Haskell was previously a classmate of Robert Fripp at Queen Elizabeth's grammar school in Wimborne near Bournemouth, the pair having subsequently played together in the local band The League of Gentlemen.

The group was then augmented with session musicians, including another In the Wake of Poseidon alumnus, the noted jazz pianist Keith Tippett, together with Yes vocalist Jon Anderson, and brass/woodwind players Robin Miller, Mark Charig, and Nick Evans.

The press release drafted by Sinfield to promote Lizard wryly quoted Max Ehrmann's poem "Desiderata", which contains advice on how to chart a true course through confusion.

The Islands line-up of the group would finally give some of the Lizard material a live airing, with "Cirkus" and "Lady of the Dancing Water" becoming part of King Crimson's touring repertoire.

"Cirkus" would also later become part of the touring repertoire of the 21st Century Schizoid Band, whose members included Mel Collins and Jakko Jakszyk.

In 2016, for the band's biggest European tour since 1974, "Cirkus" was included in the repertoire, as well as "Dawn Song", which is part of the "Lizard" suite and was played live for the first time ever.

For the 2017 North American tour, "Dawn Song" was expanded to the entire "Battle of Glass Tears" section (adding "Last Skirmish" and "Prince Rupert's Lament", neither of which had ever been performed live).

In his book Prog Rock FAQ, Will Romano called Barris' work "one of the era's most beautifully strange pieces of album cover artwork".

She cited the Lindisfarne Gospel and Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry illuminated manuscripts as inspiration for her work.

[9] In his retrospective review, AllMusic's Dave Lynch described it as, "Seamlessly blending rock, jazz, and classical in a way that few albums have successfully achieved, Lizard is epic, intimate, cacophonic, and subtle by turn – and infused with the dark moods first heard when "21st Century Schizoid Man" and "Epitaph" reached listeners' ears the previous year.