David Singleton (basketball Coach)

David Singleton (born 1961) is an English record producer, audio engineer, record label director, musician, songwriter, author and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known as the production and business partner of Robert Fripp of King Crimson.

Singleton is the co-owner/director (with Fripp) of the Discipline Global Mobile record label, half of the Ton Prob production team (again with Fripp) and the developer of the BootlegTV live concert streaming setup. Singleton has co-produced and/or engineered almost every Robert Fripp release (including King Crimson albums, EPs and archive releases) since 1992, and has also worked on releases by Bill Nelson, Bill Bruford, Europa String Choir and many others. – press release at Phill Savidge PR

In addition to his production and label administration work, Singleton has pursued an intermittent career as musician and songwriter. He released a solo single in the early 1980s and was part of the 1990s art-pop band Camilla's Little Secret. His work as producer has extended beyond executive and technical roles to embrace creative musical collaborations, generally using his skills as an audio technician and an aficionado of found sound. Singleton has collaborated with King Crimson (as re-arranger/re-composer of band material) on several albums released during the 1990s and 2000s.

Singleton currently releases his own material under the alias of The Vicar – a multimedia project persona that has produced a story blog and videoblogs, printed fiction, graphic novels, and song albums.

Early career and production work, The Mobile (1981–1990)

David Singleton was educated at St John's College, Cambridge, where he studied philosophy and occasionally wrote and performed his own songs. His first release as a musician and songwriter was the single "If You Can Sing in Tune/Lazy Bugger", recorded and released in 1981 while he was still an undergraduate.

Following graduation, Singleton worked as a teacher. In early 1984, while living in the Dorset village of Lytchett Matravers, he opted to change career and work as an audio engineer and record producer, setting up a 16-track studio called The Mobile inside a former mobile dental clinic caravan. While the Mobile was initially based in Lytchett Matravers, Singleton later re-situated it in the Courtyard Crafts Centre in nearby Lytchett Minster.

Singleton's aim was to provide a potentially mobile recording service at a much lower cost than a standard studio, and to use this to encourage people and organisations with lower budgets to make recordings. To this end, he persuaded various recording equipment companies to sell him second-hand ex-demonstration equipment at a greatly reduced price: the proviso which he used to seal the deal was that the equipment would be used to record work by young people who might retain their interest in recording and thus become company customers in the future. In keeping with this initial pledge, early work with the Mobile included a recording of Britten's ''Noye's Fludde'' made at the Blandford Music Festival (released as an in-house recording) and assorted work with schools. Singleton also contributed outreach work at Youth Training Schemes encouraging young trainees towards their own careers in music production."Breaking the sound barrier" – article in ''Bournemouth Evening Echo'', Friday 5 September 1986

In 1987, Singleton wrote a set of his own songs with the intent of recording them with a large communal group of Dorset musicians. Although the project was never completed, some of the songs written at this time were revisited several decades later for the Vicar project.

Discipline Global Mobile and Ton Prob (1991–present)

In October 1990, Singleton applied to work with art rock guitarist Robert Fripp (best known for his work as the leader of King Crimson and as a collaborator with David Bowie) who needed a live sound engineer at short notice in the middle of a tour with his Guitar Craft ensemble League of Crafty Guitarists. The two men quickly established a rapport, and Fripp subsequently hired Singleton to work on the 1991 King Crimson compilation '' Frame by Frame: The Essential King Crimson'', to engineer, master and mix ''Kneeling at the Shrine'' (the lone 1991 album by the Fripp/ Toyah band Sunday All Over the World) and to mix ''Show of Hands'' (the second album by The League of Crafty Guitarists). At the time, Fripp (who was living in the town of Wimborne Minster) was a near-neighbour of Singleton's and the duo soon joined forces as a permanent and equal partnership of complementary, overlapping skills and ideas. Consequently, Singleton has co-produced and/or engineered almost every subsequent Robert Fripp release, including the vast majority of King Crimson albums, EPs and archive releases since the start of the 1990s.

In 1992 Fripp and Singleton founded both the Ton Prob production partnership and the record label Discipline Global Mobile (DGM), both of which have continued to the present day. DGM was explicitly set up as "a model of ethical business in an industry founded on exploitation, oiled by deceit, riven with theft and fueled by greed". The label was structured so as to operate within the marketplace without being dictated by commercialism, and to encourage development within three fields (within music, within a developing and sought-out audience, and within the personal lives of those working as part of the label). according to

During this period Singleton worked with assorted DGM-signed artists (Trey Gunn, California Guitar Trio, Gitbox, Tony Geballe, Jacob Heringman, Ten Seconds) as well as The Orb (via the Fripp/Orb/Thomas Fehlmann collaboration FFWD) and Bill Nelson (musician), and worked on archive recordings by King Crimson, The League of Gentlemen and The League of Crafty Guitarists. Post-1998, his production clients have included past and present King Crimson frontmen John Wetton and Jakko Jakszyk and classic American songwriter Melanie