Category: General

This question has crossed my mind a lot in the last couple of days. I’ve seen it discussed online too in recent months. I’ve never seen a satisfactory explanation. I have my own idea of what Progressive Rock actually is, or at least what it feels like. But, putting this into words is harder than it looks.

I was compelled to put my thoughts into pixels during a long car journey, accompanied by the music of noughties US bands The Polyphonic Spree and Subtle, when my mind wandered around the land of Prog for an hour or two. I was still recovering from a lunchtime discussion during a band rehearsal, where that old chestnut was raised, debated, and left unresolved. I think I got a little closer to the answer, by the time I arrived…

Accepted wisdom states that Progressive Rock is flowery music about wizards made by ex-hippies in flares, who attained Grade 8 in their chosen instrument at Boys’ Grammar School. The songs are long and meandering—so long, in fact, that an album of only 2–4 tracks including some complicated time signatures and plenty of Mellotron should be of no surprise. Accepted wisdom—oh, the irony.

Let’s face it, Prog Rock got a bad name from this common perception. And this previously-hip musical genre was outcast with the advent of back-to-basics Punk and Disco in the mid- to late-seventies. Much of this accepted wisdom remains to this day. Even Progressive Rock fans sort of believe it. I went along with it, ashamedly, though I never really fully believed it.

What do I know, anyway? Who am I to judge? What follows is only an opinion. The cool thing about music is that it’s subjective. And it is very personal. People argue about music all the time, and all opinions are valid. But my opinion is more valider.

Unknowingly, I got into Progressive Rock at a very early age—probably 7 or 8. I was the youngest in my family, and I was influenced by teens with growing record collections, because there wasn’t much else to do in the early seventies. I say “unknowingly” because it was all just music to me back then. I was weaned on a diet of Beatles, Beach Boys, Focus, Pink Floyd, David Bowie, Stackridge, Roxy Music, Supertramp and Mike Oldfield. At the age of 11, my first favourite band was 10cc.

Back then, Progressive Rock was as much a fashion as a musical genre. And fashions change. True to form, I didn’t properly get into Progressive Rock until age 13, in the late seventies, when it was very uncool. That’s when I knew the type of music I liked had a name, and I had to find more of it to listen to. My new favourite band was Yes. My bedroom wall was covered with Roger Dean posters and band photos. I learned to play guitar on a diet of S.H. (Steve Howe, Steve Hackett and Steve Hillage).

I had to be content with listening to records by bands who’d gone a bit crap. They’d had their day. By the early eighties, it was a bit embarrassing. When asked which my favourite bands were, my responses were met with a mixture of disgust and amusement, because they were currently making shit records. They didn’t know one of the universal laws of Physics, which states that, “a band’s best albums are usually their earliest.” When I ran out of good Progressive Rock to listen to, I moved on to what the people in the know were calling New Wave. Anyway, I digress…

Some time in the nineties I had an epiphany. Quite a few of the albums I had been enjoying over the last decade were pressing the same buttons as those seventies Prog albums. I eventually created a website called Prog’s Not Dead, dedicated to contemporary albums which I felt followed the Spirit of Prog and yet avoided that classification. [Don’t look for it; I wiped it a long time ago.] It was around then that I realised that popular bands like Radiohead were very much Prog, and that Punk, Dance, Folk and Hip-Hop could be Prog too.

Fast forward to recent times. In 2021, a band answered my musicians wanted ad, asking if I’d be interested in joining them in their Prog Rock band. My initial thought was, “HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA, no.”* I hadn’t followed actual out-of-the-closet Progressive Rock since the early 80s. Don’t get me wrong—I still love my seventies Prog—but, it was in the past. The post-seventies Progressive Rock bands I’d heard had been pretty dire, in my not-so-humble opinion. Why would you try to recreate that magnificent musical genre if you couldn’t do it any justice?!

Back to today, and I’m daydreaming in the car to a soundtrack of hippy choral indie rock and experimental hip-hop from the mid-noughties. Both albums strike me as being very Prog. Neither has long meandering songs with weird time signatures or great instrumental prowess. No fancy solos, or references to dragons or faeries. No sci-fi album covers. But they are still Prog. Why are they Prog? There must be a pattern, a code or a formula!

Then it began to dawn on me. You have to separate the ‘Progressive’ from the ‘Rock’. They are two different things. Rock music emerged in the mid-sixties, and, like Blues, Chart Pop and Traditional Jazz, had a defined set of musical parameters: raunchy guitars, earnest singing, pumping bass and hard-working drums. Verse, chorus, bridge/solo. The Progressive guys found this a bit boring and predictable, and messed around with the format. It’s as simple as that. I guess you could say that, by the mid-seventies, the Progressive guys had run out of possibilities within the Rock format, and got stuck. Some went downhill rapidly, and some managed to extract a bit more mileage for another few years before going the same way.

So that’s what Progressive Rock is. It’s almost as important to know what it isn’t. This is where I reach for the dictionary, and check what the word ‘progressive’ means, literally. It can be interpreted in a few subtly different ways. It can mean steady evolution by increments. It can mean trying to improve/change something. Which brings me to those aforementioned post-seventies Progressive Rock bands. They aren’t so much Progressive Rockers as Retro Revivalists and copyists. Indeed, there’s nothing progressive about emulating something you liked when you were a youngster. Unhand that adjective!

So, to recap… You can have all types of Progressive music: Progressive Hip-Hop, Progressive Dance, Progressive Metal, Progressive Punk, etc. BUT, it’s only truly progressive, if the artist is trying to change the format for the better. Progressive Rock probably had it’s time by the late 70s. Progressive Rock is dead. Long live Prog!

[* I joined the Prog band.]

I’m not in the habit of giving book reviews, but this book had a strong effect on me, and, as a result, I felt compelled to write about it.

The Crimson King

I’ve been a long time admirer of King Crimson, and, by inference, of Robert Fripp. The man is clearly a legend. And, like Mark E Smith, he is infamous for creating a certain band atmosphere by means of benign dictatorship. Indeed, one of the bands I’m in, Crimson Creatures, was partly named as an homage to the also Dorset-related band.

But, I’m no fanboy. I’d never paid much attention to Fripp’s extra-curricular activities, apart from his musical collaborations with Brian Eno, David Bowie, and Van Der Graaf Generator. I have also, like many others, been subjected to his video shorts with Toyah. So, although I was aware of Guitar Circle, I knew very little about it. Any book about the craft of playing guitar written by a god-like guitar genius has got to be good, right?

I’m usually very thorough when I read a book. I start at the beginning, read all the extra bits, and never skip anything, no matter how boring — I might miss something. The introduction seemed very rich in hippy phrases. You know the sort. Like (and I’m paraphrasing here) you cannot just receive the music, you must first clear you mind, become at one with the universe, and you will become receptive to the music.

I Talk to the Wind

This sort of thing went on for quite some time. I kept putting the book down, as it was quite hard going. But, I was bound to get to the meat and potatoes soon enough, right?

After a sizeable chunk, I started doing the unthinkable and I jumped forward a few pages to see for how long the zen philosophy continued. Several jumps later, I was at the end. I made the momentous decision to put the book down, and put it away. I was defeated. It must be said that I rarely never finish a book I’ve started, and this book was not cheap.

I’d only recommend this book if you are a King Crimson collector, or think that crystals provide positive energy.

Since moving to sleepy Dorset, I had been on the look-out for local musicians for collaboration. I placed adverts on a couple of websites, and made a few contacts, but nothing much happened. Then, one day, I was contacted by a friendly and verbose keyboardist/composer, asking me if I was interested in joining a start-up Prog band, based in Poole.

I was a huge Progressive Rock fan in my youth. And I still very much enjoy listening to the likes of Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Gentle Giant and Van Der Graaf Generator. But it never crossed my mind to join a Prog band. I always thought that much-maligned genre was very much in the past, being superseded by the likes of Radiohead, Deerhoof and Field Music many years ago. Besides, I never really got into the Neo-Prog bands which popped up in the 80s and 90s.

But the keyboard wizard was very enthusiastic and persuasive, and after a long telephone conversation, he sent me demos of the songs he’d been working on with his bandmate and one-man music factory (on bass and vocals). The demos were slightly scary in their length and execution. There was extensive use of falsetto, banks of retro synthesizers, and they seemed to go on forever. But there was a lot of potential clearly visible amongst the chaos.

We agreed that I should take a few songs and see if I could beat them into a more manageable form. So, three finished songs later, we met up and rehearsed them. It was clear that we worked well as a unit. It was very refreshing to play with musicians with similar aims and abilities, and things went surprisingly smoothly. I found myself invited to join — And Then There Were Three (sorry). Five months later, we had a 3-track EP and an album of original material in the can, and we’d named ourselves Crimson Creatures.

We are releasing the songs on Crimson Creatures’ Bandcamp and streaming platforms, in 2-weekly intervals. We’ve acquired some PA gear and have started regular rehearsals. We are also looking for a progressive drummer who isn’t scared of a 7/4 time signature. Eventually, we hope to be playing live, assuming there are still people who like a bit of Prog in their Rock.

Ever since I started recording again, I’ve had one eye open for potential collaborators. I can write music, it’s just that coming up with ideas is a very slow and random process for me. The solo Long Division album took 3 years, start to finish.

It had always been easier to compose with a collaborator. Cloudburst and Back to the Grind were good examples of this. I have several albums’ worth of original demos from the 80s. We would bring scraps of music to recording sessions, bounce ideas and suggestions around, and have something resembling a song later that day.

Andy Bell was an occasional observer at Cloudburst rehearsals. He was a keen guitarist and songwriter, and went to the same school as us. We reconnected a few years ago, through the wonder of social media, and shared a few beers at Darrener reunions. This year, he sent me a recording of one of his old acoustic guitar compositions, and said, “see what you can do with this.”

I think he was expecting me to noodle over the top with an electric guitar. What actually happened was that I beat-mapped and pitch-shifted the recording, and dropped it into a DAW. A couple of days later, I’d added drum sampler, bass sampler, electric 12-string, Strat and SG tracks.

It was as much an exercise in recording, production and mixing as it was in composition. The bones were already there, I just had to put flesh on them. But it was fast, and we were pleased with the result. I think we both knew that we would be doing more.

So, a few weeks later, I was sent another short acoustic piece. This time, we were more ambitious, and it started to morph into a full-length track. I was delighted when Andy announced he was going to attempt to sing on it, despite being very much a guitarist first. Andy named it Lowly Man.

I had produced my first complete song since Worm Pizza in 2003. I suggested we changed Andy Bell & Keith Nuttall to something a bit shorter. My wife suggested a hybrid, made from our names, like K/andy. So we agreed on K(andyb)all. Two songs later, we went for something a little less K-Pop, and something a little more fitting. We chose the title of our first song, Lowly Man.