Monthly Archives: November 2005

I’m just about to head into town to see Van der Graaf Generator at the Bridgewater Hall. As a work colleague who shall be nameless said, it should be a hair-raising experience. I hope to put up a review tomorrow night.

Guardian music hack Alexis Petridis looks at the world of Internet promotion. As expected, he can’t help but fall into hipper-than-thou elitism and lazy clichés.

The Internet has been touted as the future of the music business ever since file-sharing became big news: bands, it was mooted, would cut record companies out of the equation by posting their music on their websites and building up a virtual fanbase. But nothing of the sort happened. Selling music via a website became the province not of hip new bands, but old stagers considered defunct by their labels: Simply Red, Level 42, legions of wizened prog rockers. They were making a living, but the whole business still carried a slight taint, the modern equivalent of flogging your records from a car boot.

Of course, as The Ministry of Information reminds us, he makes no mention of Marillion, who started the whole the whole Internet self-promotion thing off. Except, of course, to sneer at ‘wizened prog rockers’. I would hardly call Mostly Autumn wizened old-stagers. Even if they play a style of music a cloth-eared idiot like Alexis Petridis considered deeply unfashionable.

The real danger to the likes of Alexis Petridis is that Internet promotion bypasses people like himself. It gives the opportunity for genres of music not endorsed by the cynical London-based clique of music journalists to find an audience and thrive. Thanks to the power of the Internet, there will be room for music genres other than the currently fashionable four chord poseurs whose simplistic and banal music is touted as “deeply symbolic of mans struggle against his socio-political environment”. Everything will no longer sound like Coldplay now.

As “wizened prog rocker” Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree said in the song “Four Chords That Made a Million”

You belong there on the cover
You are the Emperor in new clothes
A man who thinks he owns the future
Will sell your vacuum with his prose

Alexis Petridis makes a living selling vacuum with his prose. Anything which reduces the malign influence of the likes of him will be a good thing.

I’m re-reading this book, originally published back in 1996. Paul Stump tries to strip away the official punk-obsessed revisionist history of 70s rock, and tell us how it really was. Starting with a chapter entitled “Duffle Coats from Outer Space” he traces the rise and fall of progressive rock from it’s origins in sixties psychadelica through it’s marginalisation in the face of punk and new wave a decade later, eventually reaching the second generation neo-progressive bands of the 80s and 90s.

Stump tries to establish progressive rock in the context of the era, such as explaining how the tax-exile status of many big bands in the mid 70s was a contributing factor to the genre’s decline as they lost touch with UK audiences. He also suggests that the New Wave of British Heavy Metal in the late 70s and early 80s worked against progressive rock in that it competed against it for up and coming musicians. I’m not sure I buy this thesis, since the first of the 80s Neo Prog bands followed swiftly in the wake of NWOBHM, and I remember a big overlap in the fan bases.

The book covers most of the significant artists and albums, not just the megastars like Pink Floyd, Yes and Genesis, but the lesser known ones like Hatfield and the North, or Henry Cow. He doesn’t shirk from naming some of the more risible excesses of the late 70s, although he does make a brave attempt to defend Yes’ overambitious failure “Tales from Topographic Oceans”. In contrast, he’s very harsh on ELP, to an extent which will probably not endear him to any remaining fans of the band.

Overall, it’s a good overview of a much maligned genre which is long overdue for critical reassessment. Unfortunately, being published nine years ago, it doesn’t cover the more recent ‘third generation’ of bands who have sprung up in the last few years, playing progressive music with the underground DIY ethos of punk, while the musical heirs of punk and new wave dominate the record companies and airwaves.