“Fantastic”: The song that Emerson, Lake and Palmer fluked in the studio
No matter how prosperous you are as a band, the studio can be a perilous place. In fact, it can drive to a state of madness following success, where even the most irreverent ideas ring out between the studio walls to the sound of imaginary applause. But in 1970, Emerson, Lake and Palmer were a decade away from experiencing anything resembling studio delirium.
Comprised of Keith Emerson, Greg Lake and Carl Palmer, the group was one of the few supergroups to outsell their day jobs and while, their their 1972 record Brain Salad Surgery was a large part of that, their self-titled 1970 debut album set out a stall of prolific prog-rock music that celebrated each individual facet of the band.
But while the destiny of their supergroup formation was rooted firmly in progressive soil, it was the production of an all-out rock track that brought with it their most fruitful session.
“’Knife Edge’, which was the only rock track on the very first album, was something which came together very, very quickly in the studio and really worked – it was fantastic,” drummer Carl Palmer said. “We thought it was an instrumental, and Greg said, ‘No, hang on.’ He said, ‘I could put a topline on this, we could have something’.”
While Keith Emerson is credited with the writing of the music, its injection of classical sensibilities was largely based on a 1926 piece by the Czech composer Leos Janacek called ‘Sinfonietta’. Not long after the release of ‘Knife Edge’ the publisher who owned the rights to “Sinfonietta” brought up the issue, resulting in Janacek receiving a songwriting credit along with Johann Sebastian Bach, as the song uses quotations from his ‘French Suite in D Minor.’
In the 2016 reissue of the album, Emerson wrote: “Yes, that was Janacek. He used fifth chords quite a lot. The theme that goes ‘Ba ba baa’ sounds great on a Hammond organ. It’s almost like a guitarist’s riff. We called it ‘Knife-Edge’ and you are basically looking at C and G. And then you go down to B flat and an F. The rest is all yours. All you have to do is stick the twiddly bits in between.”
Despite the hot water the band found themselves in over copyright issues, the studio session success that delivered it was a creative hot streak that would soon end for the band. By the end of the 1970s, the band had noticed a strain on their songwriting process and, as a result, friendships. The 1979 album Love Beach would be their last and has since become represented of a tired end to an otherwise stellar supergroup career.
“It’s not that Love Beach is a bad album,” Lake said, adding, “It was an album that the band really didn’t want to make. We were forced to make it contractually, but once we’d decided to do it, we gave it our best shot.” A somewhat tepid motive for a band who’d spent the previous decade proving studio sessions were less about giving it a good shot and more about delivering unfiltered brilliance.
