In the early 1980s, The Police’s Andy Summers released two collaborative albums with King Crimson leader Robert Fripp, I Advance Masked (1982) and Bewitched (1984). Now, Andy has revealed that unreleased recordings from those sessions will finally see the light of day in the coming weeks.
In a recent video interview with Ultimate Guitar, Summers explained that someone he’d been working with about a year and half ago, and who also works with Fripp, asked him if he could listen to the all of the material from the sessions he’d done with Robert. This prompted Andy to dig the recordings out of storage.
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“[E]ventually, the tapes got out of the storage. They got sent and he got them in England,” Summer shared. “He reduced them down to whatever. And there’s about 12 other tracks [that weren’t released].”
Andy told Ultimate Guitar that when he heard the tracks, he was “kind of knocked out” at how great they sounded.
“[I thought,] ‘My God, why didn’t we put these on the [albums]? We did two albums,” he said. “So, out of nowhere, there’s a third album.”
[RELATED: Police Guitarist Andy Summers Recalls Memorable Musical Encounters with Jimi Hendrix]
Summers added that he believes the album will be coming out as part of a package that Fripp is releasing soon on his own label. As of September 4, there appears to be no mention of the project on Fripp’s official website, DGMLive.com.
Reflecting more on the unreleased recordings, Andy said he thought to himself after hearing them, “Why was I throwing those out?,” because I was essentially the producer [of I Advance Masked and Bewitched]. … They were all really [good]. They were like the other tracks that we actually put out.”
On How His Collaborations with Fripp Came About
Summers also talked with Ultimate Guitar about he wound up recording those albums with Fripp in the 1980s. He explained that he and Robert grew up near each other and began playing music in the same scene. Andy also revealed that before he joined The Police, Robert helped get him a gig after he’d moved back to the U.K. following several years living in the U.S.
Summers said their collaboration came about a few years after that, at a time he wanted to branch out from the music he was playing with The Police.
“I’m in the biggest band in the world, and I started to … [have] the feeling to want to do something else outside of the band, just to sort of prove that I could do it, musically,” Andy noted. “I was so used to playing the same Police songs over and over and over again, but my interest in music obviously … was urging me to try other forms, other ways of playing.”
He continued, “And then I had this idea of trying to do a guitar duet with Robert, particularly because we had this local tie-up in our lives from the same town. He was famous, I was famous, there’d probably be an interest in it. And so we got together.”
Summers’ 2024 Tour Plans
Summers’ The Cracked Lens + A Missing String solo tour will visit New Zealand and Australia in late September and early October. The trek features the guitarist performing along to a sequenced display of his photography.
A fall U.S. leg of the tour will follow. It’s mapped out from a November 2-3 stand in Austin, Texas, through a November 12 performance in Key West, Florida.
Tickets for Summers’ concerts can be purchased now via a variety of outlets, including StubHub.
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