‘I keep going back and adding things’: Greg Lake’s book is overstuffed with memories of ELP, King Crimson

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Greg Lake has been mentioning an on-going autobiography project for some time, one with the very appropriate title of Lucky Man. No word yet, however, on when we’ll be lucky enough to read it.

Seems the former frontman for both prog-pioneering King Crimson and the supergroup trio Emerson Lake and Palmer keeps coming across stories that he can’t bear to leave out.

“I’ve been writing it for some years now,” Lake says, in this CoveFM clip. “I keep meaning to bring it out, but everytime I get close to it, somebody comes up and says: ‘Greg, do you remember the story about this and that? If you included that in the book –‘ And I think: ‘Oh, God, I’d forgotten that.’ And I go and I put it in, you know? I keep going back to it, and adding things. I suppose it’s this fear of just not wanting to leave something out which was important.”

And there’s plenty there, what with his hand in the seminal recordings of King Crimson between 1968–1970 and then the founding of the supergroup ELP, which was active from 1970-79, 1991-98 and then again in 2010.

“Of course, sooner or later, I’ve got to stop,” Lake adds. “There’s got to be a place where you say: ‘That’s it,’ really. ‘That’s one take on a lifetime.’ And I think I’m very near that point now where I shall stop and get it published.”

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