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We hand over to Mr. Malcolm Garrett again this time for a pretty special selection of tunes. This is a real grower, and for those of you who don’t buy albums any more this will remind you of the joys of a well constructed tracklist, it’ll grow on you - I guarantee. A lot of consideration has gone into these tunes and as ever, his words are better than mine:


There was once a time (as the sixties turned into the seventies) when pretty much all music that wasn’t classified as pop, classical, jazz, or (the dreaded) easy listening, was known simply as ‘underground‘ or ‘progressive‘. 

Everything contemporary, unusual and otherwise unclassifiable found its way into a rack in the record store that was labelled just ‘progressive‘. Naturally this was the principal place I would look for anything exciting or challenging. I would return to the same few stores in Manchester and thumb through the same collections of discs week by week, wondering whether or not to buy a particular disc, invariably one adorned with a curious image and with an esoteric sounding title, trying to decide if the music would be as enjoyably intriguing as the sleeve. There was no internet to aid research, so almost everything I sampled was based on personal recommendation, or a lead from an enthusiastic NME or Melody Maker review. More often than not I simply bought it on a whim, or after a cursory listen to a track or two in the listening booths still installed in the better stores.

Faced with a mixed lot of largely unknown and previously unheard discs, and with precious little guidance, it is remarkable that most albums I picked up were by and large fresh and eminently listenable. Some of what I found was truly progressive, in a way that I don’t think has been heard since. The world of music really was opening up. In that first explosion of audio experimentation, I discovered things that are genuinely timeless, and so, with the passing of time, here I am still listening.

A cautionary note, however. Please do not confuse ‘progressive‘ with ‘Prog’. At some sad time in the early- to mid-seventies, the likes of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Rick Wakeman and Yes would appear to have embarked upon a willful and systematic ruination of the genre. With each new album they recorded longer and longer pieces, but for no discernible benefit, and with less and less musical discipline or charm. Often they had fairly meaningless ‘concepts’ underlying them, in an attempt to imbue them with some sort of higher musical significance.

Thus it was that the perfectly acceptable, and suitably descriptive, tag of ‘progressive‘ was mercilessly shortened to simply ‘Prog’ rock. This was a quite different term for what was quite different music altogether, albeit springing from similar origins. This rather pejorative term has lingered in the collective memory as one which not only sums up this other largely unpleasant musical backwater, but sadly has also besmirched the heritage and credibility of musically sophisticated recordings such as the ones to be heard in this collection.

What we have in this playlist, by way of clarification, is mostly work from those early days of ‘progressive‘, and is definitely not what I would call ‘Prog’. This, instead, is from the time when pop seemed to turn to rock almost overnight, and the LP found favour as a preferred medium to the 3 minute single, which by then was already somewhat redolent of the first psychedelic era. A later playlist will address more directly the transition from pop single to rock LP track, but these recordings are definitely album material only. They are somewhat longer than 3 minutes, no longer constrained by 7″ vinyl nor daytime radio restrictions, and whilst they feature extended instrumental passages, and are musically quite complex, they display a sparkling sense of musical invention. The basic instrumentation of electric guitar, bass, drums was augmented first with keyboards, then often with wind and strings, and most significantly, with their electronic counterpart: the magnificent mellotron.

This collection begins and ends with pieces by Van der Graaf Generator, who are archetypal ‘progressive‘, and a band truly without equal. The opener ‘Man Erg’, from their opus ‘Pawn Hearts’, has been played continuously by me since its release in 1971, and it still chills me with its haunting presence. The last piece is an impassioned live rendition of ‘Childlike Faith in Childhood’s End’, which was the closing track from the penultimate Van der Graaf album, ‘Still Life’, before they called it a day in 1976, and laid the way clear for Punk.

I could write much more about the other songs in this list, and detail my reasons for selecting them, but I’m hoping that you’ll discover and enjoy this music with that same spirit of enquiry that I did first time around. 

Tracklisting

Man Erg - Van Der Graaf Generator
Stagnation - Genesis
In The Land Of Grey And Pink - Caravan
Cirkus - King Crimson
Hollow Stone (Escape OF The Space Pirates) - Khan
Tropical Fish: Selene - Gong
Symphony No. 2 (3rd Movement) - Egg
Nothing Is Easy - Jethro Tull
Alucard - Gentle Giant
Starship Trooper: Life Seeker/Disillusionment/Wurm - Yes
Instant Kitten - Matching Mole
Death Walks Behind You - Atomic Rooster
Childlike Faith At Childhood’s End - Van De Graaf Generator

 

Running time 1:41:35
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