A fanfare for prog rock
The much maligned musical movement is finally getting its moment at the Proms, says Stuart Maconie
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- Stuart Maconie
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Fifty years ago, at the height of another long hot summer, a rough beast they called punk was born at the 100 Club in London and Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in a squall of noise and a gale of spittle.
The effect on many a rock fan’s trouser dimensions and record collections was electrifying and immediate. Indisputably great albums by Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Genesis and their grandiloquent, flamboyant peers were consigned to the back of the record collections behind the Damned, the Clash and the Sex Pistols.
A passion for “prog”, as it came to be known, was the love that dared not speak its name, aside of course from the several million people, from Tokyo to Telford, who bought prog albums in their millions. History has proved these refuseniks right and this year’s Prog Rock Prom, subtitled A Fanfare for the Common Man, celebrates that musical and historical truth.
Lest we forget, even when it wasn’t cool, prog was mindbogglingly popular – which is probably precisely why it wasn’t cool with the punks and their converts in the music press. Jethro Tull amassed 15 gold or platinum US albums, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon was the best-selling album of the 1970s and spent 966 weeks on the Billboard chart, and Genesis sold 150 million albums worldwide.
Troubled Home Counties teen Mike Oldfield made a solo record called Tubular Bells that became the first release on Virgin, spawning an empire that came to include trains, cola, mortgages, telecommunications and vodka. Drummer Bill Bruford summed this up in typically witty manner: “King Crimson was one of the only gigs for a rock drummer where you could play in 17/8 time and still stay in decent hotels.”
Guy Garvey of Elbow. Getty Images
King Crimson are key in the development of the genre. Their 1969 debut In the Court of the Crimson King (emblazoned with an angry vermilion face), by turns saturnine and serene, is often cited as the first prog rock album, credited with introducing and distilling some of the genre’s essential elements – a willingness to be both melodically and rhythmically expansive, an embracing of both dissonance and pastoral beauty, and a familiarity with the European symphonic and chamber music traditions.
It was this sense of ambition maybe, as well as perhaps a sartorial penchant for capes, headdresses and flamboyant stage sets, that annoyed the gatekeepers of the rock orthodoxy. Rock should not stray far from the three-chord motherlode of Chuck Berry and Little Richard, lest it get ideas above its station and become pretentious. This was bunkum then as it is now and wiser heads knew it.
Like the Beatles who, two years before Crimson’s debut, had made their own foray into a kind of proto-prog with Sgt Pepper, an album that announced to the open-eared of the world that albums could be unified statements; studios could be instruments and pop musicians could borrow from anywhere so long as they did it with confidence and aplomb. Prog was a giddy collision between British psychedelia, postwar art-school ambition and an abundance of technology.
Prog’s golden era, the age that forms the spine of our Prog Rock Prom, falls roughly from 1969 to 1976 when acts like Yes, Genesis, ELP, Jethro Tull, Van Der Graaf Generator, Focus and Gentle Giant made records as popular as they were daring.
Genesis’ Peter Gabriel performing in 1973. Getty Images
The prevailing caricature had it that, while punk was the angry voice of the kids on the street, prog concerned itself with trolls, goblins and Tolkienish whimsy. While this was a wildly inaccurate canard – Gentle Giant for instance took inspiration from Camus, Rabelais and RD Laing – it proved a disappointingly durable one.
But the new century has brought rehabilitation. The very qualities once mocked – duration, difficulty, a willingness to risk boredom – began to look like resistance to the logic of the playlist. Younger musicians, genre-blind and unshackled from “cred”, approached prog without the baggage. A new cohort of bands such as Black Country, New Road, Everything Everything, Black Midi, Lost Crowns and even Arctic Monkeys have embraced the principles of prog: ambition, scope, musical complexity, unusual instruments and arrangements, even the courage to fail.
The truth is that it’s entirely possible to love the knotty complexities and dazzling adventurism of Gentle Giant and Yes as well as the bracing, gap-toothed, incendiary detonations that were the early singles by the Clash and the Sex Pistols.
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At the Prog Rock Prom, Elbow’s Guy Garvey, Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals, Jane Weaver and the Staves will perform alongside legends of the era such as Peter Hammill of Van Der Graaf Generator and Carl Palmer, the P of ELP. The Prom will be something to behold. Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends, that fanfare for the common man and woman around the world.
Authors
Stuart Maconie
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