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….

• Elbow and Sigur Rós on the Obelisk arena on Saturday night. Utterly amazing
• Grinderman on Sunday. What can you say, just brilliant
• Some other bands, notably Gravenhurst and Truckers of Husk
• The Literature tent. What a great idea. Especially when it features Robin Ince and Ros Noble doing a “John Peel-off”
• Joanna Newsom. Previously I wasn’t that convinced by her but thought she was  spellbinding, even when she kept forgetting the lyrics to one of her songs she was so nervous. Bless her.
• The beer. Not just crap Carling but proper real ales: Hector’s Pure and Scarecrow. Nice one.
• Those refundable cups at the beer tents: what a great idea. Meant the site wasn’t a sea of broken plastic or paper cups
• Making an effort to be green

And lows:

• Julian Cope coming on late and only playing three songs
• Franz Ferdinand. Yawn. So, so boring
• Parents taking up four acres of space in the arenas with all their chairs, wheelbarrows, blankets and tents, and then talking all the way through the sets anyway. Bah!
• Not being able to get anywhere near the comedy tent for most of the festival.
• The size of the programme — like carrying a paperback book around with you

Anyway,  after the wonders of Gong at the Meltdown festival I went to see the astounding Yndi Halda at the Barbican on the following Friday. They were supporting Ólafur Arnalds who I’d never heard of before — an Icelandic chap who does that kind of electronica / modern composition thing. I didn’t think Yndi Halda’s set really got going until the second half and it ended with in complete meltdown with ‘Illuminate my heart my darling’. The new stuff was pretty interesting with lyrics and all.

So, following that off to My Bloody Valentine at the Roundhouse on the Monday. I knew their reputation for noise terror and this was confirmed by others  who went to see them on the previous nights so I wore my earplugs all the way through in a true rock and roll style. Glad I did, especially for the noise-drone apocalypse at the end. It was so loud it warped time, so I have no idea how long it was — fifteen, twenty minutes?  I have never seen an audience so keen to leave the auditorium and was probably the only gig where a dedicated fanbase didn’t call for an encore.

What I didn’t manage to do was to get to any of the Radiohead gigs in Victoria Park. I have no idea how I managed to miss these being announced but I did. Odd, seeing as I get RSS alerts from Dead Air Space but I obviously just chose to ignore them. As I write this I’m listening to “Radiohead From the Basement” which just confirms for me, rather unfortunately seeing as I missed their gigs, that they are simply the best band ever and “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” is well on its way to being my favourite Radiohead song.

“From the Basement” is well worth checking out: songs from ‘In Rainbows’ and its mini-album sequel played live in Nigel Godrich’s studio. I was particularly impressed with Thom Yorke’s drumming on “Bangers and Mash”. Two drummers? One of them a singer? Hmm, watch out, it could all go a bit Seconds Out if you’re not careful. Anyway, it shows them still at the top of their game. How many other bands have remained so good fifteen or so years into their career and developed with every album?

This weekend I saw the wonderful Gong playing at Massive Attack’s Meltdown festival in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. What started as a nostalgic indulgence of my misspent teenage years listening to early 70s prog and psyc ended up with me totally transfixed by a band led by a 70 year old man in a red-sequined dress.

It wasn’t a bad line up considering that that all the original drummers (Rashid Hourai, Pip Pyle and Pierre Moerlin) are now dead, as is the sadly missed Bloomdido Bad de Grasse himself, Didier Malherbe. However we did get Steve Hillage, Miquette Giraudy, Gilli Smyth and Mike Howlett; the latter in a particularly fetching monk’s cowl which was later removed with some difficulty by a roadie. Despite some notable absences in personnel, the sound was all present and correct: walls of glissando guitar, a rhythm section so tight you couldn’t slide a sheet of A4 between it, scary chromatic riffs and even scarier pixie costumes.

The set was amazing and took in most of the classic period, err, classics, starting with Fohat… and ending with You Never Blow Yr Trip Forever. We even got “Light in the Sky” off of Hillage’s Motivation Radio which prompted the red-sequined dress affair.

Anyway, it all took me back to more innocent days when the term PHP meant so much more to me than the name of a web programming language. That’s Pot Head Pixie for the uninitiated. My path to Gong went via lots of other prog and psyc bands: Genesis, King Crimson, Pink Floyd / Barrett, Soft Machine, Kevin Ayers, Caravan. This was between the years of 15 and 18 when I should have been listening to the Smiths, shambly indie music and Madchester. When I was at Kent University I even visited the homes of Richard Sinclair and Hugh Hopper. That’s dedication for you. I didn’t manage to get Richard Sinclair to one of my band’s gigs though, even though we did play a version of “In the Land of Grey and Pink”. Ungrateful so-and-so.

The Independent recently ran an interview with Daevid Allen which reminded me just how loveable Gong are and how exciting that time round the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s was, both politically and musically. I particularly like the bit about how Allen tried to sneak back from France into the UK for a gig after he’d been refused entry:

“I came through in a van with a photo of the Buddha on my passport,” he recalls.       

There’s more to say about Gong and indeed lots of other bands I used to love and I plan to return to them. For now though, check out this footage of Gong on YouTube playing “Fohat digs holes in space” from 1972. Camembert Electrique is quite the bad-trip album (”finger on the trigger and your body burning up!”) but this is just plain frightening.