In 1969, English prog-rock outfit King Crimson captured a bleaker side of post-psychedelic rock, with their debut album In the Court of the Crimson King (an observation by King Crimson) and 37 years later its darkly majestic finale found a perfect home in Alfonso Cuarón's dystopian thriller, Children of Men, based on a P.D. James novel of the same name.
The song (easily King Crimson's best known) is introduced as the story's protagonist, the cynical Theo, is traveling to visit his well connected cousin, Nigel, who has been hoarding several of the world's remaining artistic masterpieces in a post-industrial mansion called the Ark of the Arts. Nigel sends a driver to pick up his cousin and for the duration of the ride "The Court of The Crimson King" seems to drift in and out of the car, conjuring up its sinister medieval tableau of yellow jesters and fire witches. You can never quite tell where the music is coming from in the scene; it hovers between source and something larger, filling the entire sequence with uneasy portent...Theo seems to hear it at times, or perhaps not. It's a great lead-in to a grand but moribund display of cultural treasures that have lost their meaning in a world without a future.
Click here to hear the song in all its nine minute long glory on iMeem.
Trivia: for the above shot of Theo's approach to the Ark of the Arts, special effects house Double Negative created a composite shot by pasting a bridge over the M3 roadway in Surrey, directly in front of the Battersea Power Station. The front drive is modeled on the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern art gallery, which is housed in a renovated power station.
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