals that comprise it are still operating from greed and egocentricity. So no matter how well you design a house it won’t stand if the individual bricks are defective.

Fripp: Right, so change therefore has to be a personal choice. And it’s got to be gradual, because normal political life has to do with changing externals by force, and any kind of force is going to breed its opposite reaction. So, if you force a welfare society on people, but their personal values and way of life haven’t changed for the better, they’re going to wind up disliking each other even more than they did before. Another important thing is that if you have an aim in mind, you have to work as if it’s already achieved. You can’t create a democracy by imposing a dictatorship on people until they’re ready for democracy. You have to be democratic yourself. Your way of going there is where you’re going.

Musician: I wanted to ask Joe about his attitude towards violence. You use the imagery of violence, but I don’t think you really believe it’s the answer. Am I right or wrong?

Strummer: Of course not! Violence isn’t an answer to anything. Do I want some jackoff to jump on my back right now? Of course I don’t. It’s so sordid.

Musician: What about the case of “Sandinista!”? Obviously, Somoza was overthrown by force.

Strummer: Sure, but that’s practical violence. Somoza ain’t going to go unless you shoot a few hundred of his guards. I’m not saying that I could get into that here in Britain, but I think in Nicaragua the situation certainly demanded it. Think of how many campesinos were slaughtered there since 1919. It must run into the millions! In that situation, I condone picking up a gun.

Joe Strummer and Robert Fripp in conversation, 1981 (Arthur)