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The album was released in October 1969, and some record stores immediately latched on to the visual impact of its cover.

It was as if there was something magic going on.” The only one who did not like the painting was drummer Michael Giles, but as Robert Fripp said, he also did not like the name King Crimson. Greg Lake recalls “We all stood around it, and it was like something out of Treasure Island where you’re all standing around a box of jewels and treasure… This fucking face screamed up from the floor, and what it said to us was ‘schizoid man’ – the very track we’d been working on. When completed, Sinfield brought it to the recording studio and laid it on the floor for the group members to look at. Whatever went through his mind as he was applying the watercolors to canvas, it worked. How do you visualize a song like 21st Century Schizoid Man? Godber sat himself in front of a mirror and started painting. Sinfield gave Godber one directive: The cover had to stand out in record shops. Hundreds of thousands of people at Hyde Park experienced the same effect a few weeks earlier, when King Crimson unveiled their music at The Stones in the Park concert. Sinfield put on the tape, blasting a piece of music that blew Godber’s socks off. Having never been commissioned for an art project and certainly not an album cover, the aspiring artist asked to listen to the music his art was supposed to visualize. Enter Barry Godber, who was hired not for his computer programming skills but rather those with the brush, for he studied at Chelsea Art School and was savvy with watercolors. Wasting no time, he reached out to his friend and former colleague at English Electric Computers, were they worked the night shifts as computer operators. Having served as roadie, light man, lyricist and a general conceptualizer for a new band named King Crimson, he was now tasked with the matter of finding a way to package the strange music the band was committing to tape in the recording studio. Pete Sinfield was in need of an album cover.