Pretentious rock on a grand scale

There is many a book that has been cooked up over a liquid lunch, but rarely has one been so obviously ill-conceived as The Show That Never Ends, which comes complete with hyperbolic blurb from the esteemed novelist Michael Chabon. Yet what David Weigel provides is a masterclass in how not to write non-fiction. To paraphrase The Producers, having picked the wrong writer, the wrong editor, the wrong researcher, where did the publishers go right?

The answer, sadly, is nowhere. I say sadly, because for some time there has been an abiding need for a good history of rock’s most reviled ‘aberration’: Prog (short for Pretentious Rock On a Grand scale).

It is almost impossible to stop oneself being offended by this book, whether one’s a Prog purist, a Prog denier or simply a rock historian. (For the record, I am all three.) It is ironic that the underlying problem with the book is conceptual, given that the concept album and Prog were, for a period in the 1970s, almost synonymous.