Carl Palmer Plans Emerson, Lake & Palmer Tour Even Though Emerson & Lake Are No Longer Alive
Prog supergroup Emerson, Lake & Palmer became unlikely arena conquerors in the ’70s before breaking up in 1979. The trio reunited a number of times over the years, but they haven’t played a live show since 2010. There’s a very good reason for that: Two of the three band members are died. Both keyboard wizard Keith Emerson and multi-instrumentalist Greg Lake died in 2016. Emerson died by suicide, and cancer took Lake’s life just nine months later. But Carl Palmer, the only surviving member of the group, still thinks he can take ELP on the road.
Palmer’s idea is to use recently-unearthed footage of the band playing London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1992. Palmer would play drums live along with split-screen film of Emerson and Lake. Palmer tells Rolling Stone, “That, to me, would be the way to present an Emerson, Lake & Palmer show again. That’s going to be extremely possible. It will look authentic, it will look real, and it will be in sync. And it’ll be something better than a hologram.”
Palmer says that the tour could be ready sometime next year, and he’d like to play a residency in New York or Las Vegas. The Emerson and Lake estates have signed off on the plan. Palmer tells Rolling Stone, “At the end of the day, I can tell you that Keith and Greg would be saying, ‘Yeah, Carl, get out there and do that.’ The biggest advantage is, I won’t have any more arguments or long group meetings about when we’re going on tour. It’ll be very easy for me to decide!” In the meantime, Palmer is getting ready to play ELP’s music on tour with a band called Carl Palmer’s ELP Legacy. You can read the deeply surreal Rolling Stone story here.