McDonald and Giles
McDonald and Giles

THE REVIEW

It's fascinating.

Imagining, but also speculating on which new musical universes that spaceship would have landed on,

if Ian McDonald and Michael Giles had not so rudely (ungrateful!) left King Crimson, in the midst of that tour in December '69.

But then it's always the same story.

What would the Stones have been if Brian Jones hadn't dived into that pool one evening, I've always had a morbid curiosity about my (first) Roxy Music.

About that future so experimentally retro, cut short just as it was getting interesting with the departure of Brian Eno.

And I've also wondered if that talented crooner Ferry, charismatic yes but often with those suits from the Castrocaro Terme Festival, who knows what would have happened if that glam spaceship hadn't crashed prematurely on those craters of Marina di Bibbona.

If that forever young, always dressed in white like our own Morandi, had caught, but who knows even a mild yet chronic gingival herpes, just to keep him at rest for some... Atlantic Year(s).

However, let's return to those two dashing Ian McDonald and Michael Giles, who on the cover of their only and self-titled album, distributed in '70 by Island Records, are portrayed in their most intimate and natural state.

Walking with their respective ladies, in a wooded undergrowth colored by a surreal pink, in the air barely filtered by essences of that left-wing crimson DNA memory.

But just at the cover level, how far are we from that convulsion of that 21st century schizoid artist.

After the band's separation in 1970, McDonald and Fripp split the songs they had written and performed on that tour with the Crimson and each made their own albums.

But listening to "In the Wake of Poseidon" and immediately after "McDonald & Giles", could one imagine another great second album by King Crimson if McDonald and Giles had stayed with the band?

Surely, a strong point of "McDonald & Giles" is the cohesion between arpeggio and rhythm, the beats are lightning out of the blue, there are rhythmic sections that find their way into your head and are difficult to shake off, Giles' distinctive drumming is a hype of this album. He would have even played as a session drummer on Crimson's second album and so the question returns; what would "In the Wake of Poseidon" have been with those strong and funky drums in prog, which even came to illuminate the street culture of the Beastie Boys, sampled in their "Body Movin'".

But then why continuously recall that fantastic and sinister schizoid shadow, that lofty ethereal sacredness and not enjoy this pastoral stroll in the Other Wood and in the company of two fantastic maidens.

The sunset is still far away and the walk begins with the multi-part epic "Suite in C", an elegant foray into strictly British prog rock territories, between reminiscences and youthful loves for "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", with a sweet promiscuity of that mad folkadelia of Pentangle, Incredible String Band, and Fairport Convention.

Step by step, girl in hand and the schizoid dwarf in the drawer, to arrive at the next destination at the foothills of the Elysian Fields, among that dream folk that infiltrates increasingly high and rarefied atmospheres.

Then we have that flight of Icarus, in "Flight of the Ibis" which mirrors like a swan in the poignant and paced Crimson ballad of "Cadence & Cascade", but it does not slide into the cliché and as with all heavy things encountered in the course of our life, one simply passes through, into the spectacular intimacy of Giles' singing that allows me, in an instant pushes out the door all the powerful vocal intensity of Greg Lake. But then the Ibis would be the second cousin of the Egyptian god Thoth, or that symbol of resurrection and rebirth, perhaps signifying the birth of a new musical language found in the album, perhaps...

The abilities of the late McDonald, recently deceased, as a multi-instrumentalist and composer were already established, the remarkable charm of the album comes from the different direction taken by the duo.

There are vocal harmonies present on side B "Birdman" that recall more the seminal "Giles, Giles and Fripp", that expanded sound purified from the darkness of the mellotron and enriched by complete sections of strings and brass, special guest that piano of Steve Winwood, who was also recording during that period with Traffic at Island Studios.

The sound of the organ solo in the "Turnham Green" section of the album opener "Suite in C" would be immediately familiar to anyone who had listened to the "John Barleycorn Must Die" album released in July 1970, and the album overall can be said to have a gentle, melancholic, autumnal aspect like the illuminating cover.

And then, finally, this McDonald and Giles" could be one of the best-kept musical secrets of the '70s...