FIVE YEARS THAT SHAPED PROG

Frankly insane 2016 attempt to tell the history of UK progressive rock at a time when mags ran lengthy features. If you've got a spare hour or so (did a US one too!)

No room for visuals so here’s me and Curved Air chanteuse and progressive rock goddess Sonja Christina in 1976

FIVE YEARS THAT SHAPED PROG

From the second world war until the late 20^th century, brave new movements pumped music and culture with ever-evolving lifeblood. After rock ‘n’ roll’s arrival in the mid-fifties, a pattern emerged where the initial impact of a new trend was followed by it being hijacked and hoovered up by the music industry, often resulting in something else coming along to challenge or even replace it, leaving little pockets of resistance to celebrate themselves, if little else.

What came to be called progressive rock took molecules from the rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, beat, R&B and mod movements after they had been spiked by the psychedelic revolution, often adding folk, classical and avant garde elements to forge a musical strain which, sometimes against heavy odds, managed to survive, evolve and thrive.

By the early seventies, progressive rock had somehow solidified into a particular sound and image that would come under fire from punk’s insurgents before they were sucked into by industry and resprayed as new wave. What was soon to be called Prog had already got too massive to be squashed, joining heavy metal as one of the world’s most popular musical forms, its pioneers hailed like gods and new bands always emerging in their wake.

A progressive mindset in British music can be traced most visibly back to the Soho jazz scene of the late 1950s and early sixties, which nurtured many artists who would later appear at the more progressive end of the rock spectrum. The jazz poetry collective New Departures, started by pioneering poet Michael Horovitz and featuring the likes of future Cream lyricist Pete Brown, alto sax colossus Graham Bond and many more, was crucial in breaking down the barriers between genres. Bond was among the first to make a name in jazz then cross over to R&B, making a major impact with his fearless, classically-infused Hammond organ onslaughts he unleashed with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated before forming his Organisation, a seminal influence on progressive rock’s adoption of the keyboard as a main instrument. Bond was first to use a mellotron (on 1965’s There’s A Bond Between Us), while his bands gave the world giants such as Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce, Jon Hiseman, Dick Heckstall-Smith and John McLaughlin.

It’s well-documented that the onset of Beatles-inspired beat music then Stones-hotwired R&B trampled the jazz market into the dust, forcing clubs to close or change their musical policy, and musicians to cross over just to survive. The burgeoning progressive scene provided a logical escape valve, even if it was through a psychedelic tunnel. The movement’s evolution was so rapid that every waking day seemed to bring a new delight, development or shapeshifting discovery. Using personal memories or archives of events as they unfolded, a timeline approach seems the simplest way of chronicling these rapid changes in British music between 1966 and 1970, leading up to the decade in which progressive rock crystallised into a major movement.

1966

1966 can now be seen as the year music grew up, conducting dress rehearsals for the coming countercultural revolutions but already throwing up landmarks and blazing trails to be followed. May saw two albums released which helped change the course of music; Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. The former was the first rock double album (later Prog’s favourite format), which solidified Dylan’s new electric approach and the deeper lyricism he was bringing to music (The previous year’s Like A Rolling Stone had been the first epic-length 45). According to Syd Barrett’s former girlfriend Jenny Spires, she and her boyfriend listened to little else but Blonde on Blonde after it was released (and had perms to emulate Dylan’s look on the cover).

Meanwhile, Pet Sounds invented the modern album with its breathtakingly beautiful suite of intricately created songs draped in soft focus resonance, heavenly chorales and hallucinogenic string quartets. Although it had been inspired by the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, the Beatles acknowledged Pet Sounds as a major influence on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, while Stones manager Andrew Oldham hailed it as “the most progressive album of the year” and took full page press ads to tell the world. Meanwhile, a darker, jazzier, more satirical milestone arrived that June in the form of the Mothers Of Invention’s Freak Out, another double album.

Off we go…

February: The Yardbirds release Shapes Of Things, a progressive landmark which deploys Keith Relf’s ominous vocals and shattering guitar from Jeff Beck, who described his feedback-engulfed solo as “weird mist coming from the east”. The Yardbirds had already shown their rapid progress with the previous year’s singles For Your Love, Still I’m Sad and Heart Full Of Soul, and go on to define psych’s east-west evolution on 1966 singles including Over Under Sideways Down and Happening Ten Years Time Ago.

March: Pink Floyd, who formed in Cambridge the previous year, play a ‘Giant Mystery Happening’ as the first of nine appearances at the weekly Spontaneous Underground events organised at London’s Marquee club by Steve Stollman (brother of New York avant label ESP-Disk founder Bernard). Some gigs are shared with free music pioneers AMM, whose guitarist Keith Rowe is watched by Barrett, who copies his techniques of rolling ball bearings along the strings to produce spacey sounds.

July: Cream play first gigs as UK’s first supergroup, bringing together guitarist Eric Clapton from John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker, who had both served apprenticeships in Graham Bond’s Organisation. Although Cream’s debut album is a relatively subdued affair, the group take off at gigs into increasingly lengthy improvisations.

In Canterbury, Robert Wyatt leaves the Wilde Flowers and joins bassist Kevin Ayers in London to form the Soft Machine, along with keyboardist Mike Ratledge and Australian beatnik guitarist Daevid Allen. The Canterbury scene becomes an almost mythical wellspring from which gushed key names in British progressive music.

August: The Beatles release Eleanor Rigby/Yellow Submarine. Influenced by Bernard Hermann’s score for Psycho, George Martin conducted the string octet which made Eleanor Rigby a key early example of classical influences invading pop music before becoming a Prog mainstay. The single comes from the sessions which produce Revolver. Lennon and Harrison had discovered LSD the previous year, resulting in shapeshifting experimental landmarks including Tomorrow Never Knows, which declares the onset of psychedelia as Lennon put his vocals through a Leslie speaker, George unveils his sitar and all operate tape loops over Ringo’s hefty, unusual drum tattoo. Lennon’s lyrics are partly inspired by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert’s The Psychedelic Experience (A Manual Based On The Tibetan Book Of The Dead). The Beatles also record Lennon’s similarly acid-flecked Rain, (B-side of Paperback Writer), which features early backwards vocals and guitars.

September: Pink Floyd play All Saints Church Hall, Powis Gardens, for the first time and get noticed by the burgeoning underground. At his Cambridge home, Syd Barrett is writing the songs he will sing for the rest of his short career (According to his girlfriend Jenny Spires, they all but stop coming by the end of the year).

December: The Who release A Quick One, which includes Pete Townshend’s first foray into the virgin turf of rock operas. Pink Floyd play the first of many gigs at London’s new counterculture epicentre UFO, held at the Blarney Club on Tottingham Court Road and are filmed in action by Peter Whitehead for his seminal documentary Tonite Let’s All Make Love In London.

Birmingham’s The Move have been using old school showbiz publicity stunts to attract attention at an explosive Marquee residency which sees them wrecking TV sets and cars onstage. After manager Tony Secunda persuades guitarist Roy Wood to start writing songs, the Move shoot to number two with Night Of Fear’s bad acid trip, built on sitars mutating Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

In Southend, R&B band the Paramounts split and singer-pianist Gary Brooker starts writing songs with lyricist Keith Reid, which will be recorded under the name Procol Harum (as suggested by madcap London DJ Guy Stevens).

1967