Friday, February the 3rd, 2006
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Every now and then, when I think I may be getting too big for my boots, I like to take a lesson in humility. I find that by contemplating the absurd Mr and Mrs Fripp, those paragons of self-effacement, I am able to regain a more judicious perspective on the world.
Mr Fripp is well known as the bespectacled guitar noodler who had the gall to take a technique common in experimental music of the 1950s and 60s (a tape delay and looped signal, basically) and call it ‘Frippertronics'. That's like me writing a sonnet and saying it's a new type of poem called a ‘Keyet’.
Meanwhile, I am indebted to the current edition of Private Eye for this splendid quotation from Mrs Fripp, in answer to a question posed by Now magazine:
Q—What have you done with all your punky stage outfits?
A—I have a house to keep my press cuttings, costumes, head-dresses, stage make-up and books that refer to me. There's a room of recordings of every TV show I've done and another full of fan mail.
John & Yoko only needed an apartment for the fur coats. Toyah requires a whole house.
And thanks to Max Décharné for alerting me to the existence of the town of Toyah in Texas. The photograph below is captioned thus: Three wooden grave markers stand as testament to the desolation of West Texas. Toyah was a crew change point on the Texas & Pacific in the early 20th century. Like the hot wind, the trains still blow through Toyah, but most of the citizenry moved elsewhere. Who can blame them?