#13 – A Prog Lifer?

I was recently asked in the comments of the Emerson Lake and Palmer videos if I’d grown up with prog music? It was assumed that, because ELP and Yes and Genesis had been so big in the early 70s that I would have grown up with their sound ringing in my ears, The the legacy of these huge bands would have been stitched into the everyday fabric of British life and culture. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s taken a lifetime to get to this point. The first time I was aware of music that wasn’t church music (hymns) or ABBA, was probably Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals (Joseph, Starlight Express, Jesus Christ Superstar). The first record I bought was Invisible Sun by The Police. At school it was all early 80s metal – Maiden, AC/DC, Motorhead, some Rush, Queen. I’ve documented my lifelong love affair with Iron Maiden elsewhere. I saw Live Aid in 1985 when I was 14, and was blown away by The Who. A year or so later I was more into Talking Heads, The The, The Teardrop Explodes, Echo and the Bunnymen. I then went back to the late 70s and was heavily into post punk stuff like The Buzzcocks, Magazine, The Stranglers, but also The Damned, The Cult, The Cure. It wasn’t really until my late teens I got into Floyd in a big way, but by then the electronic music scene was evolving faster than anything else and being far more interesting than anything else. Chill Out by The KLF, The Orbs Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld and Lifeforms by The Future Sound Of London were seminal records for me. So from around 1990 till mid 2005, I was on a diet of Brit rock/pop (I liked Blur and Oasis!), electronica, Ozric Tentacles, Iron Maiden and Pink Floyd. In fact, all the music I’d ever owned I still listened to though I’d have phases of certain bands and albums for a while. I remember going through a phase of listening to Kill Em All by Metallica for weeks on end in about 2000 because I couldn’t get enough of it!

I think that the generation that followed the prog generation had to really look hard to find stuff like ELP. Yes, it was popular in the early 70s, but by the time I was at the right age to explore music, I think that the music industry and press had done a good job of eradicating it from the national consciousness and swept it aside with punk, new wave and NWOBHM. Prog didn’t exist and it didn’t have a voice, an image or any kind of visibility. Older music such as The Beatles and The Stones and Led Zeppelin were still revered and held up as the origin of all that is good.

Prog was denounced as cheesy, corny, ever so uncool, nerdy pointless drivel, so much so that the propaganda by the music press forbade anyone to explore the genre. Sure, I’d skirted the edges of the sound with Floyd, Blue Oyster Cult, The War Of The Worlds and Mike Oldfield, and brushed with Supertramp, Fleetwood Mac, Jean Michel Jarre and even some Zappa, but the desire to fit in with my teenage peers and to meet girls pretty much dictated what I was listening to! I wanted to belong and be seen, not be an outlier and invisible.

It takes time and the mindset of “don’t give a fuck anymore” and “ I want to see for myself” to break out of the mould that has shaped me. I’d always been more adventurous with my listening than most of my friends but it was with the sounds of today, not yesterday. It has been one of the biggest regrets of my life, but I’m slowly rectifying it now.