Love comes to you and you follow
Lose one on to the heart of the sunrise
SHARP-DISTANCE
How can the wind with its arms
All around me
Lost on a wave and then after
Dream on on to the heart of the sunrise
SHARP-DISTANCE
How can the wind with so many around me
Lost in the city
- Yes, Heart of the Sunrise
I get a lot of flack for being a prog-rock fan – progressive rock is the probably most maligned form of music on the planet, with the possible exception of jazz-funk.
The ‘prog-rock is awful’ meme seems to date from the punk era, when an influential clique of London-based Stalinist music journalists decided that music with three chords and a sneer was to be the only game in town. Since then this line has been repeated by successive generations that weren’t even born in the early-to-mid 1970s when progressive rock was at it’s height, and have probably never even listened to any 70s Genesis, Yes or Pink Floyd.
Progressive rock is always doomed to be judged by it’s worst excesses, not it’s best moments. Nobody would ever judge punk by acts like Sham 69 or the Cockney Rejects. But everybody always judges prog-rock by Yes’ “Tales from Topographic Oceans” (One of their worst albums) or obscure and inaccessible works by people like Henry Cow (No, I’ve never heard any Henry Cow – he might be incredibly brilliant)
Why do the journalistas hate prog rock so much? I have some theories:
- Prog-rock has more complex melodies and rhythmic structures, and needs more intense listening, while music journalists always want to judge a record on the basis of a couple of spins.
- Music journalists, being writers, are more interested in the lyrics than the music; and prog-rock is emphatically not about lyrics. The best bits of prog-rock albums are often the instrumental sections; the lyrics are usually nothing more than decoration. The scribblers just don’t get this – their most common complaint is that ‘the lyrics are nonsense’. So what?
- Prog-rock is perceived as being ‘middle class’, and the Stalinist clique cling to the myth that rock is exclusively a working-class thing, something that was, is, and always has been total and utter bollocks. I’ve heard it said that you need some exposure to classical music at an influential age to fully appreciate prog-rock, this may have something to do with it.
- The British music press is simply made up of tone-deaf cloth-eared idiots.
Of course, prog-rock never went away, it just went underground. While the great 70s bands like ELP, Genesis, Yes and Pink Floyd either split, blanded out, or became soap-opera parodies of themselves, successive generations of bands have kept the spirit alive. There are plenty of so-called neo-prog bands from the 80s and 90s. Marillion may be well-known enough to appear on the journalista’s radar screen and get flack from them, but bands like IQ, Dream Theater and Spocks Beard have also produced some wonderful music in recent years. Sadly the media is in the grip of the Journalista’s prejudices, so the chance of any of those bands ever appearing on anything like the BBC’s Later with Jools Holland is virtually nil. Bah!
