W hat image comes into your mind when you think about KingCrimson? The chances are it’ll be the screaming face gazing out from the cover of the group’s 1969 debut album. That it’s there at all comes down to Peter Sinfield who, when the group were casting about for cover ideas, said he knew someone who might be able to do something.
“I used to hang around with all these painters and artists from Chelsea Art School,” Sinfield told me, in one of the many long telephone calls we exchanged when I was writing the band’s biography. “I’d known Barry Godber for a couple of years; he’d been to a few rehearsals and spent a bit of time with us.
Peter and Stephanie Ruben
on their wedding day.
DGM ARCHIVE EVENING STANDARD/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
I told him to see what he could come up with. I think I probably said to him that the one thing the cover had to do was stand out in record shops.”
Godber managed to achieve that and more. When printed onto the LP’s gatefold sleeve, Godber’s inspired work channelled the raw paranoia and Cold War dread of the times and, in doing so, stuck a doom-laden chord in the consciousness of the public. As a result Sinfield, who had also come up with the band’s name, and was at that point the group’s roadie, live sound engineer, light show operator and lyricist, became the group’s de facto art director overnight.
“Peter had a lovely saying he referred to throughout his life,” recalls Stephanie Ruben, who was Peter Sinfield’s girlfriend in 1969, married him a few years later and, despite their eventual divorce, remained a lifelong friend who saw him on the day he passed away in November 2024. “He would say, ‘There are kings and makers of kings. And I’m a maker of kings.’ That’s actually a lovely place to be.