“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 on his surprise ‘new’ collab album with Robert Fripp

Andy Summers has been talking about his experience of working with Robert Fripp, and how after two collaborative albums in the 1980s, they’re about to release a third.

In an interview with Ultimate Guitar, the ex-Police man explained how the pair had known each other since they were teenagers growing up in Dorset in the 1950s. However it was until the early 1980s when both were established musicians that the idea for a collab happened.

“I had this idea of trying to do a guitar duet with Robert, particularly because we had this local tie-up in our lives from the same town,” he explained. “He was famous, I was famous, there'd probably be an interest in it."

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"So we got together in New York. Actually, I remember we got together in someone's apartment in the village and were jamming, trying to see what we could come up with and what the music would be. I could do what I could do, and Robert has got his particular style too, that sort of polyrhythmic way of playing the guitar."

"And then we actually went back to our home town in England. There was a little recording studio, which was also run by a guy that we grew up with. 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."

The pair released two albums – I Advance Masked (1982) and Bewitched (1984) and that seemingly was that. Except that 18 months back Summers was encouraged – by someone who knows Fripp - to dig out all the tapes from those two albums. "

"He said, 'I'd really like to listen to those. Can you get them?' So we kind of had to go through the motions but eventually, the tapes got out of the storage. They got sent and he got them in England. He reduced them down to whatever. And there's about 12 other tracks. So he (Fripp) obviously worked on them."

"I don't know if he mixed them, because most of it was done with two or three guitars, but 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. I thought, 'My God, why didn't we put these on the album?'"

So against the odds a third Fripp/Summers album is going to be released this month, on Fripp’s own label. “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,’ says Summers.

"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.”