Yesterday, on the 17th of February 2025, former King Crimson drummer Jamie Muir passed away. He was in the band between 1972 and 1973. Bill Bruford, one of the most prominent drummers of his generation and Muir’s colleague in the group’s lineup at the time, wrote on his social media:
Jamie was the drummer/percussionist with whom I worked on the King Crimson album ‘Larks’ Tongues in Aspic (1973). He had a volcanic effect on me, professionally and personally, in the brief time we were together many years ago – an effect which I still remember half a century later. I’m sorry we lost touch, but his departure from our working relationship was so sudden and unexpected, I sort of assumed he didn’t want anything more to do with me and my colleagues in King Crimson!
King Crimson in Covent Garden, London 1972. L-R Jamie Muir, Robert Fripp, David Cross, Bill Bruford. Image by Barrie Wentzell.
He was a lovely, artistic man, childlike in his gentleness. There was probably a dark side underneath. It could be glimpsed as he climbed the PA stacks in a wolf’s fur jacket, blood (from a capsule) pouring from his mouth, on a rainy Thursday night in Preston, Lancs., to hurl chains across the stage at his drum kit. One of these Robert Fripp will tell you, only narrowly missed him.
His conversations with Jon Anderson at my 1973 wedding party, in Jon’s words, ‘changed my life’. Jamie also changed mine.
I consider it a privilege to have known, and benefitted from the company of, a man of such quiet power, even briefly. He struck me as one of those about whom one might truthfully say he was a beautiful human being. He will be much missed. Goodbye, Jamie.
