Peter Sinfield, a co-founder of prog rockers King Crimson who went on to a successful pop songwriting career for artists such as Céline Dion, has died aged 80.
King Crimson announced the news, describing him as the band’s “original roadie, lyricist, lights operator and live sound engineer”. No cause of death was given.
Sinfield was born in London and lived an itinerant and bohemian youth, including spells in Spain and Morocco – he later described himself as King Crimson’s “pet hippie”.
He first partnered with the group’s multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald in the band the Creation, before they fused with Giles, Giles and Fripp – the trio of Michael Giles, Peter Giles and Robert Fripp. Peter left and was replaced by Greg Lake, and Sinfield named the group King Crimson. He co-produced and wrote lyrics for their first four albums – In the Court of the Crimson King, In the Wake of Poseidon, Lizard and Islands – between 1969 and 1971.
Matching the far-out sound of the band’s music, Sinfield’s style tended towards mystical and psychedelic fable-like storytelling, but he also had a keen political bite as he castigated commercialism, authoritarianism and conflict. “Blood rack, barbed wire / Politicians’ funeral pyre / Innocents raped with napalm fire,” ran one verse of King Crimson’s anti-Vietnam war song 21st Century Schizoid Man.
After the release of Islands, Fripp asked Sinfield to leave the band. Sinfield went on to produce Roxy Music’s debut album, including its iconic glam single Virginia Plain, and in 1973 recorded his only solo album, Still, with a band including King Crimson’s Greg Lake. The two worked together again when Sinfield was called on by Lake to provide lyrics for Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and he wrote Lake’s UK No 2 festive hit I Believe in Father Christmas. He also worked with Procol Harum’s Gary Brooker, before moving to Ibiza and spending the remainder of the 1970s living there.
On returning to the UK, he partnered with songwriter Andy Hill and wrote lyrics for mainstream pop music that was almost diametrically opposed to the fantastical prog of King Crimson: contributing to four albums by Bucks Fizz and writing songs for Five Star, Leo Sayer, Abba’s Agnetha Fältskog and more. One of his songs for Bucks Fizz, Heart of Stone, became a minor hit for Cher in 1990.
He had his biggest hit of all in 1994, writing lyrics for the Hill-composed Think Twice, recorded by Céline Dion. This desperate plea for a lover not to end a romance – “Don’t say what you’re about to say / Look back before you leave my life” – became a defining power ballad of the 90s, topping charts in the UK and around the world. It won Sinfield an Ivor Novello award.
Sinfield’s work rate lessened thereafter, particularly after open heart surgery in the mid-2000s, and he began focusing on poetry. He also made an appearance in the 2009 BBC documentary Prog Rock Britannia: An Observation in Three Movements, before retiring to live in Aldeburgh in Suffolk.
