Peter Sinfield, whose mystical and at times politically pointed lyrics for the British band King Crimson became emblematic of the progressive rock movement of the 1970s, died on Nov. 14 in London. He was 80.
His death was announced on the website of DGM, the record label founded by the King Crimson mastermind and virtuoso guitarist Robert Fripp, along with David Singleton. The statement did not say where Mr. Sinfield died or cite a cause, but it noted that he “had been suffering from declining health for several years.”
Mr. Sinfield, who once referred to himself as the band’s “pet hippie,” linked up with Mr. Fripp in 1968 after living an itinerant life in Spain and Morocco. He was the lyricist on the first four King Crimson albums, starting with “In the Court of the Crimson King” in 1969, which is widely regarded as the first album in the genre that came to be known as prog rock.
But his role was varied. He also helped produce King Crimson’s albums and worked as a roadie, lighting operator and sound engineer and, as art director, oversaw the band’s album covers. He even came up with the name of the band, plucked from his lyrics for the song “The Court of the Crimson King.”
“I was looking at things like Led Zeppelin, the Who — I could see that it had to be something powerful,” Mr. Sinfield recalled in a 2012 video interview. “And I thought, actually, if we just take it from the song and just call it King Crimson, that’s pretty powerful. And it isn’t the Devil. It isn’t Beelzebub, but it’s arrogant, and it’s got a feeling of darkness about it.”
There were plenty of lyrics to choose from in a song that was almost Wagnerian in its brooding portent and layers of fable-like imagery: “The gardener plants an evergreen/Whilst trampling on a flower/I chase the wind of a prism ship/To taste the sweet and sour.”
Mr. Sinfield’s lyrical approach proved perfect for a band known for its more-is-more sensibility. As he explained in the 2009 BBC documentary “Prog Rock Britannia”: “We had an ethos in Crimson.”
“It had to be complicated,” he said, adding, “It had to have strange influences. If it sounded too simple, we’d make it more complicated. We’d play it in ⅞, or ⅝, just to show off.”
While his lyrics, like the band’s music, tended toward the florid, they could also hit with truncheonlike force, as in the antiwar broadside “21st Century Schizoid Man” (later sampled by Kanye West on his 2010 single “Power”): “Blood rack, barbed wire/Politicians’ funeral pyre/Innocents raped with napalm fire.”
Peter John Sinfield was born on Dec. 27, 1943, in the Fulham section of London. His parents, Ian and Deidre, lived a bohemian lifestyle, so Peter spent a lot of time in the care of a German housekeeper, Maria Wallenda, a high-wire performer with the famous Flying Wallendas circus act.
He acquired a taste for William Blake, Robert Browning and other poets while a student at the Danes Hill School in Oxshott, a village southwest of London, and later at the Ranelagh School in Bracknell, farther to the west. He left school at 16 to travel through Europe and beyond. He eventually settled back in his home country, where he formed a band called Creation. Also in that band was the multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald, who left the next year to join Mr. Fripp in his new band, with Mr. Sinfield soon to follow.
Despite his success with King Crimson, Mr. Sinfield’s relationship with the famously exacting and famously prickly Mr. Fripp soured. He worked on the group’s fourth album, “Islands,” released in 1971, but the next year he was asked to leave.
Mr. Sinfield was not yet finished with rock’s artier side. He produced Roxy Music’s self-titled debut album in 1972, which featured the band’s hit debut single, “Virginia Plain.” The next year he recorded a solo album, “Still,” on which he sang and his former bandmate Greg Lake — who had left King Crimson in 1970 to help form another prog band, Emerson, Lake & Palmer — contributed vocal and guitar accompaniment.
“I thought about attempting to become the U.K.’s answer to Leonard Cohen,” Mr. Sinfield said of his solo effort in a 2009 interview. “But since I hated and failed to overcome the stage fright to enjoy public performing, it was probably just as well.”
Mr. Sinfield contributed lyrics to Emerson, Lake & Palmer and provided the words for Mr. Lake’s 1975 hit, “I Believe in Father Christmas.” Less a heartwarming holiday song than a tart rebuke to the commercialization of Christmas — “They sold me a dream of Christmas/They sold me a silent night” — the song still rose to No. 2 on the British charts. It was denied the pinnacle by Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Mr. Sinfield began to drift away from the music business in the late 1970s, having no interest in emerging genres like punk rock. He eventually teamed with the songwriter Andy Hill to spin out mainstream hits like “The Land of Make Believe,” by Bucks Fizz, which rose to No. 1 in Britain in 1982; “Have You Ever Been in Love,” by Leo Sayer (1983), which they wrote with John Danter; and “Think Twice,” a worldwide smash for Celine Dion in 1993.
Information about Mr. Sinfield’s survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Sinfield eventually turned his focus from music to poetry, particularly after open-heart surgery in the mid-2000s. In the 2009 interview, he recalled his unlikely journey to the Top 40, following his post-prog fallow period.
“Given a barely shaken faith that I still had something to offer to the world of popular music, I set about rebuilding my career,” he said. “Spoilt by the previously unthought-about privilege that everything I wrote went directly to disk, I had to learn how to write hit songs or get a proper job.”
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