Keyboard wizard Rick Wakeman once described progressive rock as the ‘porn of the music industry; you bought an album under the counter in a brown paper bag’. He was no doubt referring to the genre’s mid-1970s nadir when punk burst onto the scene and nicked all the cool kids, leaving the nerds to their embarrassing flares and concept albums. Fast forward 50 years and it’s the nerds who prevail. Anyone out there still listening to Sham 69?
These are the marginalised, workaday Brits you rarely get to see on television anymore
Yes, the proggiest of the 1970s rock behemoths, is on tour again with an album of new material in the pipeline. Wakeman quit the band years ago leaving 77-year-old guitar maestro Steve Howe as the only remaining member from the classic line up. This week Howe and his motley crew of stand-ins played to a packed Royal Albert Hall with a set spanning almost 60 years. Sham 69 will be performing at the Cellar Bar in Bedford next month if anyone is interested.
So while punk languishes in rock’s bargain basement, prog, once the most reviled of musical genres, still packs ‘em in. Unlike punk, which was essentially just a snarky take on 1960s rock ‘n’ roll, prog had ambitions beyond the standard three minute ditty. Inspired by the Beatles experimental Sergeant Pepper album, early extollers of the genre such asthe Nice and King Crimson took popular music to dizzying new heights of sophistication. Mixing grandiose themes, tricky time signatures and classical influences, prog placed musicianship above catchy melodies; trench-coated students loved it.
Bands such as Pink Floyd, Genesis and Yes all boasted accomplished musicians – Wakeman studied at the Royal College of Music – meaning they were able to persuade record labels to give them a long leash. This inevitably led to frequent outbreaks of rock excess; albums doubled in size while tinny live shows morphed into full on theatrical events complete with dry ice, flowing capes and floating pigs. During the tricky recording sessions for their 1973 double concept album Tales from Topographic Oceans, Yes’s lead singer Jon Anderson felt the band needed some outside inspiration so he transformed their tatty studio in suburban Willesden into what he hoped would be a pastoral idyll. Ozzy Osbourne, who’d been recording a Black Sabbath album in the next door studio, remembers a model cow with electronic udders being delivered to the back door. Rick Wakeman recalls having to balance his multitudinous keyboards on bales of wobbly hay stacked inside a hastily erected ‘barn’ while drummer Alan White tried not to be distracted by cardboard cattle, plastic house plants and a white picket fence. Out on the road excesses included giant revolving stages, laser shows and mechanical pods out of which band members would emerge Spinal Tap-like.
These days the fancy pyrotechnics have been replaced by cheap blurry visuals projected onto a not-very-well ironed sheet but the fans don’t seem to care. Early 1970s classics such as ‘All Good People’ and ‘Starship Trooper’ sound remarkably fresh as they reverberate across the Albert Hall’s cavernous auditorium.
During the interval I’m touched by the jovial camaraderie of the largely male, exclusively white fans. Most are pushing 70, some are over 80, but as they queue for drinks, beer bellies squeezed into tour t-shirts emblazoned with Roger Dean’s swirly Yes logo, they behave more like excitable teenagers.
Also striking is how alien they all look; much like the crowds who turned out to see Farage on Clacton Pier recently, these are the marginalised, workaday Brits you rarely get to see on television anymore. Of course mainstream media has no interest in catering to the cultural needs of the mainstream but although you may not hear Yes played on the radio much these days, the fans are still willing them on, so on they go.
Wakeman once said that Yes, now in its 56th year, will continue long after he and all the other members of the band (17 to date and counting) have shuffled off to that great gig in the sky. Judging by the ecstatic reaction of the audience, he might well be right.
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