Giles, Giles & Fripp

Giles, Giles & Fripp -- whose name always sounded more like an accounting firm than a rock group -- only existed for a little more than 15 months. They never got to play a single live performance under their own name, never charted a single anywhere in the world, and were so obscure in their own time and their own country that the one album that they recorded for English Decca Records' Deram label sold fewer than 1000 copies. But out of that trio grew the band that became King Crimson. Drummer Michael Giles and his bassist brother Peter Giles were veterans of the rock scene in Bournemouth, having played in such bands as Johnny King & the Raiders, Dave Anthony & the Rebels, the Dowland Brothers, the Soundtracks, the Sands Combo, the Interns, and the longest lived of them, Trendsetters Ltd., between January of 1960 and May of 1967. By the spring of 1967, with lots of gigs (mostly backing other musicians, including visiting American acts such as the Drifters, Gene Vincent, and Napoleon XIV of "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa" fame) behind them in Trendsetters Ltd., along with a handful of singles that went nowhere, the brothers decided to form their own band. In late August of 1967, they hooked up with Robert Fripp, an ex-member of groups such as the League of Gentlemen who was then playing guitar in a hotel orchestra. The resulting trio began rehearsing in earnest and, for a time, became a quartet with the addition of Doug Ward, an accordionist, with whom they got some regular work until Ward's injury in a road accident took him out of the lineup. Luckily, Giles, Giles & Fripp, as they named themselves, found some interest in their music at Decca Records, which was still one of the two major labels in England, and passed an audition to get signed to the company's...