Oh my prog!/ In the name of prog! (add your own prog rock headline here…..)
One day at school, someone turned up with a box of record they said they’d found at Lime Street station. I took two of them that I’d never heard of: King Crimson’s in the court of the Crimson King; and the seven inch single of Curved Air’s ‘Back Street Luv’.
I think I was a mod at the time, so these were deeply counter cultural. But as they were free, I persevered.
Anyway - I found the King Crimson album utterly unlistenable, except for one track ‘Epitaph’, and I really rather liked the whole rock and roll Curved Air thing…and felt very clever that I knew where Stuart Copeland came from.
Fast forward many, many years and here we are. Last year BBC 4 had an excellent documentary on Prog Rock, and there’s a general buzz that it’s back I also noticed last year that the King Crimson was re-released.
But still I resisted. I was - I’m proud to say - never into Rush, Genesis, Yes or any of that noodling nonsense. And while it’s quite good fun to read about, it I’m certainly not going to get into it now. [I have the same feeling about Formula 1 - fine in theory, deadly dull in practice]
Then a strange set of social/ professional co-incidences gets me looking at the very fine Real Reviews blog, where the enigmatic RS writes about Ulrich Schnauss’s Far Away Trains. An album I have been smitten with since the first time I heard it.
He draws a line back from that, via The Who’s Baba O’Reilly, and Won’t Get Fooled, to Terry Riley’s ‘A Rainbow in Curved Air‘, an album I’d never heard of, but which, you might be able to guess from the title has very hairy credentials indeed.
I turns out that Curved Air, took their name from Terry Riley’s album. So I think: I like Ulrich, and I liked that Curved Air song (albeit when I was 15), so I’ll try this. And as Curved Air are inextricably linked with King Crimson in my mind, I really have to retry In The Court of The Crimson King again.
Guess what? King Crimson is still rubbish! Not that there aren’t some good bits in it. But for ever minute of decent melody, or dramatic build or swoopy/ swirly bit, or haunting vocal, there’s 10 minutes of aural mush. I can see the whole thing working wonderfully on acid - but these days, Wrigleys Extra is the strongest thing to pass my lips so that’s not much good.
And the Terry Riley? This, I sort of get. Although it’s got two tracks, one 18 minutes long, the other 22, and I cant’ remember when I last focussed on something for that long. I think full appreciation requires a spliff, a set of headphones and at least an hour of uninterrupted time. Well, I have the headphones.
For completions sake, I’m glad I was introduced to it. Now I really do know where Pete Townshend got the idea for all that synth work that saw the Who through the late 70s. This is important to me.
However, that’s as prog as I’m going to get. If you ever find me writing: ‘So I thought I’d find out what Rush/Yes/ELP were really like..’, please come round and shoot me. You know where I live.