Robert Fripp has declared that he will never return to perform live with King Crimson. In a new interview granted to Uncut, the English musician returned to talk about the heart problems he faced last year and the consequences that changed his relationship with live activity. The eighty-year-old guitarist had suffered a heart attack while in Italy for one of the Guitar Craft courses. The hospitalization had already been told in 2025 during “Upbeat Moments”, the format created together with his wife Toyah Willcox. At the time, the couple also temporarily suspended their popular YouTube series “Sunday Lunch.” Fripp had explained that he was admitted to intensive care in Bergamo and underwent two emergency surgeries after being diagnosed with a trifurcated artery. Retracing those moments, the guitarist said that he initially mistook the heart attack for simple heartburn. It was a member of the Orchestra of Crafty Guitarists who took him to hospital.
In the interview with Uncut, Fripp explained that he had radically changed his lifestyle after the operation, introducing gym and yoga into his daily routine. “I haven't felt this good in decades,” he said, adding that physical recovery was surprisingly fast after the insertion of a stent and subsequent second surgery.
The discussion on King Crimson's live future is clearer, however. “Playing the guitar with King Crimson is like doing an Olympics. I had set myself standards with semiquavers at 156 or 158 beats per minute: now it's very difficult to recover that level. There are certain performances that today, I have to accept, are enormous challenges. But I no longer feel the need to perform live.” Fripp then added: “This is just the beginning of a new chapter away from the scene. I want to work with Guitar Craft students, putting all my effort into it.”
Fripp finally denied the existence of a new King Crimson album in the works: “It was supposed to be Jakko Jakszyk who took care of it, but I think he was involved in other works and in the end it never reached me.” “Sunday Lunch”, born in 2020 during the lockdown as a simple creative outlet shared with Toyah Willcox, has become a cult online phenomenon over the years, until it was transformed into a live show also brought to the stage of the Glastonbury Festival in 2023.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
