Prog Britannia

It's inevitable I guess that the BBB would follow up Heavy Metal Britannia with Prog Britannia covering - you guessed it - prog rock. Once again I was tumbled back in time to a suburban New Zealand adolescence in the eighties. My musical tastes are based on a mix of what Mum and Dad had lying around (show tunes light classics, occasional Beatles LPs) and records passed down to me by my older brothers Matt and Al (classic rock, prog and metal). Formative experiences involve Graham Newport's basement on a rainy afternoon playing D&D or those little board games from Dragon magazine with Al and a bunch of his hairy mates, while in the background Yes, Hawkwind, Sabbath and King Crimson noodled away. Al bought me Jethro Tull's Aqualung for my fourteenth or fifteenth birthday and I taped Steve Vai and Frank Zappa records from Matt's sparkly new CD player in the early eighties.

One thing they touched on during the documentary was the nature of the album art and construction. I owned Thick As A Brick in LP form, complete with newspaper, but it was also the age of high concept Sci Fi album covers by guys like Roger Dean and Hygpgnosis. I was amazed the documentary never looked at the Alan Parsons Project or Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, which inspired my brainy and bookish little sci fi mind when I was twelve or so. War of the Worlds was the first LP I ever owned, complete with booklet of art and lyrics.

Some of the music managed to live up to this imagery. King Crimson's Twenty-first Century Schizoid Man remains compelling, despite the ugliest cover artwork of the era, and Keith Emerson playing I Like To Be in America is still an enjoyably angry take on a classic song. A lot of it, however, comes over as very flaccid and directionless to me. Even as a kid I wasn't convinced by Yes or Genesis. I liked some of their ideas, but the creamy soft rock sound just rubbed me the wrong way. I liked it to be shrieked or shouted; most of the records just crooned on without ever hitting any emotional high.


In the Court of the Crimson King - hard to look at for long, I find

An important element missing from prog is sex. Metal has a strong libidinal element, testosterone expressed in all it's manly ways, while prog is a more intellectual pleasure. It uses clever words and literary allusions, cunning musical forms and novel changes of tempo and key to engage us, where metal just strives to be old fashioned rock and roll. I think it was Phil Collins who talked about how he noticed (at about the time Peter Gabriel left) that the audience for Genesis was all young guys in great coats and fisherman's hats with stacks of albums under their arms.

I think the backbone of the prog imagery and approach is the kind of placid English intellectualism that first found expression in nonsense verse of the Edwardian era. There's a love of wordplay and imagined worlds, pastoral utopias that inspire an Edenic child-like innocence, but there is no urgency or immediacy. Metal, on the other hand takes directly heroic or dystopian elements of horror and swords and sorcery and aims for high drama. Prog is the music of Wind in the Willows and the Hobbit, while metal is the music of Dennis Wheatley and Conan the Barbarian.

The classic prog bands seem to be mostly public and grammar school boys, some from the Trinity School of Music, they weren't the same as the blues rock influenced metallers. It was rock music for undergrads in the same way, I guess that modern jazz had already become a kind of blues for undergrads, separated from the basic drives of its source material in favour of a more intellectual exploration of form and content.


Typical prog rock fan

In 1983 I was absolutely one of those guys in great coats, although I wasn't much into Genesis (they'd already turned into Phil Colllins, if you know what I mean). It was a useful uniform that was quickly adapted to upcoming goth uniform – same great coat, different accessories – as I discovered Bauhaus, The Birthday Party and alternative rock. Those, of course, are also music for undergrads, and I think there's a connection between those audiences that only comes out over time – Phil Collins wheeled out his old anecdote about Rat Scabies whispering to him that he was a huge fan as evidence of this.

I still like quite a lot of prog, not least the greatest prog band of them all, Pink Floyd. Oddly, the Floyd were only mentioned a couple of times in Prog Britanni in relation to prog's psychedelic precursors. What the Hell is up with that? It was interesting to hear about these other bands, but I thought they should at least mention Pink Floyd. Tubular Bells was big, but if anyone really brought prog to the masses it was Pink Floyd! Come on BBC, why oh why etc...

Heavy Metal Britannia

I watched the BBC documentary Heavy Metal Britannia on Friday night, as the missus was out and I could indulged in a bit of sweaty maleness. It was a good history of the genre, from about 1970 to 1990 or so, just at the period when it's place in the teenage life as complicated by the arrival of grunge and goth.

Metal comes across in the doc as a kind of decadent form of the blues rock sound that had been evolving since the early sixties, a lineage coming via Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix and a few power chord-based rock classics like The Kinks's You've Really Got Me Going and the harder sound coming out of LA via The Doors, Steppenwolf and Iron Burretfly (the documentary does a great jobon the musical forebears and some guitarist (I forget who, might have been Ian Gillan, who's a singer.... but anyway) illustrates the evolution of a standard blues riff (from Brooke Benton's Kiddyo) into Led Zep's A Whole Lotta Love.

The hippy dream showed youth in the ascendent, but metal came along at a time - the early 70s - when the hippy dream was over and things took on a more hopeless tone, singing about apocalypses to come and self-abnegation through hedonism, a lot like glam but without the sexual ambiguity and artsy pretense. In fact, the lack of depth that characterises metal versus glam (and later versus punk and indie and various other flavours of rock) is what makes it so easy to mock. The limited intellectual scope for the genre makes it best when the pratitioners just get on with rocking out. As soon as they introduce elements of fine musicianship or intimations of a message, metal becomes rapidly unstuck.

Goth is pretty much the metal of the punk generation and it's interesting that metal and goth are both heavily associated with the fantasy genres, which also often dwell on past glories of vanished empires. The vampire is to goth what the rampaging Conan-esque barbarian is to metal, with Elric as a kind of intermediate figure. Metal comes at the end of the space race and the huge push that SF got from it, but by the seventies fantasy had so occupied the genre space that a blatant fantasy movie stole all SF's best toys. Goth comes at the end of the initial cyberpunk phase, pushing out the rationalistic fantasies of the burgenoing cyber world with fantasies of parasites and monsters.

Fantasy is a turning away in many ways, a way of saying things that are too hard to say in unadorned terms, a way to place the loss of hope or the death of the old away from us. These decadent forms grow out of the unfulfilled hopefulness of the previous genre - the hope offered by rock in the sixties and punk in the 70s turned sour, the hope of the rocket age and the computer age turned rotten. In these times, people turn to fantasy, but the next wave of hopefulness is never far behind.