Tag Archives: prog

56. Hand. Cannot. Erase., Steven Wilson, 2015

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Back at the beginning of this exercise, I promised one album per artist, but I always knew that there would be both a Porcupine Tree and a Steven Wilson album in this, and while I could have picked one of the later solo albums which are much less Porcupine-like, I wanted to explore this album because I think it says something about how listening to albums has both changed out of all recognition since those early days in Aberdeen, and is yet surprisingly similar now.

I’m coming to the end of this journey, and I’m feeling that some of the conclusions I thought I was coming to may not be as clear-cut as I imagined.  For example, here is an album which I have regularly listened to in exactly the same way I used to listen to those ELP and Wings albums back in the early seventies.

Which is to say, alone, in my room, watching the album rotate on the turntable while I pore over the cover and do nothing else that just listen.  I think that from the point when I was first able to listen to my music in a car (in the van, in my case), I slowly lost the ability to just stop and listen; there always seemed to be something else to be getting on with, but there’s a song on this album which I credit with bringing me back to the original way of doing things; a song which only emerged into the light when I stopped doing anything else and just listened.

There’s also a song on here which only truly reveals itself when you see the video accompanying it, so that’s another area to explore.

Following the demise of Porcupine Tree, which happened more or less at the point when I started to become a proper fan, I naturally developed an interest in the works of Steven Wilson; a lifetime of music-making which I think would take a lifetime to explore and appreciate, given all the projects and remixes he’s been involved in.  Around that time, I first got myself a smartphone, and discovered that there was a Steven Wilson app.

At which point, I think it’s worth pausing to consider just how all this music was now reaching me.

It’s not a direct analogy, but bear with me – in 1975, Genesis, a band I was just discovering, broke up.  For some definition of ‘broke up’, of course – this is what I mean by it not being a direct analogy.

The lead singer, Peter Gabriel, started releasing solo albums, but the only way to hear one of them was to go out and buy it (it didn’t appear in the library, and the only other option I had was to borrow it from one of my more Genesis-obsessed friends, which – I think – is what I eventually did.)

By 2010, armed with my early smartphone, I could hear all or any of the tracks on Steven Wilson’s first couple of solo albums any time I liked, as I had access to iTunes, and shortly thereafter, to streaming services like Spotify.  The teenaged me would have passed out, I think, at the idea of just being able to pull this music from the ether using a device which fit in my pocket.

I mean, the teenaged me was also heavily into science fiction, so might have coped better than most, I don’t know….

There was, however, a downside to being able to hear all this music whenever I wanted.  Firstly, it took me a long time to get round to the Steven Wilson solo albums, because I was busy streaming endless albums I had discarded over the years, copies of things I still had, but which were in poor condition (something weird happened to my CD of Hejira, for example, so it skipped like an old-fashioned, poorly treated LP), or went looking for back catalogues I knew I should have heard, but had never quite got round to.

Eventually, however, I started to work my way through the solo Wilson albums, and liked what I heard.  It wasn’t until much later, however, that it occurred to me that ‘heard’ was the operative word – I wasn’t so much listening to these albums as hearing them, and perhaps I just accepted that this was the way things worked now – who had time to properly listen to things any more?

Well, that was, of course, nonsense.

Back in the early 2000s, I would often listen carefully to music through headphones, not only as I travelled, but as I walked around the village in a vain attempt to hold back the effect of time and a sedentary lifestyle on my waistline.  All that had happened in the meantime was that my life became busier, with much less time available for listening – I think you can see that in the spread of albums in the list as a whole.

Suddenly, with children old enough to fend for themselves (and being invested in their own musical tastes), I found myself wondering if I had missed a thing or two, and resolved to do better, starting – I think – with this album, which was the first Steven Wilson solo album I actually bought, as opposed to just streaming it.

Back in 2011, I heard a review of a documentary film called Dreams of a Life, a film I – strangely – have never seen.  The review made a strong impression on me, however, because of the subject matter – the idea that a person seemingly involved in a normal, socially involved, life could die and lie undiscovered for three years was – and is – profoundly shocking.  The idea that Joyce Vincent could be overlooked and not particularly missed is extraordinary, but possibly not as uncommon as you might think.

Hearing, therefore, that this album was partly inspired by those events, and by an artist I had come to admire, meant that I was going to actually own a copy of it, rather than just tune in to it whenever I felt like it.  For what felt like the first time in years, I listened to a new album almost the way I used to absorb the ones I borrowed from the library all those years ago.

But the modern world has its distractions, and it wasn’t until I actually went into a record shop and bought a vinyl copy that I really listened to it, and it was only then that I discovered just how much was going on; only then that I listened to it the way I used to listen to music back when there were no smartphones, no internet, not much television, and nothing on the radio which reflected my musical tastes.

Hand. Cannot. Erase. is a concept album, then, but it’s one of loosely connected themes, not a linear story.  It does eventually touch on Joyce Vincent’s story, but only after a journey around several other female voices, articulating feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Opening track First Regret is a gentle instrumental, setting out part of the musical palette – ringing, open acoustic guitar chords compete with a fluid and flexible bass to keep at bay the power chords which threaten to break in from time to time.  The track blends seamlessly into 3 Years Older via the first of a series of jaw-dropping Guthrie Govan guitar solos.  The first lyric of the album demonstrates Wilson’s increasingly confident voice – it’s up close and personal here in its fragility; the Steven Wilson of In Absentia treated his voice as one element in the mix; here, it’s leading the song and while the instrumental break gets quite excitable in places, there’s a calmness which comes from the vocal and which asserts itself in a tale of single motherhood and ostracism before breaking out into a full-on 1970s Prog Rock wig-out, but shot through with modern percussion sounds which keep it from sounding like a pastiche or parody before coming to an emormously satisfying ending with one extra beat in the final line to round everything off.

The title track is all sparse guitars and treated drums at first, and there’s a lyric which refers to emails where its predecessors would have talked of letters.  As it expands into the fullness of its central arrangement, I’m struck by how – after more than half a century of this kind of popular music – it’s still possible for the truly great songwriters to come up with instantly memorable, catchy melodies.  I know something of the mathematics behind the fact that we’ll likely never run out of new melodic structures, but this album is full of tunes you feel sure someone must surely have thought of before.  Parts of this rock like a Porcupine Tree song might, but much of it sounds new and different, and will have you singing along like the best pop songs do.

Flipping over my vinyl copy, we come to the most interesting of the songs in the collection.  Perfect Life is a meditation from the perspective of a 13-year old girl, narrated by Katherine Begley over the kind of beat which Nitin Sawnhey was turning my head with a few weeks back.  It’s completely unlike anything else on here, except it isn’t really – it’s all of a piece; this is just another aspect of where Wilson’s music was at this point.  When it breaks into song at the end, it is – of course – another sumptuous melody which perfectly balances the loss and longing of the spoken first half.

Incidentally, this is one of those rare songs which has had a few key lines stripped from it after the lyric sheet went to print – the elision makes the song much more enigmatic and strange than the printed version, but both versions live in my head.

It’s impossible, I think, to explain what exactly Routine does to my emotions.  Its jagged and tense opening hints at things unspoken and puts you on edge, a tension which feels like it will never resolve as the song grows subtly and pushes in on you from all directions.

I’m going to recommend listening to this while watching the astonishing hand-animated video, as it not only explains more of the background to the grief-laden story, but provides a visualisation of the shattering catharsis performed by Ninet Tayeb as she finally allows her character to give voice – an inchoate scream, to be sure, but voice none the less – to pretty much every human emotion.  It’s one of the very few moments in music which can cause me to spontaneously burst into tears; it’s that powerful.

But it doesn’t end there – after the storm has passed, there’s a daybreak of hope and regret, perfectly expressed in a repeated unresolvable couplet in which we, the grieving, have our conflict eloquently expressed.

For a long time, I thought Routine  was the best track on this album.  It isn’t, but it’s close.

Another side, another shift in mood.  From melancholy and grief, we are treated to the appropriately scary sounds of Home Invasion.  Not a song to be listened to alone in the dark, it isn’t satisfied with throwing as many distorted instruments as it can find at you in an insistent, so fast it’s slightly out of control, rhythm; it also eventually breaks out a menacing distorted vocal which points the way forward to Wilson’s later album The Future Bites.  This vocal section is much more melodic, and even manages to be soothing in parts before dumping you back into the madness of the modern world with no apology.

Before it goes, Home Invasion elides into Regret #9 which teases you with what sound like voices from a Cold War numbers station and a keyboard solo played in the manner of a guitar solo, which eventually merges into a guitar solo played much more like a keyboard solo.  It’s properly discombobulating, this song, especially as it fades out to the sound of a few sparse notes picked out on a banjo.

Transience is much closer in tone and theme to Porcupine Tree.  It features a train – a favourite Wilson motif – and deliciously layered voices; all as far as I can tell Wilson himself.  Unlike the other tracks on here, this one is short and simple.  Like most of them, however, it’s melodic and compelling.

The final side begins with what I eventually understood to be the best track on here, and possibly Wilson’s solo masterpiece, Ancestral.  A great, intricate edifice of a song, it begins in the sparse reverberating architecture of a song finding its way, accompanied by a delicate but confident flute line. It gradually adds layers of drumbeat and meaning to the lyric, which is about the lonely in the big city, and how the network of ancestry can so easily be left behind without necessarily meaning to.  As it reaches this conclusion, the full breadth of the arrangement is heard, then we are swept up into another Guthrie Govan guitar solo.

I’ve tried not to be carried away in my descriptions of individual instrumental parts in any of these albums, but, honestly, if you have any sense of the power of a great guitar solo, you really need to hear this one – it’s expressive, dynamic and somehow develops the themes of the lyric in one take.  It was only when I sat down and seriously listened to the guitar solo on Ancestral that I began to understand what a great song it is.

Then, just as you think you’ve heard it all, there’s a section of what I can only describe as broken time, as the song threatens to run away with itself, then all sorts of rhythms and time signatures compete for our attention, gradually evening out into a full-throated rock riff, albeit in a time signature I still can’t quite pin down, another break down into a two-chord pattern, before just letting loose with all guns blazing and then dissolving into a spaced-out burst of psychedelia with flutes and hi-hats.

All of which is just setting up the return of the main (is it though?) riff, this time pulling in all the prior themes, carrying the flute line with it to what sounds like one of those conclusions compsers of great symphonies used to indulge in when they wanted to be sure that every theme and passing motif was properly tied up and concluded.

It must have taken a great deal of self-control not to end the album there, as it’s one of the most conclusive pieces of music I’ve ever heard.

But, of course, we have to return to the main theme of the album.  If Joyce Vincent is anywhere in all of this, it’s in the words of Happy Returns, which – without making anything specific – reflect on that bafflingly sad story while effortlessly rolling out yet another memorable melody and lyric.

We hear Joyce’s imagined voice for a couple of verses, sparsely accompanied as if to highlight her solitude, before the essential humanity of this album kicks in and without changing the story in any way, makes it seem more hopeful.  I don’t think it’s trying to let the world off the hook for its neglect and indifference, but is perhaps suggesting that we’re not all like that.

And then, as if we were watching her spirit leaving her body, a choir sings Joyce Carol Vincent to her rest in Ascendent Here On… and a pretty much perfect album comes to a pretty much perfect end.

It’s easy to dismiss a lot of the music I listen to as ephemeral or uninvolving (beyond the visceral thrill of a well-executed riff or a moment of perfection in a solo), but that isn’t a label you can pin on this album.  It’s involving, emotional, thrilling, sad, comforting and joyful, often all at the same time.  Some time in the late 1990s I wondered if this kind of music had run its course.

No, it hadn’t.  Not even close.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Oh, yes.  There are a great many Steven Wilson and Wilson-adjacent things to try, but sticking strictly to his solo work, the run of albums from The Raven That Refused To Sing to To The Bone showcase an artist developing his voice and crafting everything from thoughtful ballads to perfect pop songs along the way.  The most recent solo album, The Future Bites isn’t at all like anything we’ve just been listening to, and because of that seems to have a poor reputation.  Don’t listen to the naysayers – it’s a terrific thing.

Compilations to consider?

If you’re completely new to Wilson, once you’ve listened to this album, try Transience.  It gives a fair idea of what he’s about.

Live albums?

In keeping with the whole ‘biggest artist you’ve never heard of’ vibe around SW, the Home Invasion concert, which is available as a DVD as well as an album is a breathtaking overview of his three Royal Albert Hall performances in 2018, and is as good a live album as this century has produced.

Anything else?

So much.  Porcupine Tree, obviously, but also No-Man and Blackfield.  Oh, and Storm Corrosion, which many people will tell you (not me, but it’s close) is his best work.  The man’s an insane workaholic, and pretty much everything he touches has a guarantee of quality.  If you get through all the stuff he’s performed on, try seeking out some of his remixes, especially the Yes, ELP, Jethro Tull, Gentle Giant and King Crimson ones.  Or the Tears For Fears or Simple Minds ones – there’s something for everyone. Oh, and he’s written a book, because of course he has.  Haven’t read it yet, but I have a birthday coming up…

8. In A Glass House, Gentle Giant, 1973

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As with so many of these, the last two tracks are not from the original album

I’m going to try to stay away from talking about genre too much in these – I have plenty of views on labelling music, not all of them consistent.  Fencing certain types of music off from others puts up barriers but having a label to put on something you don’t know can be helpful – it’s perfectly valid to ask what kind of music this is when it’s something you’ve never heard.

Equally, it’s often fun to go into something completely blind, and I’ve discovered some things I love by just taking a chance, knowing nothing in advance.

All of which is to say that I do want to talk a little about Prog Rock as a genre (or a label if you prefer) so I can talk about Gentle Giant, and why you may never have heard of them.

Every genre, I think, has a Gentle Giant – a band who fit all the defining characteristics; who should be talked about in the same breath as the really big names, yet who somehow never quite grow beyond their core fanbase, all of whom will tell you unprompted about what you’re missing and how they should have been as big as the bands you were all talking about.

The bands we were all talking about in our Year Areas (that’s what we called them; you may have had Form Rooms or Common Rooms, or you may not have had anything, come to think of it) were Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis and so on.  There were one or two devotees of the Canterbury scene who had Caravan and Camel albums; I even remember seeing Barclay James Harvest lurking among the inevitable copies of Supertramp’s Crime of the Century.  I don’t, however, remember ever seeing anyone clutching a Gentle Giant album.  They didn’t appear in the fairly eclectic selection available to borrow in the library, and while I was aware of the cover of Octopus, for example, they otherwise passed me by.

So this isn’t a tale of how I heard Proclamation on ‘Fluff’ Freeman’s Saturday afternoon radio show, or of how I discovered Acquiring the Taste in a pile of records being passed around school, or in a friend’s brother’s collection; it’s the story of how it’s never too late to find a new favourite band, and why their most difficult album may just be their best.

On the first Christmas after we moved to Victoria (that’s Victoria, BC in Canada, if you’re wondering – a long way from that Year Area where we were swapping ELP albums), my children, who clearly know me well, presented me with what I insisted on calling a Record Player – it may have a Bluetooth connection for significantly improved sound, and it may have more features and functions, and be altogether a significant upgrade, but in principle, it’s a turntable, an arm with a needle at the end, and therefore not so different from my faithful old red plastic player from forty years before, and suddenly I was back in a world I hadn’t known I’d missed so badly.

The first time I went back into what I now have to call a record store was at once disorienting and comfortingly familiar.  I genuinely hadn’t understood that vinyl was back and in a way which resembles strongly the way it was when I was a teenager – there, among the racks of familiar sleeves, were hundreds of album covers I’d either only seen in miniature as CD sleeves, or as digital images.  Alongside those, whole areas of music which I knew nothing about – there were genres which hadn’t existed the last time I’d flipped through racks of vinyl albums, and I’m pretty sure none of the staff had been born then either.

Of course, I had spent many happy hours in record stores since the advent of the CD, but there’s no comparison between clacking through piles of plastic squinting at the text on the back to being able to see the whole sleeve the way the designer imagined; to be able to read the track listing and sleeve notes without having to get out your magnifying glass (did I mention I’m nearly 60?). 

That first time back in a record store was disorienting.  I felt like some alien intruder into a world I didn’t properly understand – it looked familiar, but it had been so long since I’d done this, I wasn’t sure of the etiquette – was I supposed to be pulling gatefold sleeves out of their plastic to inspect the inside?  Should I be sliding the second-hand albums out to check the quality?  Was I still supposed to be carefully leaning everything back in place so the weight was distributed evenly? (Obviously, yes, but some people seemed not to worry about that).  Most importantly, was it OK to crouch down and pull out those crates tucked below the racks to poke around looking for something which I hadn’t found in the main stack?

That first time back was also comforting, though.  Here were all those Frank Zappa albums I used to pore over without ever buying one; the smell of the records, and the feel of them, even the way I kept my place in the stack with one hand, while pulling something out and flipping it over to read the back felt so completely familiar; a muscle memory which had never gone away.  I could have spent all day in there just reorienting myself to it all and getting lost in rediscovering all those albums I used to own, and which I could now revisit.

That, too was disorienting – where to start?  Did I work my way through all those albums which I used to own and rebuild my collection like that?  Did I look for albums which I loved, but had only ever owned on cassette – either as original or copy – or CD?  What about all those classic albums I had never quite got round to buying but which I clearly should own?  Then there was the whole sub-category of albums which had come out long after the demise of vinyl and were here in a format they had never been designed for?  Did I want to own a vinyl copy of OK Computer which was a double album, but with each side shorter than it would have been if it had been planned as a double vinyl album?

In the end, I settled for a pattern of partly recreating my old collection – there were a significant number of dreadful albums I owned in the early eighties which I had no particular desire to ever hear again, but a lot I really wanted back in my life – and filling the gaps in the ‘I really ought to own a copy of that’ section.  This mainly worked well, and I quickly came to understand two things: I’d mostly rather own a second-hand copy of the appropriate vintage than a new re-press; and I now lived in a different continent, where the subtle differences between the album I remembered and the one I now owned were at once intriguing and unsettling.

There are several excellent record stores in Victoria – it’s that kind of place – each with its own unique approach to making me feel at once old and a kid again.  On one of my first forays into the largest of them, I decided that I should fill one of the gaps in my rapidly-increasing pile of albums with a Gentle Giant LP.  I had, by this time, heard quite a bit, partly thanks to the marvellous Steven Wilson remixes.  I had been enthralled by the songs I’d heard from Three Friends, so that was the album I looked for.

I was then plunged into the whole confused and confusing saga of Gentle Giant releases in North America.  I couldn’t find a copy of Three Friends because I was looking for the UK sleeve – in Canada and the US, the cover of Three Friends is the same as the cover of the first album, but with the words ‘Three Friends’ inked over the forehead of the giant (look it up if you don’t believe me).  Having discovered how much I actually loved the sound of this band – in spite of the warnings in the sleevenotes of Acquiring the Taste which specifically advise against buying the album (again, look it up), and the fact that it remains dense, complex music which requires concentration and study rather than casual listening, I decided I needed to hear more, and to hear it in its original condition, un-remixed and un-repackaged.

Which led me on a tour of all the record stores in town before tracking down a copy of Octopus (I really wish I had the space to explain why that album title speaks to me) in Turntable Records, surely the most claustrophobic and wondrous record store in the world.  I took Octopus to the counter, whereupon I was engaged in conversation about all things Gentle Giant – just like in the seventies, record stores now are owned and staffed by enthusiasts; people who will recommend things to you; ask if you’ve heard this or that; and have lengthy conversations about seeing Rory Gallagher in concert in 1979.  I was told that, while Octopus is a wonderful album (as it is), I really should hear this one, and had a copy of In A Glass House pressed upon me, along with an anecdote about seeing the band perform it live.

It was a little more expensive than the others I was buying that day, but this was, of course, because it was an import, the original never having been released in North America, because the record company thought it ‘uncommercial’.

Exactly my kind of thing, then.

By all accounts, the band themselves aren’t fans of In A Glass House, it having been recorded in a period of turmoil with founding member and eldest of the three Shulman brothers, Phil, having quit to go back to civilian life.  This only makes me like it more, of course.  I have a decent collection of Gentle Giant albums now, but this is the one I come back to most often.  I love the craft of the sleeve, with its plastic window featuring the band playing their instruments and the cardboard insert which features the band playing their other instruments, for reasons lost to the mists of time.  I love the look and feel of the whole thing; the lyrics printed on the paper inner sleeve which has miraculously survived all this time, and the terrifying flimsiness of the vinyl itself; none of your 180 gram modern stuff here; this wobbles as you take it out of the sleeve, as records always used to.

It sounds, however, like few records ever did.

It starts with sounds of destruction – breaking glass and hammers resolving into a rhythm which is itself overtaken by the first song, The Runaway. Gentle Giant songs don’t sound like anyone else – some of the rhythmic devices could have come from a Frank Zappa album, but the instruments – some of them easier to identify than others – are always a little off-kilter, each phrase establishing itself only to be rephrased by some other part of the orchestra and then taken off in a different direction, while the vocals do whatever it is that Gentle Giant vocals do.

The Runaway is a perfect example of why it’s so hard to describe a Gentle Giant vocal line.  The phrasing, right from the first line, is off; emphasis appears on all the wrong syllables, and some lines change pace halfway through, compressing half the meaning into an almost garbled string of sounds.  Meanwhile, most of the lines are sung by two voices in harmonies which owe their origin to plainchant, and there are, likely as not, a pair of recorders playing an entirely different melody underneath.

Honestly, I could spend the rest of my life listening to just this one song, and not be confident of having heard everything going on in it.

An Inmate’s Lullaby is percussion-driven, hopping from rhythmic pattern to rhythmic pattern without ever settling on anything you could tap your toes to.  As a portrait of insanity, it’s terrifyingly plausible, while managing to be whimsical and even fun in places – the rapidly detuned tympanum at the climax makes me laugh every time.

Way of Life is almost danceable – at least at first.  It rollocks along, a song which you can follow and nod along to.  Well, until it breaks down into a middle section featuring a pipe organ and the pure, calm voice of Kerry Minnear sounding like he’s dropped in from the thirteenth century.  You close your eyes, ready to relax into this calm, pastoral vision only to have it explode into some kind of stadium rock anthem, where it only lingers long enough for you to get to your feet and attempt to sing along before seemingly forcing you to ride a bike with no suspension down a cobbled hill, before crashing into a church organ which moans at you wheezily until it expires, your front wheel still spinning while you stare up at the ceiling trying to figure out exactly what just happened.

And that’s just what’s happening in the left speaker…

The second side is even better.  Experience is awash in keyboard lines which stutter along, punctuated by unidentifiable sounds under another intriguingly phrased vocal about…

It’s not clear what any of these songs are about, really.  After dozens of listens, I came to the conclusion that it’s a picture of some kind of mental breakdown, seen from a number of angles and perspectives.  It certainly would explain why the music leaps so effortlessly from one genre to another, from one rhythm to another, from the latest in electric and electronic sound to the recurring church organ; why the vocals head off in such wildly different directions, and why it’s all at once unsettling and enormously rewarding to listen to.

By the end of Experience, the modern rock song, complete with fluid and expressive guitar solo, is in all-out war with the harpsichord-driven madrigal.  They come to a sort of uneasy peace by the end, and perhaps that is what this album’s about – figuring out how to reconcile all the different influences and experiences of everyone; how to cope with one piece missing.

Then A Reunion comes in and is basically a string quartet with electric bass and Minnear’s fragile voice pressed right up against the microphone so you can hear every breath.  It is a welcome moment of calm before those same violins, now electrified, burst us into the title track and, perhaps, try to sum the whole thing up.

There’s no way to sum the whole thing up, though.  In A Glass House the track, like In A Glass House the album, defies description – it lurches from moments of calm to passages of wild abandon.  There’s melody which never quite manages to assert itself, and random instrumentation – saxophone and mandolin at one point – there are lyrics which pick out the themes of the whole thing without ever making themselves clear enough for you to nod sagely and say “oh, that’s what it’s all about”.

At times it sounds like pure 1973, all swampy guitars and pulsating bass, and in the next instant it leaps out of time altogether and wanders around the whole of musical history, trying things on and discarding them while always somehow managing to convince you that there’s a destination up ahead somewhere.

There is, to my great delight, a hidden track at the end of side two, featuring very short snippets form all six songs.  It serves to illustrate that there has been a purpose to all of this, and it does have a thread running through it.  It’s just that the thread is of some previously unknown material and quite possibly exists in a dimension we can’t quite perceive.

Another album released in 1973 touched on some of these same subjects and went on to dominate the musical landscape for decades; In A Glass House is the very definition of the road less travelled in comparison, but I’d argue that it’s just as deserving of your attention, and by virtue of it being largely unexplored territory, maybe has more to say.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Absolutely.  In fact, I wouldn’t start here – Acquiring The Taste (if you can get past the frankly revolting cover), Three Friends, Octopus, The Power And The Glory, and Free Hand all have much to recommend them (listen to the first and last tracks on The Power and the Glory, for example) and perhaps should be tackled before diving headlong into this most complex of albums.  Later albums try to adapt the Gentle Giant sound to move with the times, but don’t work for me – the joy and glory of this band is that they don’t try to fit in.

Compilations to consider?

For the usual Prog reasons, I am bound to say not really, but the aforementioned Steven Wilson remixes album, Three Piece Suite was my way in to the band, so maybe start there.

Live albums?

The only live album released in the band’s lifetime, Playing The Fool, gives a pretty good idea of what the live show was like around the time of Free Hand; it’s not on rotation like some of the other Prog live albums of the time are for me, despite the famous recorder quartet section on side two.  There are a large number of other live albums out there, some of them more official than others, but I haven’t explored them.  Yet.  I feel like there’s still a lot to explore in the studio albums, so there’s time enough for all those….

NOTE ADDED JANUARY 2023: Here’s a thing. Playing The Fool may not have been in heavy rotation when I wrote this, but I subsequently acquired a vinyl copy and I think I am now ready to admit it to the very top tier of 1970s double live albums. It’s spectacularly good; I just needed to hear it properly in its original format to understand that. Ignore the idiot who wrote that last paragraph; he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Anything else?

Nothing written down (beyond things like this, and countless interviews and articles in the music press), but there are a couple of live DVDs available, and a few snippets on YouTube which serve to illustrate just how strangely compelling this band was.

Oh, and a kind of fan tribute / reunion video from the first COVID lockdown, which is just a delight.

5. Foxtrot, Genesis, 1972

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I make no apology for the run of three Prog albums in a row – this is the music I first properly loved, and 1972 is pretty much the peak for Prog.  I could have chosen other Prog albums from the early seventies, but these are the ones – and this one in particular – which speak to my experiences at the time, and perhaps illustrate why all of this has its hooks in me.

To understand why Foxtrot has to be the Genesis album in this list, you have to come with me back to fourth year (or fifth; they kind of merged), and the study of what I suppose we were calling ‘Modern Poetry’.  We had already been through the Romantic poets, some of which stuck, and most of which slid by to the point that I really struggle to tell Wordsworth from Keats from Browning from Byron – Coleridge I knew, though; long, narrative poems with striking imagery worked for me (I imagine you can see where this is going).

Then at some change in term (and there’s no point asking me to pin it down too precisely), our poetry textbooks became the collected works of Auden, Yeats, and Eliot.  I went from being mildly annoyed by having to learn chunks of 19th century verse to being absolutely gripped by these stories.  I know now why that was; I was mystified by it at the time.  The truth is that the music I loved (and was perhaps sheepishly disowning in favour of louder, shoutier stuff, as this must have been about 1978) had been written by people who had also read this stuff and been inspired by it.  Listening to Foxtrot now, it’s as plain as day that the lyrics are poems in the style of the mid-20th Century works we tried to pick apart in our English classes.

When we were finally let loose on The Waste Land, with warnings that we wouldn’t understand all of the allusions, and that it might be a little advanced for our teenaged brains, I know I wasn’t the only person who pored over the text, imagining how you might set it to music, and what that music might sound like.  I know that, because I had heard Foxtrot – and Supper’s Ready in particular – by then, and I understood that this was how music like this got made.

Foxtrot also encompasses other fascinations of my 15-year-old self; dystopian science fiction, warped English fantasy and a slightly mystical vision of British history. I was reading, if not always understanding, the likes of JG Ballard and Michael Moorcock, and I eventually came to understand that the resonance this album, and the ones either side of it, has for me is that it covers much of the same ground; it’s rooted in the things I was interested in, and written like the poetry I liked.  I mean, I’m not suggesting that Genesis lyrics should be on the curriculum or anything, but they worked in the same way, and it was only later that I understood that.

Listening to it now is a mix of nostalgia and feeling like I need to do more homework; unlike some of the albums on this list which work just as well as background music, Foxtrot demands my full attention; I’m trying to understand odd time signatures while parsing the lyrics for hidden meanings I’ve perhaps not noticed before.

Watcher of the Skies begins with melodramatic Mellotron chords; while the notoriously unreliable Mellotron was being supplanted by synthesized sound by 1972, this is exactly the sort of thing it was made for – kicking off the album with a disorienting, off-kilter soundscape which doesn’t quite sound like anything else.

Like many of Genesis’ more romantic impulses, I can take or leave Time Table; the melody is gorgeous, but there’s something close to pastiche about it; I know I’m being unfair to perhaps the only piece on the album which tries to reach out to the world beyond the album-oriented world of Prog.  Thinking about it now, I wonder if it was on any other Genesis album, I’d like it more.  Even back in the Seventies, I’d find myself thinking ‘hurry up and get to the satirical stories’.

Back when I used to carefully unpick songs and try to understand what made them work, I had a theory that the best songs were the ones where the words had obviously come first, and the music was forced to work around them.  I’m not so sure that’s true any more, but I know that Get ‘em out by Friday is a prime example of what I meant – Peter Gabriel had written a short story about unscrupulous landlords, and the seemingly inevitable future of profit before human dignity (thank goodness he was wrong about that, eh, readers?)  – and the rest of the band had to somehow set it to music.  Of course it sounds a little forced in places, but I think that is the charm – it feels in such a hurry to tell its story in multiple voices that the music struggles to keep up.

I don’t know how long it took me to realise that Can-Utility was a direct reference to Canute, even with the lyrics basically telling the story.  Sometimes, I think, it’s easy to look too hard at something and miss the point entirely – such are the risks of writing about music, after all. 

Only when the needle lifts at the end of side one do you look at your watch and realise with a start that nearly 25 minutes has gone by.  There’s nothing unusual about that these days, of course – albums regularly sprawl well into their second hour without anyone wondering how it’s all going to fit on 12 inches of black plastic.  In 1972, however, an album this long was something unusual – it’s only about five minutes shorter than the entire first Beatles album, for example – and it is a miracle of mastering that it sounds as good as it does.

The vinyl copy I have now is a single sleeve rather than a gatefold – it’s a second-hand copy, but not in the original packaging, and I can’t tell if it’s how the Canadian version was originally released, or if there’s something else going on.  I mention this only because I had intended to wax lyrical about the 1970s gatefold sleeve at some point, and had imagined this would be it, but, you know, Supper’s Ready…

Before we can get to the main course, however, there’s a tiny palate cleanser in the form of Horizons, a delightful piece of Steve Hackett whimsy which has reminded me since the day I first heard it of Camberwick Green, in turn reminding me to point you at Peter Jones and Tiger Moth Tales at some point.

Not now, though, because now we have to consider what actually would have happened if someone had tried to set The Waste Land to music, and how different that might have been had they also heard Supper’s Ready first.

I keep returning to this theme, knowing that I will be far from the first to have seen the parallels, but the rapid switches from the pastoral dreamscape of the opening session to the allegorical figures in the second section, through battlefields real and imaginary, via a visit with Narcissus, a quick evisceration of the post-war ideal view of Britain and its stultifying structures, to and through the images of the Book of Revelation and out the other side, where the supper is revealed to be, not the Last one, or the mundane “meat and two veg” implied by the opening, but the one promised after the Second Coming in the New Jerusalem – all of that must have been inspired in part by TS Eliot.

And that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of everything going on.  If there’s an Eliot influence, there’s also the second side of Abbey Road in here, with the way all the parts fit together, and there are lines which call back to previous Genesis albums.  It’s a mighty, almost impenetrable beast of a thing – in so many ways the quintessential Progressive Rock song; not the first to fill an entire side of vinyl, nor the most eclectic or technically difficult; it is however, the one against which all the others are measured.

And few, if any, come up to scratch, because none of them pack the emotional punch of Gabriel’s release as he ties the song back to the beginning with a heartfelt variation on the first verse, before leading us home and on into the promised New Jerusalem.

(And if you’ve ever been unlucky enough to hear my patented Phil Collins rant, you’ll understand why I can’t wholeheartedly recommend ‘Seconds Out’ when we get to the ‘live albums’ part down there – I usually make reference to him singing the ending with all the emotional investment of a man reading out his shopping list.  But that’s for another time…)

Ultimately, if you already know Foxtrot, you probably love it like I do (although I’m not certain it’s my favourite Genesis album), and if you don’t, I’m not likely to have swayed you with all that rambling.  But maybe you’ll feel the urge to try Supper’s Ready one day, and if you bear in mind that it’s a product of a time, place and education system which no longer exists, maybe you’ll hear the things in it which I do.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Bearing in mind my ‘Phil Collins rant’; my personal selection of Genesis albums is fairly slim; this one and the ones either side of it – Nursery Cryme and Selling England by the Pound pretty much cover it (I find The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway a bit overblown, ironically enough for a Prog album).  Post-Gabriel, I hear diminishing returns until Duke, and then I really don’t get on with the Eighties stuff (although I’m sure there are gems in there I’ve never heard).

I do have an abiding love for Follow You, Follow Me, however, as you may well already know.

Compilations to consider?

Insert stock Prog Rock answer (just listen to the whole album, slicing it up doesn’t work) here, with the added warning that Genesis compilations tend to have the words “The Hits” after the title, and are therefore vanishingly unlikely to have anything from Foxtrot – or before 1980 – on them.

Live albums?

No.

I mean, there’s Genesis Live, which was a budget-priced, too short and not particularly well recorded album which was popular only for the surreal short story on the back; Seconds Out which features a lot of things I like, unfortunately sung by you-know-who, and Three Sides Live, which actually isn’t as bad as I remember, but still doesn’t really give the whole story.  Not that anything could, really – Genesis were at least three entirely different bands, and it’s perhaps unfortunate for me that the one I really liked was the first one, which has been kind of overshadowed by everything which came after.

Anything else?

I’ve never read a Genesis biography, and I’m struggling to think if there has ever been one.  The documentary film Together and Apart is interesting – it’s not quite what it claims to be, as it focuses rather blatantly on the bits of history which sold millions of records, and rather skates over the more interesting bits – while Peter Gabriel gets fair coverage because he’s famous, Steve Hackett ends up mostly looking like some bloke they’ve asked along to fill a stool off to the side, and I think the story suffers somewhat as a result.

4. Close to the Edge, Yes, 1972

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Note: Spotify only has the ‘Deluxe Edition’ – for the correct 1972 experience, stop after track 3

The way I remember it, there were three main Progressive Rock (capitals intended; indeed, obligatory) bands in the first year or so of secondary school, and you were supposed to pick one.  My band were, naturally, ELP, which meant that Genesis and Yes got less attention from me than they should have done.  I had a friend who was as much a Genesis obsessive as I was ELP, so I heard more of them, but Yes remained something of a mystery in those impressionable days – to my mind, a band for the slightly older boys I met in the Scouts, or older brothers (I didn’t have one of those, but some of us did).

The Scout hut was definitely where I first heard Yes – Tales From Topographic Oceans was reverently passed round one evening when it must have been new.  I’m not certain that there was a record player in the Scout hut, but I know that Tales coloured my impression of Yes, and I probably thought they were a bit too advanced for one of my tender years, so I must have heard some of it at some point.

I came to Close to the Edge, then, a little later than I might have done.  I know I heard it – possibly borrowed it from the library (and I’m coming back to that) during that cacophonous late seventies period when I was listening to everything.  Almost certainly the music of Yes was dreadfully out of fashion by the time I heard it, and I probably buried the cassette of this along with all the other uncool albums under my bed if ever there was a chance that someone would be inspecting my record collection, but it got in my head anyway, so that when I came back to it in the age of CDs and digital clarity, I was comfortably familiar with it and able to conjure up the feel of 1972, with wild experimentation the order of the day, mixed with the dying embers of psychedelia and hippy philosophising.

I think what I loved in those pre-punk years (and still clung to even as my tastes changed with the tides of fashion) was cleverness; music to make you stop and go back to see if you can figure out what was going on.  Don’t get me wrong; I like a good tune as much as the next person, but I liked even more being made to work for the good tune; those music lessons had at least tried to teach me about themes and variations; development and recapitulation, and I liked to hear that in the albums I was listening to as well.

So when I did eventually settle down to listen properly to Close to the Edge, I was ready to hear all the things I never quite got round to hearing when Yes were number three on the pecking order.

Probably the most obvious thing to say about Close to the Edge is that there are only three tracks on the album, and that is just about the most 1972 thing you can think of.  In fact, before I can even start to talk about the music, I find myself pausing to think about how these are ‘tracks’, not ‘songs’.  When did that start?  Every word I write about anything even vaguely Prog struggles against the charge of pretentiousness, but standing back to look at it, calling pieces of music ‘tracks’ definitely has the air of some private members club to which the rest of the world could only be admitted if they knew the shibboleths.

Again; 1972.

So, once you get past the strangely uninformative sleeve, and plop the record with its comfortingly familiar ‘Atlantic’ tricolour label on the turntable, what does it actually sound like?

Like nothing you’ve ever heard before, naturally.  It opens with gently trickling water, but you’ve barely had time to adjust to the pastoral nature of the thing before all five band members enter, playing seemingly unrelated things in different metres and at different tempos.  On first hearing, it’s a mess, and even on what may be my hundredth or thousandth listen as I write this, I find it hard to imagine a more off-putting way to welcome the world to your latest masterpiece.  As soon as it settles down and some order and melody assert themselves, Jon Anderson is singing something about rearranging your liver…

At which point, the more sensible among you probably bail out.  It’s a shame, because you’re missing some remarkable music, but I do get it.  There’s nothing wrong with the three-minute pop song, and there are plenty of times I’m happy to bounce around in my chair to albums with only verse-chorus-verse to offer, but more often than not, I need music to overpower me and take me places I’d never think to go otherwise.

The tile track is eighteen minutes long, and if you’re still on board, returns you triumphantly to nature, having given you much to think about in the meantime.  Of course the lyrics are impenetrable, it was – and I’ll never tire of saying this – 1972.

Oh, and delightfully, my second-hand vinyl copy has a scratch in the very last groove, so it never quite ends….

Side two is a little more approachable.  Once again, it begins with studio chatter (there was some on Trilogy too, leading me to wonder if every album recorded in the wake of Revolver had to have some somewhere), but this time eases you in with gentle acoustic guitar and an actual hummable tune.  Indeed, bits of And You And I were extracted and sold as a single in some parts of the world.  Like pretty much every Yes song of the time, it works its way through several themes and builds to a redemptive climax.  The difference between this and any number of other Yes songs is that the whole band were working together on the same journey.  It’s worth remarking on, because the endless revolving door of Yes membership rarely reached such a point of literal and figurative harmony in the fifty or more years that it’s been a going concern.  Or two going concerns, as has been the case more than once.

The album is rounded off with Siberian Khatru, more hippy philosophy, but this time with a fluid, almost funky bass line.  The whole album is shot through with a kind of spiritual ‘back to nature’ worldview which was becoming a bit old hat by the time it came out, but which feels more or less timeless now – part of a tradition of English musicians exploring the outer edges of Eastern philosophy – something else which ties it back to Revolver.

I doubt I’m going to convince anyone not already sold on the idea to try this, but I hope I can convince you that this music speaks to me on a level that the Slade singles I was listening to when this came out didn’t.

But I loved the Slade singles, too.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

Well, at last count there were 21 official Yes studio albums (and that ‘official’ is important, believe me), and one scheduled for release shortly after this is posted which will feature exactly no original members of the band.  It’s fair to say that not all of the twenty others is worth your time.  If you like this, you should probably try Fragile and The Yes Album, if you want to follow my journey with Yes, the next stop (nodding to Topographic Oceans on the way past) is Going for the One, with its hit singles, and then you should probably listen to 90125 with that so familiar eighties sound.

Everything else is a matter of personal taste.  There are Yes albums I’ve never heard, and one or two (Union comes to mind) I wish I hadn’t.

Compilations to consider?

Inevitably, there are almost as many compilations as there are albums.  Contemplating them just now, I settled on Yesstory as perhaps the most representative, but as with most Prog bands, cutting their music into small chunks doesn’t really work; you have to listen to albums as a whole.

Live albums?

Yessongs is all you’ll ever need – of course it’s a triple album; of course it only covers a short period of their career (it came out in 1973) but it has never faded in its majesty and grandeur.  These guys, it need hardly be said, could play…

Anything else? One day, some brave soul will take on the job of writing the definitive history of Yes.  It’ll likely run to several large volumes, and will only be read by obsessives like me.  In the meantime, Chris Welch’s biography, called – inevitably – Close to the Edge; the Story of Yes has its critics, but covers the main points and has been revised at least once to keep up with the band which apparently will go on forever.

3. Trilogy, Emerson, Lake and Palmer – 1972

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The first nine tracks are the original album

The first album on this list which I owned when it was still relatively recent, and the first on this list which I loved unreservedly from the moment I first heard it.  I have had something of an on-off relationship with it over the years, but it has never lost its power over me, even in the years when I though it drastically uncool, because I put more store in what others thought than I did in my own ears.  I think I’m over that now; let’s find out.

I know that I first heard ELP in a first-year music lesson in late 1974 or early 1975.  Way back in the age of enlightenment, spotty first-years had weekly lessons which alternated between trying to get us to figure out if we could get a tune out of anything at all and trying to get us to appreciate music in all of its forms.  Well, not all of them; music lessons were supposed to cover everything up until the likes of Stravinsky started frightening the horses.  We’d be exposed to some basic theory, told that our teachers liked modern music as well, honest (and have to sit through some traditional folk or modern classical featuring car horns and anvils, or something, to prove it).  Sadly, unlike in other parts of the school, the teaching was more well-meaning than enthusiastic, and even the likes of me, who were keen to learn anything about music, were left a little baffled by it all.

Until the day when Mr. McPherson (I’m pretty sure that was his name, but I’m happy to be corrected) put on three records in a row for us to compare.  First, Mussorgsky’s original piano version of Pictures at an Exhibition, then Ravel’s orchestrated version, then – “some of you might like this one” – ELP’s version.

I can effortlessly conjure up the feeling which jolted through me on hearing this third one – I can picture the room; even smell it.  I was riveted by what I was hearing, utterly spellbound.  I’m sure other things happened to me that day, but I don’t remember any of them.  All I remember is the clear sensation that I had found my music; whatever the hell Messrs. Emerson, Lake and Palmer had been doing to Mussorgsky, that was the stuff for me.  Enough of this pop music nonsense – I could take or leave that, I needed to know more; I needed to own this music.

It took a while – I was eleven and pocket money didn’t stretch to buying albums, even cut-price ones, which it turned out Pictures was.  It wasn’t even the first album I bought (we’re coming to that), but it was second or third, and if I look to my right, I can pick out the spine of it in the stack over there – when I returned to the particular pleasure of buying vinyl some years back, it was the first thing I bought for myself.

And Trilogy was the second.  While my love for Pictures has never dimmed, it was only my favourite ELP album until I heard this one.  All (almost all) the ELP albums have their charms; a couple of them are more widely regarded as classics of their kind than Trilogy, yet I genuinely feel that this is the only unequivocally successful one; the only one where every track works on its own terms, and the only one where all three of them seem to be pulling in the same direction all the way from beginning to end.

Emerson, Lake and Palmer were a supergroup – one of the first – and unlike, say, Cream, where there seemed to be a common purpose, they spent their entire career trying to go in at least two directions at once, and not always managing to reconcile those directions.  Trilogy is, I think, the only album where you can’t see the joins between Greg Lake’s earnest love songs and Keith Emerson’s classical adaptations; the only one where the inevitable ‘novelty’ song doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb.  Throughout Trilogy, from the open spaces of the beginning of The Endless Enigma to the demented drum patterns of Abbadon’s Bolero, all elements are performing a function in service to the whole.

Side 1 opens with the three parts of The Endless Enigma, setting what might seem a weary, despairing rant at the world as a mini-concerto.  Emerson’s spare keyboards in the opening always struck me as ideal mood music for a gritty late night TV show; they seem to conjure up late night neon-splashed cityscapes just after the rain has stopped.  From the Beginning, probably the best-known song from this album, is a straightforward ‘love and regret’ song raised to something with proper emotional punch by the development of the music from Lake’s acoustic opening to Emerson’s full keyboard onslaught at the climax.  Then there’s The Sherriff, which verges on parody, but works in conjunction with fan favourite Hoedown, an adaptation of Copland’s much-loved original.

The second side features two longer pieces – the title track featuring one of Lake’s most successful lyrics, and Abbadon’s Bolero, with Emerson writing his own riposte to Ravel, sandwiching the startling Living Sin, in which Greg Lake’s remarkable voice drops into his boots and conjures a real air of menace befitting the subject matter.

Look, I know they’re not fashionable, and probably never were, although they were staggeringly popular for a while.  Maybe I was at an impressionable age; maybe you can think of a thousand other excuses for why this album lives so vividly in my head fifty years on.  Me, I’m just going to go on enjoying it in all its complexity and virtuosity.  It’s of its time, to be sure, but what a time it was.

Any other albums by this artist to consider?

None as complete as this in execution, although Brain Salad Surgery and Tarkus both nearly hit the same level.  The self-titled debut is pretty good, too, although a lot of the ideas are not yet fully-formed.  Later albums, even Works, Vol. 1 which I loved in the teeth of gales of derision at the time, have not survived nearly as well, and a couple of the later ones just didn’t really work at all.  When ELP’s moment passed, it really passed.

Compilations to consider?

There’s an imaginatively entitled Best of Emerson, Lake and Palmer of which the second edition is rather more complete than the first.  There are others which I’ve never heard – mainly because I’ve heard all the albums, so why would I need to?  Not for the last time, I’m going to point out that this is an albums band, and compilations don’t do them justice.

Live albums?

All together, take a deep breath: Welcome Back, my Friends, to the Show That Never Ends.  Ladies and Gentlemen… is the essential ELP live album – all the others cower before it.  Don’t forget to pick up a copy of Pictures at an Exhibition, though – you’re allowed to skip Nutrocker at the end if you like; it doesn’t quite fit with the rest of it.

Anything else?

There’s a tremendously psychedelic live video of the Pictures show which is worth your time if you liked the album – it’s striking how different it is from the recorded version; ELP shows were somewhat improvisational affairs, and the music evolved as it was played.  I’ve seen (I have a copy somewhere) the 2010 High Voltage reunion show, and while it has its moments, Keith Emerson’s playing is not what it was – the issues with his hands which contributed to his suicide are evident, and the show never really takes off, fun though it is to see the three of them together on a stage one last time.  There are some books, although I’ve never read Emerson’s autobiography, and I’m still saving up for the forthcoming ELP Book, although the higher-end editions will likely remain outside my budget.  What would a book about ELP be, however, without some deluxe-level excess? And there’s something else about Trilogy, too.  In recent years, I have heard several of its songs reimagined and reinterpreted – faithfully reproduced by an International Collaboration featuring the remarkable Rachel Flowers, for example (Flowers has covered some of these songs solo as well, and she understands them as well as it’s possible to, I think).  However, my favourite cover of these (and one of my favourite cover versions of all) really shouldn’t work at all – the Jad & Den Quintet’s reworking of Trilogy as a late-night jazz standard is truly extraordinary, and ultimately demonstrates what I knew all along – strip away the perceived excess and these are timeless songs.