Bad news for King Crimson fans – Robert Fripp says there are no plans to revive the legendary prog rock band.

It’s been nearly five years since King Crimson played the final show of their Completion Tour in Tokyo, Japan. After the gig, Fripp declared the group had “moved from sound to silence.”

In a recent conversation with Uncut magazine, the guitarist reiterated that the band will not return, and gave further insight as to why.

“When playing at the standard I set myself – which, in King Crimson terms, it’s ‘Fracture,’ ‘Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, Part Four,’ ‘Frame By Frame,’ which equates to semi-quavers at 156 to 158 beats a minute – I mean, that’s Olympic-level guitar, purely physically,” Fripp explained. “The difficulty was that taking a year off with Covid, it’s very hard to regain that. There is a certain kind of playing that is now, I have to accept, a severe challenge. Today I don’t feel it’s necessary for me to perform in public.”

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As recently as last year, rumors were circulating about a new King Crimson album. However, Fripp assured Uncut that the band doesn’t have anything in the works.

“The drummers felt that, although we recorded every show for the archive, the sound would be very much better if they were recorded independently,” he explained. “So the drummers re-recorded their parts, and the suggestion was that we could [all record] our parts so it was very close to the live performance in terms of spirit, but with a far, far tighter sound. It was with Jakko [Jakszyk] to take it further, but I think Jakko became involved in other projects, and it never got as far as me. So the moment went, and with it a new King Crimson album.”

While King Crimson remains done, Fripp noted he is “fully supportive” of the several spinoff groups that continue to perform the band’s material.

Robert Fripp Offers Health Update One Year After Heart Attack

Fripp suffered a heart attack last year which forced him to undergo emergency heart surgery. He’s doing much better today and views the scary incident as something of a blessing in disguise.

“I look on it as a benevolent redirection of my life,” Fripp noted. “I go to the gym regularly. I’m dead-lifting currently, at best, a hundred and twenty kilograms, bench-pressing seventy-five kilograms, doing squatting with weights, stretching, balancing, yoga. I haven’t been this healthy or present within myself in decades, perhaps ever.”