Wednesday, May 25, 2005

Progressing Backwards

I'm going through a bit of a prog-rock revival at the moment. I think it all started a couple of years ago when I bought the Genesis Archive 1967-75 box set (I'd won a £25 Virgin voucher in a competition, so it was an impulse purchase). As the live performances of Gabriel-era favourites like "Dancing With The Moonlit Knight", "Supper's Ready" and the complete "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" thundered gloriously from the speakers, I found I couldn't for the life of me understand why I'd ever gone off the band in the first place. Then I remembered...

In 1975, Peter Gabriel left Genesis, with Phil Collins - a brilliant and mighty drummer, but all the stage presence of a middle-aged woodwork teacher - taking over the "vocal duties", as they say in the business called Show. The first couple of post-Gabriel albums weren't too bad, but then they became the middle-of-the-road, comfy hit machine we knew and loathed from that point on. Now, this switch coincided with the rise of Punk and New Wave music, which energised me tremendously - it was an exciting time to be nightclubbing, seeing bands like The Stranglers, The Damned and The Slits at Birmingham Barbarella's each weekend. Suddenly energy and commitment seemed at a premium, and twenty-minute virtuoso epics seemed as relevant as yesterday's sodden chip-papers.

And, of course, punk led to many good things, without which my musical life would be the poorer: Never Mind The Bollocks, The Clash, XTC, Siouxsie And The Banshees, Wire, the list could be extended to the point of tedium. But somehow, I never got around to re-evaluating prog-rock, and Genesis in particular, until that box set. I'd always assumed that I'd grown tired of Genesis purely as a side-effect of the heady swirl of shifting allegiances of the Punk era. But no, it was simpler than that.

Genesis with Phil Collins at the helm were just plain shit.

There, told you it was simple. Listening back, Genesis with P.Gabriel were exciting, quirky, unfashionable, noisy, and almost frightening in the moments of rawest power (the final outburst of "...Giant Hogweed", the first couple of minutes of "Apocalypse In 9/8", the closing pages of "Musical Box"). Especially live, where Gabriel's presence was downright unnerving at times.

So I set about re-evaluating more of my Prog-Rock back pages. The starting point was "The Best Prog Rock Album In The World... Ever", a 3-CD set featuring 30 tracks in 240 minutes. Ah, 8 minutes per track on average, them's Prog-Rock timings! The rush of nostalgia was overwhelming! I'd forgotten:

...the sheer terror of Van der Graaf Generator's avant-rock terrorism. Listening to "A Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers", their 25-minute magnum opus, is akin to sharing a locked room with a grizzled old mariner undergoing a violent psychotic breakdown. No wonder John Lydon still lists them as one of his favourite bands.

...the demented "everything but the kitchen sink... oh hell, throw the sink in too!" genre-defying twists and turns of Gentle Giant at their finest (particularly the live "Playing The Fool" and studio "In A Glass House" albums). A track might start with them singing an accapella four-part mock-medieval fugue, switching suddenly to a jazzy instrumental section, which is then ripped open by jagged rock guitar and thundering bass, before subsiding into a xylophone solo, and then... and so on. Utterly in a world of their own, their live shows were exciting musically and physically, watching them run around frantically from instrument to instrument for a couple of hours. Great.

...ELP's over the top excesses. Those who despised them characterised them as pompous pseudo-intellectuals, but their true forte was speed, power and theatricality. They had more in common with the kind of heavy-metal band whose dearest wish is for a Spinal Tap-style "amp that goes up to 11", than with anything fey or precious. Listen: Keith Emerson used to jam knives into the keyboard of his Hammond organ, making it stick on a howling discord. Then he'd spin it round and throw it across the stage. And those knives were actually Nazi daggers, given to him by one Lemmy Kilminster, more recently of Motorhead. It's not lacking in significance that ELP's fan-base included an awful lot of Hell's Angels.

And so, once more, on. The final seal on this nostalgia-fest came when I read Stuart Maconie's excellent musical memoir "Cider With Roadies" (the best rock-biog title EVER). His tales of discovering Prog-Rock, then becoming a Soul Boy (lived in Wigan, y'see), then a punk, then discovering The Smiths in the 80s, struck so many chords with me (power chords, natch).

Sometimes, after decades of musical journeying, it's good to look back and realise how diverse the totality of your musical tastes has been. And to understand that, just because you've not revisited earlier enthusiasms for a long while, that doesn't mean they were crap. The best way is forwards, but an occasional fond look back over the shoulder can lead to some brilliant rediscoveries.

5 Comments:

Blogger Jeangenie said...

Early Genesis were brilliant. I too went off them when Peter Gabriel left and took the wit, originality and imagination with him.

7:13 pm, May 25, 2005  
Blogger Paul said...

How can you talk about prog and not mention Camel?

You're right about post-Gabriel Genesis, though :-)

7:23 pm, May 25, 2005  
Blogger silver horde said...

I liked ELP I had no idea.........
I also like Phil Collins so there you have it!

8:30 pm, May 25, 2005  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Yep. I rejected all that when punk came along (you couldnt do both) but as you get older, the good bits re-emerge. eg, Pink Floyd were a no-no but they were actually quite "right-on".
Sounds like a night or two with vinyl should be in order

8:42 pm, May 25, 2005  
Blogger PaulV said...

'Afterglow' and 'Burning Rope' were good tracks by the standards of post-Gabriel Genesis, but wouldn't have made the final cut on a pre-'Trick Of The Tail' album, in my opinion. Post-Genesis Gabriel's albums had far more about them than his former band-buddies. As for Page & Plant, their live 'No Quarter' CD is one of my faves - the multi-ethnic version of Kashmir on there even outshines the original at times. Hey, I wasn't formulating any kind of general principle, y'know! I even still admire Phil Collins - AS A DRUMMER!; it's when the little sod opens his mouth that my hackles rise.

10:46 am, January 11, 2006  

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