MY LIFE IN THREE GUITARS - Trio

The guitars that have meant the most to King Crimson founder Robert Fripp

- ANDREW DALY

FEW GUITARISTS HAVE shaped progressive and avant-garde music as profoundly as Robert Fripp. With King Crimson, Brian Eno, David Bowie and others, Fripp perpetually reinvented the six-stringed wheel with ease. He usually did so with a Gibson - or something that looked like a Gibson - in hand. This is why, shudder to think, if the building were burning down, Fripp would grab his beloved '59 Les Paul Custom.

"It's the one that's worth the most," he says with a laugh. "That's for sure!" "I'm not a collector," he adds. "[The guitar you buy] should be the one that's right for the music you're playing. So I guess the criteria is, 'Why might you choose this guitar?' And all my good instruments have been Gibsons or facsimiles. It's the right fit. I put it up to my body, and it's the right fit for my left hand and my right hand." With all that in mind, we asked Fripp to select and discuss the three guitars that have "fit" him the best over the past six or so decades.

1 Gibson ES-345 1962
I BOUGHT IT in the middle of 1963 when I was 17. Up until then, my first guitar was an appalling instrument called an Egmond Frères that my mother bought me for Christmas in 1957. I still have it. It was appalling. My second guitar was a Rosetti, and that was appalling. My third guitar was a Höfner — a President, I think — which was really a semipro instrument. In England at the time, it was very difficult to get American instruments, and you needed a lot of money. But come the middle of 1963, I needed to move on to a proper instrument and bought a 1962 model. The ES-345 was made the year before, I believe, and I bought it from Eddie Moors Music Shop in Boscombe near Bournemouth. It was £350. I still have the original case and strap. But I needed to buy it on hire-purchase [