Since starting their Sunday Lunch YouTube series during the height of the Covid pandemic, husband and wife duo Robert Fripp and Toyah Willcox have delighted viewers around the world with their quirky, humorous takes on classic songs.
But despite the innocuous nature of their content, some have expressed discontent with Fripp and Toyah’s antics. Fripp, however, doesn’t care one bit. “At age 76, why should I give a fuck?” he quips, in a new interview with The Telegraph.
As the guitarist explains, the lighthearted series began when his wife handed him a tutu and a pair of her black tights, brought him to the end of the garden of their home in Pershore, Worcestershire and put on Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.
“My wife insists performers have a responsibility to lift people’s spirits in hard times,” he says. “Do I respect that? My answer is yes, completely and utterly I do.”
He continues: “We’re keenly aware of what people have experienced during lockdown. I mean, banged up in a small apartment while your mother’s dying and you can’t go to the funeral. My wife said to me, if all we’ve done in two years is help one person through their bad time, it’s all worth it.
“So I’m not sure if that meets a criteria of serving what is highest in music, but for me, it’s a real undertaking that I respect. And I am quite prepared to strap on a guitar and rock out to a classic riff in order to achieve it… But it upset some King Crimson fans.”
So there you have it: don’t expect the Crimson guitarist to hang up his six-string and lock his closet full of wacky outfits any time soon.
English actor and musician Chesney Hawkes recently completed a brief stint – a residency, if you will – on Robert Fripp and Toyah’s Sunday Lunch series. The unlikely trio covered four songs in a month: The One and Only, from Hawkes 1991 album Buddy’s Song, The Killers’ Mr. Brightside, Bryan Adams’ Summer of ‘69 and Fountains of Wayne’s pop-punk anthem, Stacy’s Mom.
Other highlights from the series – which at this point consists of literally hundreds of videos – include Limp Bizkit’s 1999 nu-metal anthem Nookie, Pantera’s 5 Minutes Alone, Korn’s Blind, Green Day’s Basket Case, and Neil Young’s Rockin’ in the Free World, which the husband and wife performed earlier this year in solidarity with Ukraine.
