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zphage
zphage
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Prog Britannia
Dec 28, 2008, 03:26
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2d7eeeba-d14f-11dd-8cc3-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1


When rock went in search of a new role
By Peter Aspden

Published: December 27 2008 01:30 | Last updated: December 27 2008 01:30

The first proper rock concert I ever went to was in the winter of 1972, and it was a fulminant affair. Emerson, Lake & Palmer were not known for their sense of understatement. They could be literally explosive. Two years earlier, in their debut gig at the Isle of Wight festival, they fired cannons into the bemused audience, who thought they were there to wear flowers in their hair. Times were changing, and fast.

There was nothing quite so hostile when I saw them at the Hammersmith Odeon, but plenty of bombast all the same. It was, as I recall, very loud, very forceful, utterly thrilling. The star of the show was the group’s keyboard player Keith Emerson, whose party piece was to stab daggers into his organ, and then zip around the other side of it and play extracts from Bach backwards, as his powerhouse rhythm section pounded on relentlessly. It was fabulous. But you probably had to be there.

To watch ELP live in those days was to witness the emergence of a bold new trend in music-making, which would, for a brief period, dominate the world’s album charts. Years later, it would come to be known as prog rock. It is a jokey label, the diminution of “progressive” adding a sprinkling of irony to the movement that, believe me, was utterly absent at the time.

Prog rock was a deadly serious affair. There was no room for irony. We declared ourselves to be fans of progressive music because we felt that rock music was genuinely progressing: beyond 12-bar blues, beyond boy-meets-girl lyrics, beyond, on a good day, the boundaries of the universe itself. The singles charts were the province of the feeble-minded (not unlike today), and we progressives were determined to do something about it (very unlike today).

Here were the essential tenets of prog rock: virtuoso musical skills, applied to any song with limitless indulgence; poetic flights of fancy that turned language into an enemy of meaning; brazen yet leaden showmanship (see Spinal Tap); and extremely long hair.

A splendid new BBC4 documentary, Prog Rock Britannia, screening on Friday, chronicles the movement and debunks some of the myths around it. It illustrates how many of prog rock’s most distinctive tropes were born of necessity rather than intention. Those endless twiddly solos, for example: Soft Machine vocalist Robert Wyatt reveals that the band’s keyboard player Mike Ratledge used a fuzz-box that fed back every time he took his hand off the keyboard. He simply had to keep going, a bit like Sandra Bullock in Speed.

Then there were all those fey lyrics about magic castles and court jesters: why did rock turn so dramatically away in its subject matter from the raw sexuality of its beginnings? Blame the English private school system. Its inhabitants couldn’t tell raw sexuality from a raw carrot. They wrote about what they knew, and what they knew was everything that was contained in a classical education. “We plundered Ovid,” confesses Tony Banks, old Carthusian and Genesis keyboard player, revealing a song-writing strategy that had been curiously overlooked by Little Richard and Fats Domino.

Prog rock, as we all know, met a sticky end. The wish to keep progressing, further and deeper and louder, was costly and ultimately futile: during one of their famously extravagant tours in 1977, ELP employed an entourage of 130 people, spending $20,000 a day. Carl Palmer’s drum kit was so heavy that every stage had to be specially reinforced. Prog rock became literally weighed down by its ambitions.

More significantly, life in 1970s Britain didn’t pan out quite as envisaged by the prog rockers. They imagined – and commissioned for their gatefold sleeves – the lush, dreamy landscapes of Roger Dean, futurist Arcadias of harmony and quietude. Instead, they got the three-day week, stagflation and rubbish piling high on the streets. Punk was the response, both to political inertia and over-long solos.

So we are left with a troubled legacy. And yet, there are elements of prog rock that cannot help but invoke nostalgic longings. Its ambition, certainly. Among the names quoted as influences in the documentary are Edward Lear, TS Eliot, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Thelonious Monk, Benjamin Britten, Lewis Carroll and Bonanza. Prog rock may have overstretched itself, but its scope was compelling. These were literate boys, using their education to produce something that hadn’t been seen before. That’s not a bad aspiration to have, and a lot more noble than the (invariably well-educated) punk guitarists who pretended only to know how to play a handful of splenetic chords.

Messrs Emerson, Lake and Palmer each have their own websites today, and they make poignant reading. Carl Palmer has just been playing in Ascoli Piceno in Italy, where you could buy VIP tickets that entitled you to a seat at the soundcheck, and dinner afterwards with the drummer. Greg Lake, the searing voice behind King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man”, toured with Ringo Starr. Keith Emerson writes movingly of friends recently lost, Mitch Mitchell and Pink Floyd’s Roger Wright. They all send messages of peace and love, and hope to see us in 2009.

‘Prog Rock Britannia’ will be broadcast on January 2 on BBC4
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