Emerson, Lake & Palmer

A supergroup

Keith Emerson of the Nice and Greg Lake of King Crimson met in December 1969 at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, where their bands shared a bill. The Nice broke up in March 1970 and Lake left King Crimson about a month later. Finding a drummer was hard, but they settled on Carl Palmer, who had played with the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and co-founded Atomic Rooster. They ordered the name so that the spotlight would not fall on Emerson, and so that nobody could call them the new Nice. Before playing a note in public they spent £9,000 on a mixing desk and £4,000 on a Moog modular.

The first gig was at Plymouth Guildhall on 23 August 1970. Six days later they played the Isle of Wight Festival to an estimated 600,000 people, firing cannons at the end of Pictures at an Exhibition. The debut album, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, followed in November and reached four in Britain. Its last track, Lucky Man, was a song Lake had written at the age of twelve, closed by an improvised Moog solo from Emerson.

The peak years

Tarkus (1971) went to number one in Britain, though arguments between Emerson and Lake during its making nearly ended the band. A concert at Newcastle City Hall became the live album Pictures at an Exhibition. Trilogy (1972), heavily overdubbed at Advision with Eddy Offord engineering, reached five in the US, their best placing there for a studio album, and carried Lake's From the Beginning, their biggest American single.

Some of Trilogy proved too hard to play on stage, so in 1973 the band bought a disused cinema in Fulham to rehearse and write in, and founded their own label, Manticore. Its first release was Brain Salad Surgery, with an H. R. Giger cover, lyrics by Lake and the former King Crimson lyricist Pete Sinfield, and the long suite Karn Evil 9, whose 1st Impression, Part 2 gave its opening line to the 1974 triple live album Welcome Back My Friends to the Show That Never Ends.

On stage Emerson rode and whipped his Hammond organ and wedged knives into its keys, beside a Moog modular weighing about 250 kg. Palmer played a stainless-steel kit built by British Steel on a rotating riser. The 1973 to 1974 world tour carried around 40 tons of equipment, and their headline set at California Jam in April 1974 played to about 250,000 people and was broadcast across America.

Works and the break

From 1974 the members lived as tax exiles and the band went quiet. Lake's solo single I Believe in Father Christmas reached two in Britain in 1975. ELP returned in 1977 with Works Volume 1, whose Fanfare for the Common Man also reached two, their best British single. The Works tour ran to more than 120 dates and began with a 64-piece orchestra, dropped after eleven shows over cost and union problems; an orchestral night at Montreal's Olympic Stadium became the album In Concert. Love Beach, made in the Bahamas to complete their contract, came out in 1978, and the band dissolved in 1979 without any announcement.

Palmer co-founded Asia in 1981. Emerson and Lake worked with Cozy Powell as Emerson, Lake & Powell in 1985 and 1986, and Emerson and Palmer formed 3 with Robert Berry, releasing To the Power of Three in 1988.

Reunions and legacy

Phil Carson's Victory Music signed the trio again in 1991. Black Moon (1992) and In the Hot Seat (1994) followed, along with concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, a 1996 US tour opening for Jethro Tull and a 1998 tour with Deep Purple and Dream Theater. Disputes over Lake's role as producer split the band again late in 1998. A one-off 40th anniversary set at the High Voltage Festival in London on 25 July 2010 was their last show.

Emerson died in Santa Monica in March 2016, and Lake died of cancer in London that December. Palmer, the last survivor, has kept the music on stage with Carl Palmer's ELP Legacy, latterly playing alongside video of his old bandmates.

The band sold an estimated 48 million records and earned nine RIAA gold albums. Rolling Stone in 2016 called them one of the most accomplished bands rock had produced, while Robert Christgau and John Peel scorned them, and a 1970s joke spelled pretentious E-L-P. The video game composers Koji Kondo and Nobuo Uematsu both name them as an influence.

One of the most accomplished and absorbing bands rock ever birthed.

Rolling Stone, 2016