The ‘Weird Kind of Karma’ Connecting Andy Summers to Robert Fripp

Andy Summers reflected on the “weird kind of karma” that connects him with Robert Fripp, and he recalled being knocked out when he recently heard 12 tracks they’d recorded together in the ‘80s, which he’d decided not to release at the time.

The future Police guitarist grew up in the same area of southwest England as his King Crimson counterpart. They decided to collaborate in the early ‘80s, resulting in the records I Advance Masked and Bewitched.

Fripp has prepared a box set to be released in September, which includes a third disc of unheard music, after Summers sent the master tapes to him. In a new interview with Ultimate Guitar, Summers – who described himself as de facto producer of the sessions – said the result was worth the wait.

“I was quite … I don’t know, perhaps ‘shocked,’ is too strong a word, but we got them and I was kind of knocked out – they’re great tracks,” Summers said. “I thought, ‘My God, why didn’t we put these on the album?'”

How Did Andy Summers and Robert Fripp Meet?

READ MORE: Andy Summers Still Has Regrets About the End of the Police

Reflecting on meeting Fripp, Summers said: “We both came from the same town in England, and he was this other guy that I’d heard about, but I’d never met him. … The weird thing was I played in this hotel. I was like 16 years old, and I got a gig and became a professional musician at 16 in this hotel group – until they threw me out for chasing the girls there. Fripp took over from me. It was a weird kind of karma: he became the next guitar player and he was a very different player.”

Summers continued: “I can’t remember much else in between; except, many years later, he helped me out – he got me a gig before I was in the Police. I’d lived in California, then I came back to England and there was a whole scene in London. I met Robert one night, and I was trying to get started again into playing in England, and he got me hooked up.”

When the Police were at the height of their powers, Summers said, he felt the desire to “do something else outside of the band, just to sort of prove that I could do it.” He admitted it was partly because he’d become “so used to playing the same Police songs over and over and over again.”

The thought of working with Fripp occurred to him, “particularly because we had this local tie-up in our lives.” The pair began working together in New York, and after agreeing the project had potential, they decided to set up in their English hometown.

“There was a little recording studio, which was run by a guy that we grew up with,” Summers recalled. “It was called Arny’s Shack, a peculiar little recording studio. He was a sort of eccentric. He smoked a pipe while he recorded. We got there, and then we just started working things out.”

Andy Summers Thought He’d Hate Abandoned Songs With Robert Fripp

After I Advance Masked was released in 1982 and Bewitched followed two years later, nothing else came of Summers and Fripp’s collaboration until a member of Fripp’s team recently asked about the master tapes, subsequently cleaning up a dozen tracks which had remained on the shelf.

“Well, it was surprising,” Summers said of revisiting the tracks. “I went, ‘God, why didn’t we do this? Why was I throwing those out?’ Because I was essentially the producer. But listening to some of these songs all these years later, I thought I’d listen to them and think, ‘Oh, my God, well, I see why. They were no good. They’re terrible. That’s why we didn’t use them.’

“But they weren’t. They’re all really much like the other tracks that we actually put out. And my God, it’s a good album. So who knows where that’s going.”