The Night Watch (album)
live album by King Crimson
The Night Watch is a live album (2-CD set) by the English progressive rock band King Crimson, recorded in Amsterdam in November 1973 and released in 1997.
Contents
This album contains an important performance in King Crimson's career, being the source of the improvisations "Trio" and "Starless and Bible Black", the Fripp instrumental "Fracture" and the intro to the song "The Night Watch", all of which were included, with some editing, on the 1974 album Starless and Bible Black. Prerecorded excerpts of (No Pussyfooting) appear at the end of "21st Century Schizoid Man" similarly to what was included at the beginning of USA.
Production
The concert was performed on 23 November 1973 at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Most of the concert was also broadcast live by the BBC and taped by listeners; bootlegs of the broadcast circulated among fans. The concert began with a version of "Larks' Tongues in Aspic (Part I)", a recording which has never been found. Some bootlegs claim to have it, but these are recordings from other sources. It was one of the first releases of archival recordings by Discipline Global Mobile, the record label founded by Robert Fripp and David Singleton.
Art
Like the covers of many King Crimson albums, The Night Watch's cover features a painting by P. J. Crook, which is also entitled The Nightwatch. The sleeve was designed by the Bill Smith Studio of London.
The public source identifies “The Night Watch (album)” as live album by King Crimson. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Night, Watch and album.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q773646. The first chronological checks are 1973, 1997 and 1974.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Night Watch (album)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.