It was the usual talking heads affair with some obvious faces (Rick Wakeman, Ian Anderson, Phil Collins) and some less so (Arthur Brown, the bloke out of Egg). Robert Wyatt was also on hand, alongside some classic Soft Machine footage.
The most refreshing thing about the programme that was that it dispensed with any “year zero” dismissals of prog from the outset. As Jonathan Coe pointed out in the programme, since punk, progressive rock has been the only musical genre that has been written off in its entirety as completely shit. I think the last ten years or so there’s been a bit of a movement to bring back prog in from the cold, but I think this is the first programme I’ve seen or heard which has been broadly sympathetic and non-judgmental. Which is positive. In any musical genre there will be some genius and a lot of chaff. Prog, like punk, was no exception — for every Selling England, Close to the Edge or Larks’ Tongues in Aspic, there was a overblown Emerson, Lake and Palmer triple album or a Tales From Topographic Oceans.
Prog rock was the first musical “genre” I really got into as an introspective teenager in the mid 1980s. Yes, over ten years on from its heyday, I discovered it after graduating from synth-pop and Now, That’s What I Call Music compilations. I can’t really say why it worked for me so much, it just did; and I still love (at least some of it) now. It started with borrowing Genesis Live from my local library and within a few months I’d devoured the rest of the early Genesis catalogue (and most of the later output too I’m more ashamed to admit). I then moved on to Pink Floyd, Yes, Soft Machine, Gong, Caravan and Hatfield and the North; not to mention some of the more esoteric stuff round the fringes.
Prog’s experimentalism and sense of fun is what makes it so enduring, despite the fact that, especially by the end of its heyday, it was rather prone to excess, pomposity and self-repetition. So, there is some truth in the clichés there, despite the fact that I think prog’s sense of humour is too often overlooked (see particularly early Genesis and Jethro Tull). Prog’s association with wizards and Tolkeinesque nonsense is also overplayed: you won’t find much of that in Genesis or King Crimson, although you certainly will in Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.
Prog Rock Britannia broke up the progressive period in to three sections: its early days from the first Procol Harum album and Sergeant Pepper, its heyday from about 1970-73 and its fall from grace 1974 onwards. Prog started from the experimental underground, moved overground and then had became the norm by the mid 1970s which is clearly where the rot set in (ELP, I’m looking at you here).
It’s clear that, during the late period, while some bands were creating the clichés which would later define the popular interpretation of prog (overblown stage shows, pretentious concept albums, excess), other bands were aware of what was going on and prepared to jump ship. Fripp temporarily closed down King Crimson, but not before releasing the amazing Red, which sounds like a prototype post/math-rock album and allegedly was a big influence on Kurt Cobain. Although The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway falls superficially into the “bad prog” camp in terms of its theatricality and concept, listening to it now, it sounds like a dry-run for the first Peter Gabriel solo album. It’s a lot rockier, edgier and harder than previous Genesis albums. Saying ‘Back in NYC’ is almost punky is probably pushing it, but it’s one of the songs that Gabriel managed to incorporate into his early solo sets without any incongruity (it also tellingly features the line, “your progressive hypocrits hand out their trash”).
So, why did prog go bad? When you’ve got a lot of young, talented and creative musicians with a lot of money and no boundaries to what they were doing (apparently, many of the record companies just let them get on with it), the path was inevitably paved for ignomy. I’m also sympathetic to Jonathan Coe’s argument that prog rock’s biggest mistake was aligning itself with rock and roll in the first place, which it clearly was not, so that was bound to bring down the wrath of the pop gods; combine that with the fact that no musical “scene” can last last for more than a few years (including punk, post-punk, Brit-pop, you name it), then it was always going to have a best-before date.
In the last few years in particular, with programmes like Radio 6’s Freak Zone, prog seems to have started to take its place where it really belongs, in the canon of experimental music. Some prog albums would live happily in the Wire’s “avant-rock” review section (in fact over the years I’ve noticed them pretty sympathetic to Fripp, one of prog’s best experimentalists). “Progressive” music in the widest sense of the term is also pretty much alive and well — think of Radiohead, the post-rock movement, electronica and bands like Battles (their first album sounds like King Crimson speeded up). Prog has also never really lost its fanbase — the Web is a rich resource for all thing prog-related — for starters, check out Prog Archives.
Right, I’m off for some larks’ tongues….
Tags: blog-post, music, non-plone, offline.
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