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“Prog rock” is a term to inspire fear, amusement or contempt in the hearts of many music fans. It may well be the most derided musical genre of all time, emerging at the tail end of 1960s psychedelia as serious young men with very long hair and minor music degrees attempted to expand the palette of rock as a “progressive” musical form.
Out went the primacy of the pop song, in came hugely complex multi-part conceptual opuses incorporating classical, jazz and folk elements, crammed with poetically opaque lyrical themes and adorned with bewildering imagery derived from fantasy and science fiction.
For a few years from the dawn of the 1970s, British bands with peculiar names like King Crimson, Soft Machine, Jethro Tull, Gentle Giant, Procol Harum, Supertramp, the Incredible String Band, Camel and Van Der Graaf Generator were deemed to be setting a new highbrow standard for rock culture, spearheaded by the prog god triumvirate of Pink Floyd, Genesis and Yes.
Tonight, at the Royal Albert Hall, prog will go to the Proms. The BBC Concert Orchestra, augmented by guest singers and musicians, will perform new arrangements of some of the most wildly ambitious songs ever heard, including excerpts from Mike Oldfield’s 1973 instrumental blockbuster Tubular Bells. Guy Garvey from Elbow will sing selections from Genesis and King Crimson. The show will open with an orchestral version of Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s (ELP) stomping 1977 space rock instrumental Fanfare for the Common Man, itself an interpolation of a 1943 piece by American classical composer Aaron Copland.
In a sense, prog will complete a circular journey to fulfil its earliest aspirations: to make rock as serious in scope as classical music.
Stuart Maconie has curated the setlist. The host of Freak Zone on Radio 6 Music, which explores the wilder edges of underground and experimental sounds, the 64-year-old DJ has been a prog fan since falling under Gentle Giant’s spell as a teenager in the 1970s. “Progressive kind of implies that it thinks it’s better than other music. I’ve never taken it to mean that,” insists Maconie. “It’s just music that is not afraid to make adventurous choices.” He has focused his selection on “the golden era of prog, between 1969 and 1977, before it went completely off the radar, culturally”.
I should make a confession here. I am of the punk generation, and for years I was dismissive of prog, even if a couple of stray albums by ELP and Pink Floyd lurked at the back of my record collection. I thought it was overblown self-indulgence for audio obsessives.
But when I started writing for The Telegraph, I realised it was a genre a lot of readers cared about, so I decided to find out more. I dived into back catalogues of albums featuring elaborate sleeves designed by Hipgnosis and attended concerts by bands deemed terminally uncool by my critical peers.
I was not an overnight convert, but I grew to admire a level of musicianship and daring not seen in most pop forms, on a level with the technical ability demanded in classical and the imaginative dexterity of jazz. To play prog, you really have to be able to play. I learned to love the musical madness of early Genesis, gasped at the audacious brilliance of King Crimson, and dove deep into the dazzling Floyd discography.
I did not just discover a world of fascinating, eccentric, wildly ambitious music, but I was also able to make connections with new music pulsing through our times. Because prog never really died, it mutated. You can hear it in the relentless sonic experimentalism of Radiohead, the baroque pastoral intricacy of Elbow, the progressive metal of System of a Down, and the epic excesses of Muse (whose 10th album, The Wow! Signal, went to number one in the UK earlier this month).
The great BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel, who had been among prog’s early champions, brutally disowned the genre, asserting that “most of it was unutterable crap. I know, ‘cause I wrote the sleeve notes”. For its detractors, prog marked the point when rock over-reached itself, leading inevitably to the great adjustment of punk.
And yet for its diehard admirers – and there are still many – prog represents the pinnacle of rock’s ambitions.
King Crimson’s 1969 debut, In the Court of the Crimson King, is often cited as the first prog album, though Maconie argues that, “there is a case to be made for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band [1967] being the first”. The Beatles, he says, used “the studio as a compositional tool influenced by non-rock music, breaking the usual pop-song structures with longer songs, intricate melodies, complicated arrangements and unusual instrumentation.”
Pink Floyd went from the experimental space jams of 1969’s Ummagumma all the way to the towering inner spaces of 1973’s 45-million selling The Dark Side of the Moon, before building a wall onstage to brick themselves off from a growing number of critics amid the brooding paranoia of 1979’s The Wall. “There was a genuine attempt to find a new way forward, something beyond the diktat of the three-minute pop song,” Floyd guitarist David Gilmour once told me.
“For me, progressive rock was a pan-genre, it was the most inclusive form of music because it could include all styles,” says ex-Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett, 76. “Listening to classical music didn’t have to be a guilty pleasure anymore. I was listening to Jimi Hendrix and Andrés Segovia, thinking they are both guitarists, but they don’t have a lot in common, other than the fact that they make music that’s prepared to stretch out and progress. The juxtaposition of ideas is what it’s all about, to try and create hybrids of sound, different schools of thought colliding, things that shouldn’t really work together in the same song.”
Although prog found huge audiences in Europe and America, it was a distinctively British phenomenon. A German prog scene developed into Krautrock, the hypnotic drive of Can and Faust branching into the electronic inventions of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. North American progressive music was sleeker and more pop friendly, notably the arena rock of Styx, Boston and Kansas, with Canada’s still hugely influential Rush pushing into heavy metal terrain.
“A lot of British prog bands had players with classical training,” notes Maconie. “They knew about [Béla] Bartók and [Igor] Stravinsky, and they saw themselves as upholding a European classical tradition.”
It could lead listeners into some very strange places indeed. The 1973 Yes double album Tales from Topographic Oceans had a gatefold sleeve featuring flying interstellar fish and comprised 80 minutes of music with just one song on each side. Meanwhile, Genesis singer Peter Gabriel was crawling out of a phallic tube in an outfit covered in inflatable genitalia during performances of the gorgeously unfathomable 1974 album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Drummer Phil Collins once admitted to me, “I love Pete, but I’ve still got no idea what it was supposed to be about.”
Hackett remains defensive of prog’s reputation for excess. “One person’s imaginative idea is another person’s pretentious nonsense. Perhaps you shouldn’t need to have the bombast of the lasers, the dancing girls in the wings, the plane that crashes into the stage, but, you know, audiences like the pyrotechnics, the wizardry. It’s called presentation.”
It all came crashing down with the advent of punk in 1977. Primal rock was back, Johnny Rotten wore an “I Hate Pink Floyd” T-shirt, and rock’s virtuosos were suddenly labelled dinosaurs and shuffled off into early redundancy. Yes keyboard player Rick Wakeman has likened it to the collapse of beleaguered British industries in the 1970s: “You went into work one morning and they basically said, ‘Here’s your card, mate, it’s over.’”
Only it wasn’t quite as cut and dried as that. Floyd’s The Wall sold over 30 million copies and maintained their status as an all-time classic rock band. Following the departure of Gabriel and Hackett, a more-focussed Genesis became even more popular. Supertramp evolved from a minor prog outfit into a soft-rock powerhouse with their 1979 album Breakfast in America. A new lineup of Yes featuring producer Trevor Horn scored their biggest ever hit in 1983 with pop-rock anthem Owner of a Lonely Heart. The biggest stars of the prog-rock era have endured, yet without much critical respect.
“I actually bought the Sex Pistols album and enjoyed it for what it was,” admits Hackett. “But I didn’t particularly enjoy being lambasted by other bands and torn to pieces by critics. Because it seemed to me that either music is inclusive or it isn’t. The idea of saying that rock is better than classical or punk is better than prog – it’s nonsense.”
Interestingly, Maconie almost gave up on prog himself. “I can remember the electrifying moment when I heard the Damned’s Neat Neat Neat on John Peel. I was an instant convert. I think the punk thing against prog was necessary, it was a reaction to all the excess, the stadiums full of pantechnicons of gear, a return to economical records as opposed to 18-minute tracks exploring the higher realms of human consciousness.”
Like many listeners, however, as he grew older, he stopped caring what anyone else thought of his tastes. “The truth is, I’m still nuts about Gentle Giant. They are the connoisseurs’ prog band, this strange five piece who could go from a madrigal into a bit of heavy metal into funk into jazz into a bit of 20th century classical. The 15-year-old me had my mind blown by how adventurous they were, and it still kind of is.”
Gentle Giant’s 1975 song, On Reflection, from the album Free Hand, will feature in his prog Prom. “My contention now, after all the intervening years, is that if you would, for fun, still rather listen to [punk band] the Lurkers than Gentle Giant, then you’re nuts! Because there is so much more of interest going on, at every possible level, in a Gentle Giant record.”
Prog, he concedes, is never going to be for everyone. But that is one of the things he likes about it. “My favourite bit of fan mail for the Freak Zone was a woman who said, ‘You played this track last week that was almost unlistenable. Keep up the good work’. And I know what she means. You don’t have to like everything I play. I just hope you might think, ‘Well, I’ve learned something now – I’ve learned what I don’t like!’”
BBC Proms: Prog Rock – A Fanfare for the Common Man is at the Royal Albert Hall on Saturday July 18 at 7.30pm. It will be available on BBC Sounds and BBC iPlayer at a later date.
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