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DRONING | 0:00:07 | 0:00:10 | |
Pit-eh-schoo, blugh, buh-doov... | 0:00:14 | 0:00:17 | |
Jun-jing, jun-jing, jun-jing, jing, juh-jing, jun-ding, jung... | 0:00:17 | 0:00:19 | |
-BOOF! -Rata-da-da-da, da-da-da, da, da... | 0:00:19 | 0:00:23 | |
Doo-doo, doo, doo, doo-doo, doo-doo... | 0:00:23 | 0:00:25 | |
Eh-eh-eh, neh-neh... | 0:00:25 | 0:00:26 | |
Da, da, da, da-da... | 0:00:26 | 0:00:28 | |
Eh-eh-eh, Neh-neh... | 0:00:28 | 0:00:29 | |
Neeeh... | 0:00:29 | 0:00:31 | |
Digga-digga-digga-digga... | 0:00:31 | 0:00:33 | |
-Digga-digga, dah-dah... -Over. Then some chords! | 0:00:33 | 0:00:36 | |
"The Assyrian came down like a wolf from the fold | 0:00:36 | 0:00:38 | |
-"and his cohorts were gleaming in silver and gold..." -Diddle-liddle, dum-dum, doo-doo... | 0:00:38 | 0:00:42 | |
"The sheen of his stars were like stars in the sky," whatever it is. | 0:00:42 | 0:00:47 | |
It's gonna go, "Meeh, doo-doo, doo, doo". Then it's gonna go "doodle-oodle, oodle-oodle." | 0:00:47 | 0:00:50 | |
Continual "lul-uhl-lul-uhl" notes without a single break-in. | 0:00:50 | 0:00:54 | |
Boof! | 0:00:54 | 0:00:55 | |
And I almost lost it there! | 0:00:55 | 0:00:57 | |
-HE LAUGHS -Easy! | 0:00:57 | 0:01:00 | |
From the British pop revolution of the 1960s, emerged an entirely new breed of musician - | 0:01:20 | 0:01:25 | |
a post-Beatles, post-psychedelic generation that saw a future of limitless possibilities. | 0:01:25 | 0:01:31 | |
It was time for pop music to move beyond the three-minute love song and chart success. | 0:01:31 | 0:01:36 | |
With little or no concern for fame, fortune or the audience, they plundered every musical form | 0:01:37 | 0:01:43 | |
on an adventure into uncharted territories in search of the lost chord. | 0:01:43 | 0:01:47 | |
This is the story of that generation of new bands, | 0:01:47 | 0:01:51 | |
Yes, King Crimson, Genesis, ELP, Jethro Tull and many more. | 0:01:51 | 0:01:56 | |
From the land that time forgot, the glory days of Prog Britannia. | 0:01:56 | 0:02:01 | |
MUSIC: "Time Of The Season" by The Zombies | 0:02:01 | 0:02:04 | |
In 1967, pop music, like the world it inhabited, was about to explode. | 0:02:07 | 0:02:12 | |
In London, the British beat boom fused with American pop in a blaze of invention that would ransack | 0:02:12 | 0:02:17 | |
jazz, folk and anything else it could find in the many basement clubs of the city. | 0:02:17 | 0:02:22 | |
I do think there are periods which are golden ages and, you know, | 0:02:25 | 0:02:28 | |
the stars are aligned, and whatever is happening, and it produces a lot of creativity. | 0:02:28 | 0:02:33 | |
Where I was at college was like a snapshot of music at the time. | 0:02:33 | 0:02:39 | |
The angry bot people liked The Beatles. | 0:02:39 | 0:02:43 | |
The side I was on was blues upstairs and, in the cellar, Bob Dylan | 0:02:43 | 0:02:50 | |
and then you had the modern jazz guys and the classical guys. | 0:02:50 | 0:02:53 | |
Otis Redding and Sam & Dave and Booker T & the MGs came over and you suddenly realised that | 0:02:54 | 0:03:00 | |
you know, it's "game up". | 0:03:00 | 0:03:02 | |
You can't pretend to be them any more when they're actually here. | 0:03:02 | 0:03:06 | |
There was some white music that even black musicians were listening to, | 0:03:06 | 0:03:09 | |
for example, Jimi Hendrix was listening very hard to Bob Dylan, you know, there was stuff going on. | 0:03:09 | 0:03:14 | |
# It's the time of the season... # | 0:03:14 | 0:03:18 | |
There was huge social changes and huge chemical changes... | 0:03:18 | 0:03:23 | |
going on. There was something definitely in the water. | 0:03:23 | 0:03:26 | |
I mean, timing is everything. The smartest thing I did was get born in 1949. Brilliant, brilliant. | 0:03:26 | 0:03:32 | |
Cos at 18 you're in 1968. Europe's aflame, the Paris Riots. | 0:03:32 | 0:03:39 | |
Perfect. | 0:03:39 | 0:03:41 | |
I was in the States in '68 and there were three major assassinations while we were there. | 0:03:41 | 0:03:46 | |
A few Kennedys and an Andy Warhol or two. | 0:03:46 | 0:03:49 | |
You know, it was all happening. | 0:03:49 | 0:03:51 | |
It WAS all happening. But much of the music only reached eager young British ears courtesy of outlaws. | 0:03:54 | 0:04:00 | |
Offshore pirate radio stations, broadcasting illegally | 0:04:00 | 0:04:03 | |
to a nation still dominated by something called the BBC Light Programme. | 0:04:03 | 0:04:08 | |
MUSIC: "Summer In The City" by The Lovin' Spoonful | 0:04:09 | 0:04:12 | |
MUSIC WARPS INTO DIFFERENT SONGS | 0:04:12 | 0:04:17 | |
'It was unreachable. You felt like you were tuning into another planet. | 0:04:17 | 0:04:22 | |
'Contacting the aliens. It was coming from another world.' | 0:04:22 | 0:04:26 | |
You could only reach it on little transistor radios...late at night. | 0:04:27 | 0:04:31 | |
Then, in May 1967, a song that fused Bach with Percy Sledge via Bob Dylan and Geoffrey Chaucer | 0:04:39 | 0:04:46 | |
was heard leaving for the coast. | 0:04:46 | 0:04:48 | |
A Whiter Shade Of Pale by Procul Harum. | 0:04:49 | 0:04:52 | |
I wouldn't be exaggerating when I said that the world was waiting for that. | 0:04:52 | 0:04:58 | |
# We skipped the light fandango | 0:04:58 | 0:05:04 | |
# Turned cartwheels cross the floor... # | 0:05:05 | 0:05:07 | |
The Beatles and the beat boom had been going for... | 0:05:07 | 0:05:11 | |
certainly three or four years. | 0:05:11 | 0:05:14 | |
'It was all getting a bit tired.' | 0:05:14 | 0:05:18 | |
# The crowd called out for more... # | 0:05:18 | 0:05:21 | |
I wanted to do something and I didn't want it to be like anything else. | 0:05:23 | 0:05:27 | |
Because we've had, we've had it all. | 0:05:27 | 0:05:31 | |
"This, I've never heard this before, really." That's what you think to yourself. Therefore, "I like this." | 0:05:31 | 0:05:37 | |
# We called out for another drink | 0:05:37 | 0:05:43 | |
# The waiter brought the tray | 0:05:43 | 0:05:47 | |
-# And so it was... # -And so it was that later, only two weeks later, | 0:05:47 | 0:05:52 | |
as the miller told his tale, The Beatles released an album that was a concept, | 0:05:52 | 0:05:57 | |
a world unto itself. | 0:05:57 | 0:05:59 | |
A blueprint for progressive rock. | 0:06:02 | 0:06:04 | |
MUSIC: "Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)" by The Beatles | 0:06:05 | 0:06:09 | |
# We're Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band | 0:06:12 | 0:06:16 | |
# We hope you have enjoyed the show... # | 0:06:16 | 0:06:19 | |
A Whiter Shade Of Pale topped the British Singles Chart | 0:06:20 | 0:06:24 | |
the very same week that Sgt Pepper announced the artistic triumph of the album. | 0:06:24 | 0:06:28 | |
Bands were still making singles, you know, Cream - Strange Group, | 0:06:29 | 0:06:34 | |
Pink Floyd - Arnold Layne and See Emily Play. | 0:06:34 | 0:06:37 | |
And Procol Harum - Whiter Shade Of Pale. | 0:06:37 | 0:06:41 | |
All of these records were amazing, creative, interesting singles | 0:06:41 | 0:06:46 | |
and they also were incredibly, commercially successful. | 0:06:46 | 0:06:51 | |
So the bands at that moment were getting the best of both worlds. | 0:06:51 | 0:06:54 | |
It was Sgt Pepper, and the creative amazement of Sgt Pepper, | 0:06:54 | 0:07:02 | |
that really convinced everybody that | 0:07:02 | 0:07:04 | |
you can extend ideas onto an album, you can make concept albums. | 0:07:04 | 0:07:08 | |
In fact, with the album, you can do almost exactly whatever you want. | 0:07:08 | 0:07:11 | |
It was a strange mixture of... | 0:07:11 | 0:07:15 | |
almost music hall and totally other-world music - | 0:07:15 | 0:07:20 | |
that was the wonderful thing about it, | 0:07:20 | 0:07:23 | |
it bridged the gap between the real world and this other world. And the other thing, | 0:07:23 | 0:07:29 | |
it was all totally new. You'd never heard anything like that before. | 0:07:29 | 0:07:32 | |
It's more fun in the record if there's a few sounds that | 0:07:32 | 0:07:35 | |
you don't really know what they are and really they're just instruments | 0:07:35 | 0:07:39 | |
only something happens on here. I couldn't tell you what cos we have a special man | 0:07:39 | 0:07:43 | |
who sits here and goes like this and the guitar turns into a piano or something. | 0:07:43 | 0:07:48 | |
And then you may say, "Why don't you use a piano?" Because the piano sounds like a guitar. | 0:07:48 | 0:07:53 | |
If you look at the leap in terms of musical vocabulary and sophistication between | 0:07:53 | 0:07:58 | |
the first Beatles album and Sgt Pepper which is like five years, | 0:07:58 | 0:08:02 | |
everything that could be done with that form has already been done in those five years. | 0:08:02 | 0:08:07 | |
Where else can you take it except to make it more and more sophisticated | 0:08:07 | 0:08:11 | |
and more and more musically interesting or just | 0:08:11 | 0:08:14 | |
for rock music to go on repeating itself and regurgitating itself? | 0:08:14 | 0:08:17 | |
I liked... There's a lot of classical music I liked. | 0:08:19 | 0:08:22 | |
I was always frightened of classical music and I never wanted to listen | 0:08:22 | 0:08:26 | |
because it was Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and big words like that. And Schoenberg. | 0:08:26 | 0:08:30 | |
I think a lot of people started to appreciate many other genres. | 0:08:30 | 0:08:35 | |
Pop music is the classical music of now. | 0:08:35 | 0:08:40 | |
Probably The Beatles had been listening to the same stuff, | 0:08:40 | 0:08:43 | |
smoked the same cannabis... now and again. | 0:08:43 | 0:08:47 | |
A lot of people were smoking on the quiet | 0:08:47 | 0:08:52 | |
and they actually got furious when the hippies came along | 0:08:52 | 0:08:56 | |
because suddenly there was a lot of notice being taken | 0:08:56 | 0:08:59 | |
whereas they'd been quietly, you know, enjoying themselves for a long time. | 0:08:59 | 0:09:04 | |
This was the era when if you wanted to try something, you could. | 0:09:04 | 0:09:07 | |
You knew a mate who had some hashish, | 0:09:07 | 0:09:09 | |
or you knew a mate who had some LSD. | 0:09:09 | 0:09:11 | |
But you had to be careful. If you were very cautious and took very little of these things | 0:09:11 | 0:09:17 | |
you could meddle and not lose your mind and end up in hospital. | 0:09:17 | 0:09:20 | |
Cannabis was a stimulant. And it did enable you to hear a lot more in the music. | 0:09:22 | 0:09:28 | |
It was there, you weren't imagining it. It was in there. But you concentrated more on listening to it. | 0:09:28 | 0:09:33 | |
What came from that was the ability for people who would normally... | 0:09:33 | 0:09:39 | |
copy American music suddenly wanted to express themselves. | 0:09:39 | 0:09:45 | |
And so you had this strange thing at that time that almost every band had a unique sound. | 0:09:45 | 0:09:52 | |
Nobody sounded quite like anyone else. | 0:09:52 | 0:09:55 | |
# Dynamic explosions in my brain, shatter me to drops of rain | 0:09:55 | 0:10:01 | |
# Falling from a yellow sky... # | 0:10:01 | 0:10:05 | |
I moved across to what was really a new movement in music | 0:10:05 | 0:10:09 | |
which was the psychedelia period. | 0:10:09 | 0:10:12 | |
-# Hold me but as I jerk... # -And that was Arthur Brown and The Crazy World of Arthur Brown. | 0:10:12 | 0:10:17 | |
I mean, we didn't know what it was and we were in it! | 0:10:17 | 0:10:20 | |
It was pretty confrontational. | 0:10:20 | 0:10:23 | |
For that time, shocking. | 0:10:23 | 0:10:25 | |
Arthur's concept was basically about the beginning of time, the beginning of life. | 0:10:25 | 0:10:31 | |
I am the god of hellfire and I bring you... | 0:10:31 | 0:10:35 | |
The original for the make-up was the death mask, which goes back | 0:10:35 | 0:10:38 | |
right through English history and further than that. | 0:10:38 | 0:10:41 | |
# Fire, to destroy all you've done... # | 0:10:41 | 0:10:45 | |
It was kind of deep, really. It was real, you know. | 0:10:45 | 0:10:48 | |
-HE CHUCKLES -Sometimes the bar would be filled with petrol and the roadie would | 0:10:48 | 0:10:53 | |
stand there throwing matches, a good distance away, until one landed and then... BOOF! | 0:10:53 | 0:10:59 | |
The British beat boom had been a predominantly Northern or working class phenomenon. | 0:11:04 | 0:11:10 | |
But the architects of progressive rock were escapees from entirely different backgrounds. | 0:11:10 | 0:11:15 | |
I suppose for a rock and roller, my education was completely wrong. | 0:11:17 | 0:11:20 | |
My mum and dad, I mean, literally did go without food to send me to piano lessons. | 0:11:22 | 0:11:28 | |
I never found that out till many, many years on and I went there when I was five. | 0:11:28 | 0:11:32 | |
And I loved it. | 0:11:32 | 0:11:34 | |
My family had a very varied take on music and they were very opinionated about it. | 0:11:34 | 0:11:39 | |
Course I liked Cliff Richard & The Shadows and they were going, | 0:11:39 | 0:11:42 | |
"Nonsense, you won't even know who these people are next year." | 0:11:42 | 0:11:45 | |
MUSIC: "Do You Wanna Dance" by Cliff Richard & The Shadows | 0:11:45 | 0:11:50 | |
I was in this attic and I put on this Vivaldi record, The Four Seasons or something, and I just flipped. | 0:11:50 | 0:11:56 | |
I just went, "This is fantastic stuff." | 0:11:56 | 0:11:58 | |
Studied Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks concerto. Did a lot of church music, sang in choirs. | 0:12:00 | 0:12:08 | |
At the same time as being obsessively interested in... | 0:12:08 | 0:12:14 | |
The Shadows. | 0:12:14 | 0:12:15 | |
Went to the Guildhall. | 0:12:15 | 0:12:19 | |
Went to the Royal Academy. Had lots of private tuition, LOTS of private tuition. | 0:12:19 | 0:12:24 | |
But never REALLY wanted to be in an orchestra. | 0:12:24 | 0:12:28 | |
Or a jazz group for that matter. I wanted to be a rock drummer. | 0:12:28 | 0:12:31 | |
I got a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. And I went there and I left after a year and a half. | 0:12:31 | 0:12:36 | |
I thought, "This is NUTS, this whole thing." The college were really, really anti any form of music | 0:12:36 | 0:12:43 | |
that wasn't serious classical music. | 0:12:43 | 0:12:45 | |
They would've either have become classical musicians, | 0:12:45 | 0:12:48 | |
because a lot of them have classical training to grade whatever-it-is, or they would have become jazzers. | 0:12:48 | 0:12:54 | |
But the jazz scene in Britain was never THAT exciting, it was always such hard work. | 0:12:54 | 0:13:00 | |
'66, '67, jazz was in a bad place. | 0:13:00 | 0:13:03 | |
Jazz was Free Jazz, it was squeaky-bum jazz, you know, going | 0:13:03 | 0:13:07 | |
rhee-aiir! Squeaking away. And any red-blooded drummer, | 0:13:07 | 0:13:11 | |
age 17, at that time, would've wanted to play with Jimi Hendrix, | 0:13:11 | 0:13:16 | |
rather than the Spontaneous Music Ensemble. | 0:13:16 | 0:13:20 | |
MUSIC: "Gypsy Eyes" by Jimi Hendrix | 0:13:20 | 0:13:24 | |
But what made pop so attractive to some inexperienced young musicians was... | 0:13:24 | 0:13:28 | |
well, the girls. | 0:13:28 | 0:13:30 | |
There's this whole other half of the human race | 0:13:33 | 0:13:35 | |
and, like it says in Some Like It Hot, "I tell you, it's a whole different sex." There was girls. | 0:13:35 | 0:13:40 | |
Where were they? They were in caffs. What were they doing? They were sitting there. | 0:13:40 | 0:13:45 | |
They had chalk-white pink lipstick on. And I thought, | 0:13:45 | 0:13:49 | |
"I don't quite know what they're for or what you're meant to do with them, | 0:13:49 | 0:13:53 | |
"but, I couldn't..." But I thought, you know... | 0:13:53 | 0:13:57 | |
"There's something great about this lot." You couldn't talk to them, but what you could do | 0:13:57 | 0:14:02 | |
was put on a Little Richard record on the jukebox and it would unify the room. | 0:14:02 | 0:14:08 | |
You couldn't put on Bartok, Violin Concerto. That wouldn't have impressed anybody. | 0:14:08 | 0:14:13 | |
It wouldn't have unified the room. Wouldn't have got everybody tapping their feet. | 0:14:13 | 0:14:18 | |
CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYS | 0:14:18 | 0:14:21 | |
But the classical tradition had gripped a generation of rock 'n' rollers determined to show | 0:14:22 | 0:14:27 | |
that pop music could also be profound and grown-up. | 0:14:27 | 0:14:30 | |
In the winter of love, Procol Harum scored another first when they recorded an 18-minute suite | 0:14:33 | 0:14:39 | |
In Held 'Twas In I, for their album Shine On Brightly. | 0:14:39 | 0:14:43 | |
The search for meaning and significance was on. | 0:14:44 | 0:14:48 | |
I said, "I think we should do, like, a great work." | 0:14:50 | 0:14:54 | |
That's what I called it. | 0:14:54 | 0:14:56 | |
In fact it was called O Magnum Harum for a while. | 0:14:57 | 0:15:00 | |
MUSIC: "In Held 'Twas In I" by Procol Harum | 0:15:00 | 0:15:04 | |
Start off at the beginning of the universe... And ended in Heaven. | 0:15:08 | 0:15:13 | |
And all the trials and tribulations that come in between. | 0:15:15 | 0:15:18 | |
With a bit of sitar chucked in. | 0:15:18 | 0:15:20 | |
MUSIC CONTINUES | 0:15:20 | 0:15:23 | |
You know, somebody had to do it, I suppose. If it hadn't been Procol Harum at that point, | 0:15:26 | 0:15:32 | |
it would have been somebody, you know, four weeks later. | 0:15:32 | 0:15:35 | |
Now... We can actually write music. | 0:15:35 | 0:15:39 | |
And if we're gonna write music, the model is classical music | 0:15:39 | 0:15:44 | |
and classical music has extended forms, sonatas, | 0:15:44 | 0:15:49 | |
symphonies. So we're gonna do structures and pieces that last a long time | 0:15:49 | 0:15:56 | |
that try and give us that credibility, musically. | 0:15:56 | 0:16:00 | |
The Nice, originally PP Arnold's backing band, set the controls for the heart of classical music, | 0:16:05 | 0:16:11 | |
jazz and the modern stage musical on their maiden voyage into progressive rock. | 0:16:11 | 0:16:16 | |
Front man Keith Emerson was the Hendrix of the Hammond organ, making his instrument scream and sigh | 0:16:18 | 0:16:23 | |
in dazzling displays of technical virtuosity and crazed physicality. | 0:16:23 | 0:16:27 | |
Their first unlikely hit was a seven-minute version | 0:16:34 | 0:16:37 | |
of Leonard Bernstein's America, from West Side Story, | 0:16:37 | 0:16:40 | |
transformed into an instrumental, prog rock protest song. | 0:16:40 | 0:16:45 | |
MUSIC: "America" by The Nice | 0:16:45 | 0:16:48 | |
CHURCH ORGAN MUSIC | 0:17:01 | 0:17:04 | |
Progressive music didn't only come from the big cities. | 0:17:11 | 0:17:14 | |
Welcome to Canterbury, the posh cathedral town that seeded those musicians that would, in time, | 0:17:14 | 0:17:20 | |
grow into Soft Machine, Caravan, Hatfield & The North and Matching Mole. | 0:17:20 | 0:17:26 | |
All stemming from a little-known local group called The Wilde Flowers. | 0:17:26 | 0:17:30 | |
The Wilde Flowers didn't do loadsa gigs, probably only about | 0:17:32 | 0:17:36 | |
one a fortnight, maybe one a week. Cos we weren't very popular! No. | 0:17:36 | 0:17:40 | |
Those lads were very much into Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie. | 0:17:44 | 0:17:51 | |
We tried to do sort-of danceable versions of that kind of music, you see. | 0:17:51 | 0:17:56 | |
Just to be different and awkward. | 0:17:56 | 0:17:58 | |
MUSIC: "Impotence" by The Wilde Flowers | 0:17:58 | 0:18:00 | |
# I like me, I like you and the things that we do... | 0:18:00 | 0:18:02 | |
# Ba-ba-ba! That we do... # | 0:18:02 | 0:18:04 | |
I don't like it if people think that we thought that... | 0:18:04 | 0:18:08 | |
clever grammar school-y people came in and thought we we're doing | 0:18:08 | 0:18:13 | |
something better than mere pop. We were awestruck by pop music. | 0:18:13 | 0:18:17 | |
By the magnificence of Beatles, of Motown and really we just wanted to participate in it. | 0:18:17 | 0:18:23 | |
But getting our little group together, our own dialects of other stuff we'd picked up | 0:18:23 | 0:18:28 | |
crept into what we did. I'm playing beat drums and I'm trying to sound like a rhythm and blues drummer, | 0:18:28 | 0:18:34 | |
but I had been listening to all these sophisticated jazz drummers | 0:18:34 | 0:18:38 | |
and I was sort-of cluttered with...with stuff. | 0:18:38 | 0:18:42 | |
You can't pretend you haven't heard Elvin Jones if you have. | 0:18:42 | 0:18:46 | |
Soft Machine was the first band to emerge from The Wilde Flowers. | 0:18:48 | 0:18:52 | |
They headed for London's newly established underground clubs, | 0:18:52 | 0:18:55 | |
playing with groups such as Arthur Brown and Pink Floyd at Middle Earth and UFO. | 0:18:55 | 0:19:01 | |
In that club you got everything from vaudeville | 0:19:03 | 0:19:06 | |
to rock, to jazz, to electronics, to pure percussion | 0:19:06 | 0:19:12 | |
to theatre, to poetry, to dance, to naked people wandering around. | 0:19:12 | 0:19:17 | |
That was what we all gravitated towards, UFO and Middle Earth. | 0:19:20 | 0:19:23 | |
That was the... the culture that defined us. | 0:19:23 | 0:19:28 | |
There were all these stoned people listening to music played by stoned bands. | 0:19:28 | 0:19:35 | |
And as long as everybody was stoned, everybody thought it was really good. | 0:19:35 | 0:19:40 | |
MUSIC: "We Did It Again" by Soft Machine | 0:19:40 | 0:19:43 | |
We hadn't really got enough tunes...to just do songs. | 0:19:45 | 0:19:49 | |
So, we thought, "Oh, I remember, what do you do about that? I know, what do jazz musicians do?" | 0:19:49 | 0:19:53 | |
They improvise. So you just pick a couple of chords in there and just...keep going on them. | 0:19:53 | 0:19:59 | |
And so tunes become ten-minute events. | 0:19:59 | 0:20:02 | |
MUSIC CONTINUES | 0:20:02 | 0:20:05 | |
This is not because we've all become virtuosos, not in our case. | 0:20:08 | 0:20:12 | |
It's because we haven't got enough tunes to stretch one-and-a-half hours. | 0:20:12 | 0:20:16 | |
Our organist Mike Ratledge was older than us, taller and his father had been a headmaster | 0:20:17 | 0:20:23 | |
and who had an Oxford degree, so therefore assumed immediate seniority. | 0:20:23 | 0:20:27 | |
Well, this is the fuzzbox which sounds like this... | 0:20:28 | 0:20:31 | |
HE PLAYS DISTORTED NOTES | 0:20:31 | 0:20:33 | |
Once he puts his fuzz on, you had to keep playing, you couldn't take your hand off. | 0:20:33 | 0:20:38 | |
Cos it would start feeding back. So he developed a solo style | 0:20:38 | 0:20:41 | |
of absolutely continual "lul-uhl-lul-uhl" notes without a single break-in. | 0:20:41 | 0:20:45 | |
MUSIC: "Why Am I So Short" by Soft Machine | 0:20:45 | 0:20:48 | |
So we can do these trance-like things, | 0:21:10 | 0:21:14 | |
with sound going on for ages and ages without a single pause. | 0:21:14 | 0:21:19 | |
Just round the corner from UFO, the more established Marquee Club was already showcasing bands | 0:21:33 | 0:21:40 | |
that would become the virtuoso kings of progressive rock. | 0:21:40 | 0:21:43 | |
Like Jethro Tull. | 0:21:43 | 0:21:46 | |
And Yes, fronted by vocalist Jon Anderson. | 0:21:46 | 0:21:49 | |
I went to see Yes with 30 other people at The Marquee one night. | 0:21:51 | 0:21:55 | |
And guy next to me said, "You know they're looking for a drummer?" And I met Jon, introduced myself. | 0:21:55 | 0:22:01 | |
He said, "Oh, yeah, man, yeah. Give us a call, | 0:22:01 | 0:22:03 | |
"come back next Tuesday. We'll give you audition." And I never called, you know. | 0:22:03 | 0:22:08 | |
And I often wonder if I'd called, what would have happened to my life! | 0:22:08 | 0:22:12 | |
MUSIC: "Beyond And Before" by Yes | 0:22:12 | 0:22:15 | |
Life in Yes, for jazz drummer Bill Bruford, was like this... | 0:22:16 | 0:22:20 | |
The group started as a cover band, like most groups do. | 0:22:22 | 0:22:25 | |
You start playing Beatles tunes and a couple of tunes by The Fifth Dimension, like you would. | 0:22:26 | 0:22:34 | |
And then we got bored and extend a section. | 0:22:35 | 0:22:37 | |
"It's quite good up to here but let's stick in another bit here where it goes rhythm and blues." | 0:22:37 | 0:22:42 | |
And we'd stick that in. And then the thing would get longer and longer and longer | 0:22:42 | 0:22:46 | |
until eventually somebody inevitably said, | 0:22:46 | 0:22:49 | |
"Let's make one up ourselves." | 0:22:49 | 0:22:50 | |
Jon was a very keen listener and absorber, bit like blotting paper, he absorbed music. | 0:22:54 | 0:22:59 | |
# Time like gold dust brings... # | 0:22:59 | 0:23:01 | |
He was mad keen on Sibelius and TV themes. | 0:23:01 | 0:23:07 | |
He'd start singing things, "Jon, this is the theme to Bonanza!" | 0:23:07 | 0:23:10 | |
And he'd say, "Oh, never mind, stick it in!" | 0:23:10 | 0:23:13 | |
MUSIC: "No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed" by Yes | 0:23:13 | 0:23:17 | |
Yes never said no. They stitched movies soundtracks to folk music | 0:23:19 | 0:23:24 | |
to modern jazz to classical music to TV themes... | 0:23:24 | 0:23:27 | |
And the only people we didn't concern ourselves with at all, I think, was the audience. | 0:23:27 | 0:23:33 | |
# Step out in the night when you're lonely | 0:23:33 | 0:23:38 | |
# Listening for the sound city ears don't hear... # | 0:23:39 | 0:23:43 | |
If you couldn't make the London clubs, | 0:23:45 | 0:23:47 | |
couldn't find progressive rock albums in the shops and rarely heard it on the radio, | 0:23:47 | 0:23:51 | |
you could, by the end of the sixties, | 0:23:51 | 0:23:54 | |
see every band in one glorious drug-and-rain-drenched experience | 0:23:54 | 0:23:57 | |
at a pop festival near you. | 0:23:57 | 0:23:59 | |
MUSIC: "Dharma For One" by Jethro Tull | 0:23:59 | 0:24:02 | |
This was the first golden age of the British music festival. | 0:24:09 | 0:24:13 | |
A new community in which no-one was more welcome than the progressive rock group. | 0:24:13 | 0:24:17 | |
Everybody had a festival. | 0:24:19 | 0:24:22 | |
You went along and played and heard all different types of band. | 0:24:22 | 0:24:26 | |
And people would listen to a jazz orientated band, a hard rock band, | 0:24:26 | 0:24:31 | |
a dance-type band. And they would sit there and listen to the lot. | 0:24:31 | 0:24:35 | |
Certainly, the outdoor live experience was generally freeing. | 0:24:37 | 0:24:41 | |
It always seemed like it was a sunny day, | 0:24:46 | 0:24:49 | |
and the weather was gorgeous. Everybody was smiling and happy. | 0:24:49 | 0:24:53 | |
It was a very sort of hippy thing. | 0:24:53 | 0:24:55 | |
It was really music. It really was music. | 0:24:57 | 0:25:01 | |
It wasn't any other reason. | 0:25:01 | 0:25:03 | |
Yeah, people got a bit smashed, and bonked in the open air, | 0:25:03 | 0:25:07 | |
and that was just the road crew. | 0:25:07 | 0:25:09 | |
MUSIC: "The Court Of The Crimson King" by King Crimson | 0:25:09 | 0:25:12 | |
The great Suffolk seaside town of Aldeburgh, | 0:25:23 | 0:25:27 | |
now home to Pete Sinfield, original lyricist for the intimidating new band | 0:25:27 | 0:25:31 | |
he inadvertently named King Crimson. | 0:25:31 | 0:25:35 | |
We had an ethos in Crimson. | 0:25:37 | 0:25:38 | |
I'm sure people like Gentle Giant and other bands... | 0:25:38 | 0:25:41 | |
we just refused to play anything that sounded anything like a Tin Pan Alley. | 0:25:41 | 0:25:46 | |
If it sounded at all popular, it was out. | 0:25:46 | 0:25:49 | |
So it had to be complicated. | 0:25:49 | 0:25:50 | |
It had to be more expansive chords, it had to have strange influences. | 0:25:50 | 0:25:55 | |
If it sounded too simple, we would make it more complicated. | 0:25:55 | 0:26:00 | |
We would play it in 7/8, in 5/8, just to show off. | 0:26:00 | 0:26:02 | |
# For the court of the Crimson King... # | 0:26:02 | 0:26:08 | |
Crimson's first big show-off opportunity came in July 1969, | 0:26:08 | 0:26:13 | |
when they supported the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park. | 0:26:13 | 0:26:16 | |
Unleashing their unique, highly-rehearsed sound on a totally unprepared audience. | 0:26:16 | 0:26:22 | |
They played Schizoid Man particularly well on that day. | 0:26:26 | 0:26:29 | |
They really steamed it. It was a monster. | 0:26:29 | 0:26:32 | |
# Blood rack, barbed wire | 0:26:36 | 0:26:39 | |
# Politicians funeral pyre | 0:26:39 | 0:26:43 | |
# Innocence raped with napalm fire | 0:26:43 | 0:26:46 | |
# 21st century schizoid man... # | 0:26:46 | 0:26:50 | |
We played Mars, or Schizoid Man, one of our heavier pieces. | 0:27:02 | 0:27:06 | |
And there was a silence at the end. | 0:27:06 | 0:27:09 | |
And no-one knew whether to clap or not. | 0:27:09 | 0:27:11 | |
"That was good"! Then they would go... | 0:27:12 | 0:27:15 | |
HE IMITATES LOUD APPLAUSE | 0:27:15 | 0:27:16 | |
That was the sort of stuff we liked. We really liked shocking people. | 0:27:16 | 0:27:19 | |
Unbelievable. | 0:27:25 | 0:27:27 | |
We were scared to death. | 0:27:27 | 0:27:29 | |
No-one knew that rock musicians could play like that. | 0:27:29 | 0:27:32 | |
To execute rapid passages deafeningly loud... | 0:27:37 | 0:27:40 | |
MUSIC: "21st Century Schizoid Man" by King Crimson | 0:27:40 | 0:27:43 | |
..then exactly the same passage, everybody playing in unison thing, | 0:27:44 | 0:27:48 | |
but very quiet. | 0:27:48 | 0:27:49 | |
I mean, this was scary. This was the best group in the world. | 0:27:52 | 0:27:55 | |
Mike Giles one night was playing the cymbals at Mothers in Birmingham, | 0:27:57 | 0:28:00 | |
he ended up playing the cymbals like this... | 0:28:00 | 0:28:03 | |
..till there was no noise at all. | 0:28:04 | 0:28:06 | |
And he just...poised, and didn't do anything. | 0:28:06 | 0:28:09 | |
And we thought, "Wow!" I thought... | 0:28:09 | 0:28:11 | |
And Fripp panicked, and took off his boot, | 0:28:11 | 0:28:14 | |
and started banging the stage with his boot because he couldn't stand the tension! | 0:28:14 | 0:28:18 | |
The amount of ego and power and experience that went into that first album was extraordinary. | 0:28:20 | 0:28:25 | |
Maybe that's inherent in that, | 0:28:25 | 0:28:28 | |
and that strength was the seeds of its destruction. | 0:28:28 | 0:28:32 | |
MUSIC: "Ride" by Caravan | 0:28:37 | 0:28:40 | |
The shock and awe that both defined and deified King Crimson | 0:28:44 | 0:28:48 | |
were completely absent from the whimsical, | 0:28:48 | 0:28:50 | |
slightly stoned sound still emanating from Canterbury. | 0:28:50 | 0:28:54 | |
The remaining Wilde Flowers now took the road out of town | 0:29:00 | 0:29:04 | |
as a band called Caravan. | 0:29:04 | 0:29:06 | |
When half of the Wilde Flowers went off and formed Soft Machine, | 0:29:11 | 0:29:16 | |
and managed to get a record deal, | 0:29:16 | 0:29:19 | |
we thought that perhaps we could do the same, | 0:29:19 | 0:29:21 | |
so we were very much looking to see how they were doing, | 0:29:21 | 0:29:26 | |
trying to do the same thing ourselves. | 0:29:26 | 0:29:28 | |
I suppose with the Canterbury scene, you have progressive music at its most melodic. | 0:29:28 | 0:29:32 | |
It's do with these people being able to write quite good tunes | 0:29:32 | 0:29:37 | |
being in contact, I think, with a kind of British melodic tradition | 0:29:37 | 0:29:41 | |
that maybe has more to do with 20th-century classical music | 0:29:41 | 0:29:44 | |
than with pop music. | 0:29:44 | 0:29:46 | |
You hear distant echoes of Vaughan Williams and Britten and that kind of thing. | 0:29:46 | 0:29:50 | |
# Sitting in my treetop world | 0:29:50 | 0:29:55 | |
# Doing nothing at all... # | 0:29:55 | 0:29:58 | |
Certainly the surrounding countryside and what-have-you, | 0:29:58 | 0:30:02 | |
we seemed to get a bit of inspiration from all that. | 0:30:02 | 0:30:05 | |
Sitting about in the sunshine. | 0:30:05 | 0:30:07 | |
Making up bits of music. | 0:30:07 | 0:30:09 | |
# Envy me all you want... # | 0:30:09 | 0:30:14 | |
Living off girlfriends, you know. | 0:30:14 | 0:30:17 | |
Great fun. | 0:30:17 | 0:30:19 | |
# Join me any time if you please... # | 0:30:19 | 0:30:25 | |
Court jesters, crimson kings, lost souls and magic men. | 0:30:30 | 0:30:36 | |
This was a broad church. | 0:30:36 | 0:30:38 | |
A very English music, infused with childhood fantasies | 0:30:38 | 0:30:41 | |
and the quirkiness of a small island race. | 0:30:41 | 0:30:44 | |
Spike Milligan, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, stuff like that. | 0:30:47 | 0:30:53 | |
And we had our own kind of popular surrealism | 0:30:53 | 0:30:59 | |
right from the humorous poets and writers | 0:30:59 | 0:31:02 | |
of the late 19th, early 20th century. | 0:31:02 | 0:31:05 | |
A long time before they invented surrealism on the continent, | 0:31:05 | 0:31:08 | |
we had Lewis Carroll! | 0:31:08 | 0:31:09 | |
At that time, we were making quite a large effort to be English. | 0:31:11 | 0:31:15 | |
Probably why we didn't go down too well in Germany when we were there! | 0:31:18 | 0:31:22 | |
MUSIC: "Horizons" by Genesis | 0:31:27 | 0:31:29 | |
Charterhouse Public School. | 0:31:35 | 0:31:37 | |
A group of young scholars, inspired by the ambitious compositions of Procul Harum and King Crimson, | 0:31:37 | 0:31:43 | |
embraced this new, mature pop music | 0:31:43 | 0:31:46 | |
as a way of dodging the professions for which they'd been groomed. | 0:31:46 | 0:31:50 | |
We had a bit of a tag over us, you know. Public schoolboys. | 0:31:50 | 0:31:53 | |
"What are they doing? What do they know about music? | 0:31:53 | 0:31:56 | |
"Where's their pain?" sort of thing. | 0:31:56 | 0:31:58 | |
We were in a school that was designing people to go into the civil service. | 0:32:02 | 0:32:07 | |
You often talk about getting into music | 0:32:07 | 0:32:09 | |
as an escape from poverty and stuff, | 0:32:09 | 0:32:11 | |
which perhaps it was for a certain kind of people | 0:32:11 | 0:32:13 | |
in the late '50s and early '60s. | 0:32:13 | 0:32:15 | |
For us, it was a kind of escape from a totally pre-determined career choice, if you like. | 0:32:15 | 0:32:21 | |
I was banned from playing the guitar for my entire time at Charterhouse. | 0:32:25 | 0:32:29 | |
I don't quite know why. I think they saw the guitar as a symbol of the revolution. | 0:32:29 | 0:32:34 | |
And I was gonna start it off in my house with my guitar. | 0:32:34 | 0:32:36 | |
So I was always under the thumb of my house-master for that reason. | 0:32:36 | 0:32:41 | |
They wanted to be songwriters. | 0:32:47 | 0:32:50 | |
But bands were now making their own material. | 0:32:50 | 0:32:53 | |
So they formed their own band, called it Genesis, | 0:32:53 | 0:32:55 | |
and did what every other group now seemed to be doing... | 0:32:55 | 0:32:58 | |
retreated to the country to get their heads together. | 0:32:58 | 0:33:03 | |
There was a phrase, "Getting together in the country, man," | 0:33:04 | 0:33:08 | |
but actually, I think being removed from the business was quite important for us. | 0:33:08 | 0:33:12 | |
The time at Christmas Cottage was where we sort of became a band | 0:33:13 | 0:33:17 | |
and started writing with our own sound. | 0:33:17 | 0:33:20 | |
And it's what came naturally to us, really. | 0:33:21 | 0:33:24 | |
We were embedded in English and obviously European classical traditions as well, | 0:33:24 | 0:33:28 | |
but also, in terms of a lot of the lyrical stuff we would take from English things, | 0:33:28 | 0:33:33 | |
influenced by TS Eliot and fairy stories, and stuff like that. | 0:33:33 | 0:33:36 | |
People forget there weren't that many bands in those days. | 0:33:36 | 0:33:40 | |
It was like a blank canvas. So as long as you were half-decent, | 0:33:40 | 0:33:43 | |
and had a bit of a sound, and were good live, | 0:33:43 | 0:33:47 | |
'you had a chance it was a career, you know.' | 0:33:47 | 0:33:50 | |
We like audiences that sit down and listen to the music | 0:33:50 | 0:33:53 | |
rather than get drunk and pick up girls. | 0:33:53 | 0:33:56 | |
We like audiences that will sit down and listen. | 0:33:56 | 0:33:59 | |
MUSIC: "White Mountain" by Genesis | 0:33:59 | 0:34:01 | |
While Genesis focused on songwriting, | 0:34:05 | 0:34:08 | |
other bands were mastering their instruments and finding new ones. | 0:34:08 | 0:34:11 | |
Technical virtuosity was fast becoming the essential protein in progressive rock's DNA. | 0:34:12 | 0:34:18 | |
I just don't believe that a drummer should just keep time. | 0:34:18 | 0:34:21 | |
Cos if you want time, buy a metronome. | 0:34:21 | 0:34:25 | |
Don't come and speak to me! | 0:34:25 | 0:34:26 | |
I think music... you make it for yourself. | 0:34:26 | 0:34:29 | |
If the chap next door likes it, isn't that fantastic? | 0:34:29 | 0:34:31 | |
I do think self-indulgence | 0:34:33 | 0:34:35 | |
is a good thing in art, because if you're trying | 0:34:35 | 0:34:39 | |
to please other people all the time, | 0:34:39 | 0:34:40 | |
you just stick to the same model all the time. | 0:34:40 | 0:34:43 | |
Nobody hears anything new, so nobody expects anything new. | 0:34:43 | 0:34:46 | |
You play a note, and you project it out. | 0:34:48 | 0:34:51 | |
Even if it's one note, it can go "donnnng"... hmm. | 0:34:51 | 0:34:54 | |
You can make it go... | 0:34:54 | 0:34:56 | |
-WITH DEEP ECHO: -"Donnnng"! | 0:34:56 | 0:34:57 | |
It's more than just playing the instrument. | 0:34:57 | 0:35:01 | |
It's not cool today to play your instrument. | 0:35:03 | 0:35:05 | |
Jangly guitar music... | 0:35:05 | 0:35:07 | |
It's jangly! That's what you do. | 0:35:07 | 0:35:09 | |
But to actually play a solo, something nice, | 0:35:09 | 0:35:12 | |
something that speaks, something that gives you a little kind of emotion, | 0:35:12 | 0:35:16 | |
a little buzz, makes your hair stand up on the back of your neck, | 0:35:16 | 0:35:19 | |
that's not cool. That's not part of this age. | 0:35:19 | 0:35:22 | |
But this was the dawning of the age of the highly-accomplished player. | 0:35:24 | 0:35:28 | |
The name musician. | 0:35:28 | 0:35:30 | |
In 1970, Crimson man Greg Lake, | 0:35:31 | 0:35:34 | |
plus Nice man Keith Emerson, | 0:35:34 | 0:35:37 | |
plus Crazy World man Carl Palmer, | 0:35:37 | 0:35:39 | |
equalled bass, keyboards and drums, | 0:35:39 | 0:35:42 | |
equalled prog rock's first supergroup, | 0:35:42 | 0:35:45 | |
equalled ELP. | 0:35:45 | 0:35:47 | |
MUSIC: "Hoedown" by Emerson, Lake & Palmer | 0:35:47 | 0:35:50 | |
We weren't a rock band, we weren't a blues band. | 0:35:57 | 0:36:00 | |
Emerson, Lake & Palmer was a kind of...was a European group that played classical adaptations. | 0:36:00 | 0:36:06 | |
Yes, we could rock out. But we didn't hang our hat on being a rock band. | 0:36:06 | 0:36:11 | |
In actual fact, it really was a thoroughbred musical statement we were making. | 0:36:11 | 0:36:16 | |
You need the playing expertise so that your colleagues know that you are the bee's knees, | 0:36:18 | 0:36:23 | |
but just give them some entertainment as well, and that's what it's all about. | 0:36:23 | 0:36:27 | |
That's my philosophy. | 0:36:27 | 0:36:28 | |
I think I'd call it showbusiness, actually! | 0:36:36 | 0:36:39 | |
Somebody jumping over their organ, or sticking in knives | 0:36:39 | 0:36:43 | |
to hold down a fifth or a fourth, a chord. | 0:36:43 | 0:36:45 | |
Musically it's valid, | 0:36:45 | 0:36:48 | |
visually it's right on it, | 0:36:48 | 0:36:49 | |
and it is rock'n'roll! | 0:36:49 | 0:36:51 | |
ELP's technical expertise and crowd-pleasing antics | 0:36:58 | 0:37:01 | |
elevated musicianship and ticket sales to new heights. | 0:37:01 | 0:37:05 | |
Progressive rock popped its head out of the underground | 0:37:05 | 0:37:08 | |
and glimpsed not only showbusiness, but big business. | 0:37:08 | 0:37:11 | |
Progressive rock wizard Rick Wakeman | 0:37:14 | 0:37:16 | |
was amazed when he first saw what Yes were now up to | 0:37:16 | 0:37:19 | |
with their psychedelic guitarist Steve Howe. | 0:37:19 | 0:37:22 | |
Everything that happened in the '70s, this is it, | 0:37:26 | 0:37:28 | |
was to do with psychedelia, you see. | 0:37:28 | 0:37:31 | |
Psychedelia may have quit as a fashion in 1968, | 0:37:31 | 0:37:36 | |
but when I joined Yes, | 0:37:36 | 0:37:39 | |
I was still a psychedelic guitarist in my mind. | 0:37:39 | 0:37:42 | |
I would not play blues cliche for love nor money. | 0:37:42 | 0:37:45 | |
I was just bowled over, because everything was wrong. | 0:37:49 | 0:37:53 | |
Bill Bruford had the most incredible unusual tuning of the kit, | 0:37:55 | 0:37:59 | |
and they mic'ed it up. No-one mic'ed it up then. | 0:37:59 | 0:38:02 | |
And it was the most fantastic drum sound I'd ever heard. | 0:38:02 | 0:38:06 | |
MUSIC: "Yours Is No Disgrace" by Yes | 0:38:06 | 0:38:08 | |
There were funky elements, there were classical elements, | 0:38:14 | 0:38:17 | |
there'd be a free section, or some sort of psychedelic vamp or funk thing, | 0:38:17 | 0:38:21 | |
cos we liked Sly and the Family Stone, so we needed some of that. | 0:38:21 | 0:38:24 | |
Chris Squire. Most bass players try to get as low as they could, to make your trousers flap. | 0:38:28 | 0:38:32 | |
Chris wiped out all the middle, and had all the treble turned up, | 0:38:32 | 0:38:36 | |
and used a Rickenbacker while everyone else was using Fenders. | 0:38:36 | 0:38:40 | |
I thought, "That's outrageous"! | 0:38:40 | 0:38:41 | |
And then Steve Howe, when everybody else was using big stacks, | 0:38:41 | 0:38:45 | |
had a little Fender Twin, and a Gibson semi-acoustic. | 0:38:45 | 0:38:51 | |
I played any kind of guitar you could think of that I liked. | 0:38:55 | 0:38:58 | |
So I went on to mandolin, steel, and all the kinds, six, twelve, Spanish... | 0:38:58 | 0:39:04 | |
"Eh, what? What's going on?" | 0:39:04 | 0:39:07 | |
And then, of course, at those times, every lead singer was six foot six, | 0:39:07 | 0:39:10 | |
long greasy black hair, you could smell 'em from the back row, | 0:39:10 | 0:39:13 | |
and along comes this little fella who's got an alto voice. | 0:39:13 | 0:39:16 | |
# If the summer change to winter, Yours is no disgrace... # | 0:39:16 | 0:39:24 | |
Wakeman wanted in. | 0:39:27 | 0:39:29 | |
PHONE RINGS | 0:39:29 | 0:39:30 | |
But when he got the call, it wasn't an easy decision. | 0:39:30 | 0:39:33 | |
On the same day that Yes asked me to join, | 0:39:34 | 0:39:37 | |
David Bowie asked me to form Spiders From Mars with Mick Ronson, | 0:39:37 | 0:39:43 | |
um...which, when I look back, that was one hell of a choice! | 0:39:43 | 0:39:50 | |
# There's a starman waiting in the sky... # | 0:39:50 | 0:39:54 | |
Progressive music wasn't the only gig in town. | 0:39:54 | 0:39:58 | |
Top Of The Pops, regarded as a sell-out by any self-respecting prog rocker, | 0:39:58 | 0:40:04 | |
was by now home to artists such as Bowie, Roxy Music and T Rex. | 0:40:04 | 0:40:09 | |
Bands still making singles hits, and girls dance. | 0:40:09 | 0:40:12 | |
For Robert Wyatt, the Soft Machine party was all but over. | 0:40:19 | 0:40:23 | |
The band had matured into a jazz-fusion quartet | 0:40:23 | 0:40:27 | |
with little sympathy for his pop sensibilities. | 0:40:27 | 0:40:30 | |
Goodbye, the UFO Club... | 0:40:31 | 0:40:33 | |
..hello, the Albert Hall. | 0:40:34 | 0:40:36 | |
You know, pretty respected, and so on, but nobody's dancing any more, | 0:40:44 | 0:40:48 | |
so I sort of thought, aww, you know, | 0:40:48 | 0:40:49 | |
I never really quite made it as a proper pop musician! | 0:40:49 | 0:40:52 | |
We thought we were a pop band! | 0:40:55 | 0:40:58 | |
It's just that... I try to make normal records, they just don't come out like that. | 0:40:58 | 0:41:03 | |
We could have made a really good pop LP, and been in the charts, | 0:41:10 | 0:41:14 | |
and been in those films about the '60s. | 0:41:14 | 0:41:17 | |
And we blew it. | 0:41:17 | 0:41:18 | |
Wyatt was eventually sacked from his own group. | 0:41:24 | 0:41:27 | |
I think I resented it for a while, | 0:41:28 | 0:41:31 | |
and when I got cross, | 0:41:31 | 0:41:33 | |
I used to feel about Soft Machine the same way that Palestinians think about Jerusalem. | 0:41:33 | 0:41:38 | |
"This once was mine!" | 0:41:38 | 0:41:41 | |
Without Wyatt, Soft Machine moved into purely instrumental compositions, | 0:41:46 | 0:41:50 | |
avoiding the problems of lyrics. | 0:41:50 | 0:41:52 | |
"My baby done left me" never did work with complex musical structures. | 0:41:53 | 0:41:57 | |
This music didn't want the blues. | 0:41:59 | 0:42:01 | |
It needed fantasy and myth. | 0:42:01 | 0:42:03 | |
Cupid meets Psyche, | 0:42:04 | 0:42:05 | |
not boy meets girl. | 0:42:05 | 0:42:08 | |
We hadn't really experienced much outside education. | 0:42:11 | 0:42:14 | |
So I suppose that's partly why we wrote about...fantasy lyrics, | 0:42:14 | 0:42:18 | |
different situations about life rather than boy/girl things. | 0:42:18 | 0:42:23 | |
I had come from a public school background, | 0:42:23 | 0:42:26 | |
very self-conscious. | 0:42:26 | 0:42:27 | |
Could never have expressed that in a song in those days. | 0:42:27 | 0:42:30 | |
So it was much easier to go back to Greek myths and write things like that. | 0:42:30 | 0:42:34 | |
So we plundered Ovid and anybody else we could find. We were all the same, really. | 0:42:34 | 0:42:39 | |
There was an audience of newly-educated university students | 0:42:42 | 0:42:45 | |
who were crying out for something | 0:42:45 | 0:42:47 | |
that they had read in science fiction and they wanted a musical version of that. | 0:42:47 | 0:42:51 | |
And of course, there was The Lord Of The Rings, and Mervyn Peake and Gormenghast, | 0:42:51 | 0:42:55 | |
and people wanted that in their music. | 0:42:55 | 0:42:58 | |
Ambitious music demanded ambitious presentation. | 0:43:02 | 0:43:05 | |
What began with Sgt Pepper now became the glorious norm. | 0:43:08 | 0:43:12 | |
Albums adorned with lyrics, paintings, cut-outs, pop-ups and pull-outs. | 0:43:12 | 0:43:17 | |
The gatefold sleeve opened like a window onto brave new worlds, | 0:43:21 | 0:43:26 | |
and provided the perfect prop on which to roll a joint. | 0:43:26 | 0:43:30 | |
Yeah... | 0:43:33 | 0:43:35 | |
I think the album cover, the artwork, and a vinyl... | 0:43:36 | 0:43:38 | |
when you bought that, it was a piece you could hold, you could look at it, | 0:43:38 | 0:43:42 | |
it was big, you know. | 0:43:42 | 0:43:44 | |
When it suddenly went down to the jewel case, to the CD... | 0:43:44 | 0:43:47 | |
HE SIGHS | 0:43:47 | 0:43:49 | |
You couldn't have the detail, because it was too small. I needed one for each eye. | 0:43:49 | 0:43:53 | |
It's hard not to start sounding like, you know, "In my day... the gatefold sleeve..." | 0:43:53 | 0:43:58 | |
but it's changed now, you know. | 0:43:58 | 0:44:00 | |
Music is now...it's not something that people hold, the article. | 0:44:00 | 0:44:05 | |
It was a whole event of getting an album. | 0:44:05 | 0:44:09 | |
Getting your album home, putting an album on, reading the bits and pieces, | 0:44:09 | 0:44:13 | |
learning a bit about it... it was absolutely fantastic. | 0:44:13 | 0:44:16 | |
And we lost that. And when we lost that, we lost an awful lot. | 0:44:16 | 0:44:20 | |
So, welcome back to days of future past. | 0:44:22 | 0:44:26 | |
This is the home of Roger Dean. | 0:44:29 | 0:44:31 | |
The artist who most successfully translated progressive rock's soundscapes into landscapes. | 0:44:31 | 0:44:36 | |
He gave Yes their distinctive brand logo, | 0:44:39 | 0:44:42 | |
and imagined worlds that at the time still seemed like beautiful possibilities. | 0:44:42 | 0:44:46 | |
Whether you're designing just a box of matches, | 0:44:50 | 0:44:53 | |
you're predicting one tiny, miniscule part of the future. | 0:44:53 | 0:44:56 | |
I think what's terribly astonishing and disappointing | 0:44:59 | 0:45:03 | |
is how little the promise of the future turned out. | 0:45:03 | 0:45:06 | |
In the '60s, people walked on the moon, in the '60s, there was colour television. | 0:45:06 | 0:45:10 | |
And no-one has gone back to the moon. | 0:45:10 | 0:45:13 | |
I think people would have been shocked | 0:45:13 | 0:45:16 | |
if they could see the year 2008 from a 1968 perspective, | 0:45:16 | 0:45:21 | |
at how astonishingly little the world had improved | 0:45:21 | 0:45:27 | |
compared to our ambitions and expectations. | 0:45:27 | 0:45:30 | |
Had we planned it properly in the '60s, this is how it might have turned out! | 0:45:30 | 0:45:36 | |
I try and find out what was motivating them to make the music, | 0:45:41 | 0:45:47 | |
and work on the same sort of ideas, if that was possible. | 0:45:47 | 0:45:51 | |
Wasn't always possible, but sometimes it was. | 0:45:51 | 0:45:53 | |
Sometimes there was a great synergy between the ideas that motivated the music-making | 0:45:53 | 0:46:00 | |
and the ideas that motivated the art. | 0:46:00 | 0:46:03 | |
But it was not the music itself. It was the ideas behind it. | 0:46:03 | 0:46:08 | |
I was lucky that the images and the music seemed to be an absolute perfect fit sometimes, | 0:46:08 | 0:46:15 | |
when in actual fact, the process was beyond analysis. | 0:46:15 | 0:46:20 | |
Yes recording sessions were also moving beyond analysis. | 0:46:23 | 0:46:27 | |
The hippy democracy the band chose as a way of life | 0:46:29 | 0:46:32 | |
made for difficulties in the studio. | 0:46:32 | 0:46:35 | |
Their fifth album, Close To The Edge, | 0:46:35 | 0:46:37 | |
took over three months to perfect. | 0:46:37 | 0:46:40 | |
It took three months because Simon & Garfunkel | 0:46:41 | 0:46:43 | |
had done Bridge Over Troubled Water, which took three months. | 0:46:43 | 0:46:47 | |
We heard this and we thought, | 0:46:47 | 0:46:48 | |
"By golly, our next record's going to take three months and a day if it kills us!" | 0:46:48 | 0:46:52 | |
So of course, this was the infantile way we behaved, | 0:46:52 | 0:46:55 | |
we took three months and a day. | 0:46:55 | 0:46:58 | |
We established a whole new plane of length of how long we play. | 0:46:59 | 0:47:03 | |
So we've got some musicians here, | 0:47:03 | 0:47:05 | |
we've got a lot of writers in the band, cos Bill wrote, everybody wrote in the band. | 0:47:05 | 0:47:09 | |
"Can I trade your idea for my idea?" You've got five guys writing... | 0:47:09 | 0:47:14 | |
Imagine five guys writing a book! | 0:47:14 | 0:47:15 | |
Steve said, "I've got this silly little line that I've had lying around for ages, | 0:47:15 | 0:47:20 | |
going, "Ding-ding-ding-doo, de-doo, diddly-iddly-um-dum..." | 0:47:20 | 0:47:23 | |
It was all horse-trading, muscle power, strongest guy, thickest skin. | 0:47:23 | 0:47:28 | |
Chris said, "I've got this...bass run." | 0:47:28 | 0:47:32 | |
Diddly-iddly-um-dum-dum-dum-dum. | 0:47:32 | 0:47:35 | |
And that was it, really. And I went, "Anything else?" | 0:47:35 | 0:47:39 | |
And he went, "No, that's it." | 0:47:39 | 0:47:41 | |
Diddly-iddly-um-dum-dum-dum-dum. | 0:47:41 | 0:47:43 | |
And when we got to, what turned out to be for me, the high spot, which was Close To The Edge, | 0:47:43 | 0:47:48 | |
really, I don't know how that record got made. | 0:47:48 | 0:47:51 | |
Some days, we got into the rehearsal rooms after, like, yesterday, | 0:47:54 | 0:47:57 | |
we got in the next day and said, "Does anybody remember how we went from the last verse into that?" | 0:47:57 | 0:48:02 | |
"No"! | 0:48:02 | 0:48:04 | |
I said, "I want that bit on the end of that, and I don't want to do it in that key, | 0:48:04 | 0:48:07 | |
"because it works nice with the way I play it on guitar on that," | 0:48:07 | 0:48:10 | |
so they'd say, "We'll get a cup of tea, Rick, you work out how we get from there to there"! | 0:48:10 | 0:48:15 | |
We couldn't do a song in five minutes. It went to ten minutes on the Yes album. | 0:48:15 | 0:48:19 | |
And we got to Close To The Edge and we thought, "This just isn't long enough! This is like...a symphony!" | 0:48:19 | 0:48:24 | |
# Down at the edge, round by the corner | 0:48:24 | 0:48:28 | |
# Not right away, not right away | 0:48:28 | 0:48:33 | |
# Close to the edge, down by the river | 0:48:33 | 0:48:37 | |
# Not right away... # | 0:48:37 | 0:48:38 | |
In those days there were two or three albums that weren't so good, | 0:48:38 | 0:48:42 | |
getting you towards the winner. | 0:48:42 | 0:48:44 | |
The one that the thing existed for, which was Close To The Edge. | 0:48:44 | 0:48:48 | |
That's the moment you exist for in a rock group, and it's terrific! | 0:48:48 | 0:48:52 | |
And you think, "That's the cookie. That's the one, right there! Done deal! I'm gone!" | 0:48:52 | 0:48:57 | |
I left then. | 0:48:57 | 0:48:58 | |
Bruford defected to the less sunny, less democratic regime of Robert Fripp's all-new King Crimson. | 0:49:01 | 0:49:07 | |
In 1972, this was akin to going over the Berlin Wall into East Germany. | 0:49:12 | 0:49:16 | |
No papers required, just extreme chops. | 0:49:20 | 0:49:23 | |
Everything you've heard about King Crimson is true. It's a terrifying place. | 0:49:24 | 0:49:28 | |
Whatever you do before you join King Crimson, | 0:49:41 | 0:49:43 | |
would you please not do it when you're in the band? | 0:49:43 | 0:49:46 | |
You're required really to develop a new style, if you can, | 0:49:55 | 0:49:59 | |
specifically for that group. | 0:49:59 | 0:50:01 | |
The implication being that you would play that way in King Crimson, | 0:50:01 | 0:50:06 | |
and King Crimson alone. | 0:50:06 | 0:50:07 | |
Yes was an endless debate | 0:50:09 | 0:50:11 | |
about whether it should be F-natural in the bass with a G-sharp on top or should it be the other way round? | 0:50:11 | 0:50:16 | |
In King Crimson, almost nothing was said. | 0:50:16 | 0:50:19 | |
You're just supposed to know. | 0:50:19 | 0:50:22 | |
Robert Fripp was a purist. | 0:50:31 | 0:50:32 | |
Unlike the Jimmy Pages of rock, he didn't brandish the guitar like a phallus. | 0:50:32 | 0:50:38 | |
His was more like a probe. An instrument of science, not sex. | 0:50:38 | 0:50:42 | |
And to use it properly, | 0:50:42 | 0:50:45 | |
you had to sit down. | 0:50:45 | 0:50:47 | |
The very first few gigs we did, | 0:50:48 | 0:50:50 | |
Robert didn't sit down. And he was very unhappy, | 0:50:50 | 0:50:54 | |
because in rehearsals, he'd have his stool and his thing, | 0:50:54 | 0:50:57 | |
that was how he'd been taught, | 0:50:57 | 0:50:59 | |
and Robert's very strict about, "That's how it should be," | 0:50:59 | 0:51:03 | |
and eventually we'd had to give him a stool, because he was sulking. | 0:51:03 | 0:51:08 | |
And he was so happy on that stool. | 0:51:08 | 0:51:11 | |
Robert's not a gyrator, is he? | 0:51:11 | 0:51:13 | |
He may be many things, but he's not a gyrator. | 0:51:13 | 0:51:16 | |
And Robert's idea of sexy is to smile with his glasses and... | 0:51:16 | 0:51:22 | |
Fripp wasn't alone. | 0:51:25 | 0:51:26 | |
Sexual energy, the very lifeblood of rock'n'roll, | 0:51:26 | 0:51:30 | |
was conspicuously absent from the prog rock stage. | 0:51:30 | 0:51:33 | |
Bands like Egg had enough on their hands just playing the complicated arpeggios. | 0:51:34 | 0:51:38 | |
Well, we weren't very sexy, | 0:51:40 | 0:51:42 | |
and we regarded overt sexual display as extremely uncool. | 0:51:42 | 0:51:48 | |
It was something...rather humiliating to have to admit to | 0:51:48 | 0:51:54 | |
that we were actually trying to get into girls' knickers. | 0:51:54 | 0:51:57 | |
We wouldn't admit to it. It was very duplicitous, very dishonest. | 0:51:57 | 0:52:00 | |
But there you are. We certainly wouldn't do it on stage. | 0:52:00 | 0:52:03 | |
I would have been completely unconvincing! | 0:52:03 | 0:52:08 | |
Imagine me doing pelvic thrusts on stage while playing in 25/8. No. | 0:52:08 | 0:52:14 | |
No sex on stage, and no sex backstage. | 0:52:19 | 0:52:23 | |
All the groupies were at Led Zeppelin concerts, | 0:52:23 | 0:52:26 | |
not waiting for progressive rock maestros | 0:52:26 | 0:52:29 | |
to demonstrate the delights of the diminished chord. | 0:52:29 | 0:52:31 | |
The rock bands in America had groupies. We didn't really have any. | 0:52:31 | 0:52:36 | |
The pop stars had groupies. We wanted groupies too. | 0:52:36 | 0:52:38 | |
We never had any Egg groupies. We never had any girl groupies at all. | 0:52:38 | 0:52:44 | |
No girls ever came to the side of the stage after a gig. | 0:52:45 | 0:52:50 | |
Sad, isn't it? | 0:52:51 | 0:52:53 | |
When we went to America, we had lots of groupies. | 0:52:53 | 0:52:57 | |
By the dozens! | 0:52:57 | 0:52:59 | |
Because they loved our English accents, | 0:52:59 | 0:53:02 | |
and the fact we weren't American rock stars and we were something different, | 0:53:02 | 0:53:06 | |
and exotic to them. | 0:53:06 | 0:53:08 | |
-IN AMERICAN ACCENT: -"We love your accent! Y'all wanna take a shower with us?" | 0:53:10 | 0:53:13 | |
-IN POSH ENGLISH ACCENT: -"What, both of you? Gosh!" | 0:53:13 | 0:53:16 | |
Progressive rock audiences certainly weren't screamers. | 0:53:19 | 0:53:22 | |
They were an infinitely patient lot. | 0:53:22 | 0:53:24 | |
Too much yang, not enough yin. | 0:53:24 | 0:53:27 | |
What we started to realise... our audience were nice and reserved people, really. | 0:53:28 | 0:53:33 | |
You know, fishing hats, greatcoats, bunch of albums under the arm... | 0:53:33 | 0:53:38 | |
Public school sixth-formers really, in greatcoats! | 0:53:38 | 0:53:41 | |
Ugly-looking audience, you know. | 0:53:43 | 0:53:45 | |
Pipe and glasses, yeah. Beards and stuff, we used to have. | 0:53:45 | 0:53:48 | |
It was very male-orientated. | 0:53:48 | 0:53:51 | |
I would say, in those days, 95% of our audience were male. | 0:53:51 | 0:53:56 | |
We never used to have females come and see us. | 0:53:56 | 0:53:58 | |
Not many girls, no. All chaps. | 0:53:58 | 0:54:01 | |
Lots of guys. No girls. | 0:54:01 | 0:54:03 | |
What is it, some kind of homo band? What is it? | 0:54:03 | 0:54:05 | |
It was the odd woman, mostly dragged along, who used to just look bewildered. | 0:54:05 | 0:54:12 | |
If the sexiness of '60s psychedelia was absent from the prog performance, | 0:54:15 | 0:54:19 | |
theatricality, used so effectively by Arthur Brown, | 0:54:19 | 0:54:22 | |
was becoming an essential part of any Genesis show. | 0:54:22 | 0:54:26 | |
Flower... | 0:54:29 | 0:54:30 | |
# If you go down to Willow Farm | 0:54:33 | 0:54:35 | |
# To look for butterflies, flutterbys, gutterflies... # | 0:54:35 | 0:54:39 | |
Initially it started off because the PA systems we had...only the voice went through the PA in those days... | 0:54:39 | 0:54:45 | |
were pretty bad, so you could never hear any lyrics. | 0:54:45 | 0:54:48 | |
Quite complex lyrics, and the lyrics were quite important. | 0:54:48 | 0:54:51 | |
So Peter felt he had to act them out a bit, so he started acting them out on stage. | 0:54:51 | 0:54:55 | |
MUSIC: "Supper's Ready" by Genesis | 0:54:55 | 0:54:57 | |
The prog rock movement really stimulated the visual aspect | 0:55:06 | 0:55:09 | |
as well as the playing and the conceptual side. | 0:55:09 | 0:55:12 | |
The visual thing was in. Theatre was important. | 0:55:12 | 0:55:15 | |
It started with that psychedelia period, Arthur Brown, wherever, | 0:55:15 | 0:55:20 | |
and went on and got developed. | 0:55:20 | 0:55:22 | |
MUSIC: "Brandenburger" by The Nice | 0:55:22 | 0:55:25 | |
Progressive rock now had such a loyal male record-buying fan base, | 0:55:29 | 0:55:33 | |
that both the major and independent labels happily signed new bands, | 0:55:33 | 0:55:37 | |
and let them record whatever they wanted. | 0:55:37 | 0:55:40 | |
They weren't even expected to make money at first. | 0:55:40 | 0:55:43 | |
This was the age of company investment and artistic freedom. | 0:55:43 | 0:55:47 | |
Egg recorded all their albums with zero interference. | 0:55:53 | 0:55:56 | |
MUSIC: "Fugue In D Minor" by Egg | 0:55:56 | 0:55:59 | |
They were interested in us, | 0:55:59 | 0:56:03 | |
because I think they thought we sounded a bit like The Nice, | 0:56:03 | 0:56:06 | |
who had already had a chart hit, | 0:56:06 | 0:56:09 | |
and they thought, "Maybe these guys can make us some money." | 0:56:09 | 0:56:12 | |
So they signed us up, but we had no input from them at all. | 0:56:12 | 0:56:17 | |
I don't think we spoke to any Decca executive ever. | 0:56:17 | 0:56:21 | |
I don't know why we got away with it, to be honest. | 0:56:21 | 0:56:25 | |
That was the style then. | 0:56:25 | 0:56:27 | |
For some reason, we set the precedent that we'd make an album, | 0:56:27 | 0:56:31 | |
when it's finished, we'll hand it over to the record label. | 0:56:31 | 0:56:35 | |
I mean, how nice is that? This is the album. | 0:56:35 | 0:56:37 | |
We were still allowed to do what we wanted to do by the record labels and management. | 0:56:37 | 0:56:42 | |
We were still allowed to come up with ridiculous ideas, | 0:56:42 | 0:56:45 | |
and then somehow find people who could make it happen. | 0:56:45 | 0:56:48 | |
Until groups like Yes, a song was taken and played. | 0:56:48 | 0:56:53 | |
A guitar player played the chords, a bass player played the roots, | 0:56:53 | 0:56:57 | |
a drummer played the rhythm and the singer sung the song. | 0:56:57 | 0:57:00 | |
Yes said, "No, no! We don't want to do it like that. | 0:57:00 | 0:57:02 | |
"We want to have a theme to start. We want to have a riff behind the song. | 0:57:02 | 0:57:07 | |
"We want to take out the chords of that section, cos everybody's heard those before. Stick some lines in." | 0:57:07 | 0:57:12 | |
More like an orchestral approach. Violins do this, the bassoons do that. | 0:57:12 | 0:57:16 | |
It's a thinking man's music, as opposed to a... just from the gut music. | 0:57:16 | 0:57:22 | |
Rock was just from the gut, I think. | 0:57:22 | 0:57:24 | |
Everyone was looking eagerly to see | 0:57:24 | 0:57:27 | |
what was new, what was gonna happen. That was definitely a heady time, | 0:57:27 | 0:57:32 | |
for sure, and one that I rather suspect we won't see again. | 0:57:32 | 0:57:37 | |
'72, '73, we were kind of in that prog rock camp. | 0:57:37 | 0:57:43 | |
Albeit we were the band that were making a joke of it. | 0:57:43 | 0:57:46 | |
We were doing a bit of a send-up of prog rock for a couple of albums back then. | 0:57:46 | 0:57:51 | |
Despite Jethro Tull's determination to stay outside the prog rock establishment, | 0:57:57 | 0:58:01 | |
their fourth album, Aqualung, seemed suspiciously profound. | 0:58:01 | 0:58:05 | |
It was not a concept album. People just ignored it. "It's a concept album! | 0:58:10 | 0:58:16 | |
"It's got a picture about God and stuff, | 0:58:16 | 0:58:18 | |
"and tramps and things... and...concept, yeah!" | 0:58:18 | 0:58:21 | |
So in the wake of that, I just thought, "Let's give them the mother of all concept albums." | 0:58:21 | 0:58:26 | |
Have a bit of fun with the whole thing, and do a spoof concept album | 0:58:26 | 0:58:29 | |
and pretend it was written by a 12-year-old precocious schoolboy, | 0:58:29 | 0:58:33 | |
and do the ridiculously convoluted 16-page cover, | 0:58:33 | 0:58:37 | |
which actually took longer to do than record the album, I think. | 0:58:37 | 0:58:40 | |
So it was a bit of a send-up. It was a pre-Spinal Tap moment. | 0:58:40 | 0:58:46 | |
# But your new shoes are worn at the heels | 0:58:47 | 0:58:51 | |
# And your suntan does rapidly peel | 0:58:51 | 0:58:56 | |
# And your wise men don't know how it feels | 0:58:56 | 0:59:02 | |
# To be thick as a brick. # | 0:59:04 | 0:59:06 | |
Ironically, the mischievous prank that was 1972's Thick As A Brick | 0:59:06 | 0:59:11 | |
is now hailed as the ultimate progressive rock album. | 0:59:11 | 0:59:14 | |
MUSIC: "Tubular Bells" by Mike Oldfield | 0:59:17 | 0:59:20 | |
That same year, multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield | 0:59:20 | 0:59:23 | |
was composing his progressive music masterwork - | 0:59:23 | 0:59:26 | |
the near-scientific experiment that was Tubular Bells, | 0:59:26 | 0:59:29 | |
for which he played all the 26 featured instruments himself. | 0:59:29 | 0:59:32 | |
A nightmare for me to explain to another musician how it should be played. | 0:59:36 | 0:59:41 | |
I can't tell them, "Play it like I would play it," cos they can't! | 0:59:41 | 0:59:45 | |
I made my own notes that only I could understand, | 0:59:47 | 0:59:50 | |
so I did sort of map it out. | 0:59:50 | 0:59:51 | |
It's a kind of piece of classical music, but with the instruments that I could play. | 0:59:51 | 0:59:57 | |
We were working in Abbey Road, | 1:00:00 | 1:00:02 | |
and Paul McCartney was in the big studio next door, number one, | 1:00:02 | 1:00:06 | |
and somebody told me he was playing everything. | 1:00:06 | 1:00:09 | |
And I understood from the technology we were using | 1:00:09 | 1:00:13 | |
that you could overdub one instrument while listening to the rest, | 1:00:13 | 1:00:17 | |
and I said, "Oh! He's probably doing it all like that! I can do that with my one!" | 1:00:17 | 1:00:21 | |
The album launched Virgin Records, | 1:00:25 | 1:00:28 | |
and was licensed in America with a help of an accompanying film | 1:00:28 | 1:00:31 | |
put together for the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test. | 1:00:31 | 1:00:33 | |
It went on to sell 50 million copies worldwide. | 1:00:33 | 1:00:37 | |
Vintage footage, probably black-and-white era, | 1:00:39 | 1:00:43 | |
late '20s, early '30s, of skiers. | 1:00:43 | 1:00:45 | |
Pull out a reel of film, and, "Er, let's have a look at this one... | 1:00:48 | 1:00:52 | |
"Ah, this one might fit, yeah." | 1:00:52 | 1:00:54 | |
With the snow going up, the powder... | 1:00:54 | 1:00:58 | |
Dun-din-dun-din-dun-din-dun-din... | 1:00:58 | 1:01:01 | |
It was just beautiful. | 1:01:01 | 1:01:04 | |
That was incredible. Mike Oldfield, and just a part of Tubular Bells. | 1:01:06 | 1:01:10 | |
But commercial success and an underground reputation was still a contradiction. | 1:01:16 | 1:01:21 | |
A shy Oldfield couldn't deal with the attention, and took to the hills. | 1:01:21 | 1:01:26 | |
The press, in pursuit of Britain's biggest international progressive music success story, | 1:01:26 | 1:01:32 | |
were denied its star. | 1:01:32 | 1:01:33 | |
I left the human civilisation, | 1:01:35 | 1:01:37 | |
and lived with my sheep on a little house on the Welsh border. | 1:01:37 | 1:01:42 | |
Major psychological problems, nervous breakdown kind of things, | 1:01:43 | 1:01:48 | |
which wasn't very nice. | 1:01:48 | 1:01:50 | |
HE COUGHS | 1:01:50 | 1:01:53 | |
Upset a hell of a lot of people. | 1:01:53 | 1:01:56 | |
There was one journalist who was furious with me, | 1:01:56 | 1:01:59 | |
cos I wouldn't do an interview. | 1:01:59 | 1:02:01 | |
I was already so successful, | 1:02:01 | 1:02:04 | |
what difference would it have made if I had done 500 interviews and toured the world? | 1:02:04 | 1:02:11 | |
So I thought, "What are you all bothering me about? Leave me alone!" | 1:02:11 | 1:02:15 | |
If Oldfield rejected mainstream acceptance of his rarefied musical experiment, | 1:02:31 | 1:02:36 | |
other musicians embraced the success that British progressive rock was now achieving around the world. | 1:02:36 | 1:02:42 | |
Most significantly, in the States. | 1:02:42 | 1:02:44 | |
The Americans loved progressive rock. It was evidence of skill. | 1:02:50 | 1:02:55 | |
Now, Americans, funnily enough, are a little unlike us, | 1:02:55 | 1:02:58 | |
in the sense that they are not immediately embarrassed by an overt display of capability. | 1:02:58 | 1:03:05 | |
The Americans...fantastic at doing that. Brits, crap. | 1:03:05 | 1:03:10 | |
The Brits come to a solo... | 1:03:10 | 1:03:11 | |
"I can actually play a lot better than this but I won't, cos I don't want to show off, | 1:03:11 | 1:03:15 | |
"so I'll just stand in the corner." | 1:03:15 | 1:03:17 | |
Suddenly, we're doing... "Hey! Cop a load of this!" | 1:03:17 | 1:03:20 | |
Now, let's bang the drum for somebody who for three years running has been voted Drummer Of The Year. | 1:03:25 | 1:03:30 | |
He's just taken delivery of a new kit, and here he is to demonstrate it - Carl Palmer. | 1:03:30 | 1:03:34 | |
It was a stainless steel drum kit. I was sponsored by British Steel. | 1:03:34 | 1:03:38 | |
Eight different engineering companies were involved in the making of this kit, | 1:03:38 | 1:03:42 | |
which is the very first electronic stainless steel drum kit in existence. | 1:03:42 | 1:03:46 | |
'I decided to get a jeweller,' | 1:03:46 | 1:03:48 | |
using a dentist's drill, a chap called Paul Raven, | 1:03:48 | 1:03:51 | |
to do these hunting scenes on each of the drums. | 1:03:51 | 1:03:54 | |
I'd seen them on Purdey rifles, and I was quite impressed. | 1:03:54 | 1:03:57 | |
There's a beautiful squirrel, nibbling away there, | 1:03:57 | 1:04:01 | |
there's a fox, really nice, they are, | 1:04:01 | 1:04:03 | |
and there's even somewhere a hedgehog. There it is. | 1:04:03 | 1:04:06 | |
And they said, "Did you want the shells a quarter-inch thick or half-an-inch thick?" | 1:04:06 | 1:04:10 | |
I said, "What's the difference in price?" They said, "The same." | 1:04:10 | 1:04:14 | |
"I'll have half-an-inch." It's the '70s, excess, | 1:04:14 | 1:04:16 | |
not thinking it'll take two guys to lift the bass drum! | 1:04:16 | 1:04:19 | |
I know it weighs a couple of tons? | 1:04:19 | 1:04:20 | |
-Two-and-a-half. -And you'll be taking this around the world on tour? | 1:04:20 | 1:04:24 | |
-Yes. -How do you fly with it? -Er, very well, thank you! | 1:04:24 | 1:04:27 | |
'The stage had to be reinforced.' | 1:04:27 | 1:04:29 | |
We didn't think of transport costs, we didn't think of weight. | 1:04:29 | 1:04:32 | |
'It went on from there. We decided to add the electronic drums, the first electronic drums at the time.' | 1:04:32 | 1:04:38 | |
Everyone thought it was keyboards. They were drums. | 1:04:38 | 1:04:40 | |
DRUM BEAT TRIGGERS ELECTRONIC ARPEGGIO | 1:04:40 | 1:04:43 | |
SECOND DRUM BEAT STOPS IT | 1:04:46 | 1:04:48 | |
Have it! It's the '70s, innit? The bigger, the better! | 1:04:48 | 1:04:52 | |
If there was something that was available | 1:04:55 | 1:04:57 | |
from a technology point of view that would enhance the sound of the band, | 1:04:57 | 1:05:01 | |
we wanted it yesterday. | 1:05:01 | 1:05:03 | |
HE RINGS BELL WITH STRING IN HIS MOUTH | 1:05:03 | 1:05:06 | |
MUSIC: "The Ancient (Giants Under The Sun)" by Yes | 1:05:13 | 1:05:16 | |
Progressive rock was now colonising the outer limits. | 1:05:18 | 1:05:21 | |
In 1973, Yes had set sail on Topographic Oceans, | 1:05:21 | 1:05:26 | |
a double album comprised of only four tracks, | 1:05:26 | 1:05:28 | |
each packed with unusual sounds, key changes and time signatures. | 1:05:28 | 1:05:32 | |
There was this constant quest. Could you hit this and it sounded good? | 1:05:35 | 1:05:38 | |
"Doing!" | 1:05:38 | 1:05:39 | |
We got Slinkies and put mics in them and threw them downstairs and recorded them | 1:05:42 | 1:05:46 | |
to hear what they were like. And you put a lot of reverb on them, it's great. | 1:05:46 | 1:05:50 | |
And it was! "Pchkowwhoossssh-bthwooooom"! Yeah! | 1:05:50 | 1:05:54 | |
It was that kind of insanity. It was a nice kind of insanity. | 1:05:56 | 1:05:59 | |
It was a musical insanity. | 1:05:59 | 1:06:01 | |
We were...totally self-indulgent. | 1:06:15 | 1:06:17 | |
But it was serious music. There was something more serious about Yes | 1:06:22 | 1:06:26 | |
than some other bands of that time. | 1:06:26 | 1:06:28 | |
We took ourselves a little serious! | 1:06:28 | 1:06:29 | |
And our quest was to make something we thought was kind of grand, | 1:06:29 | 1:06:36 | |
not grandiose, but had a kind of grandeur about it. | 1:06:36 | 1:06:39 | |
It had scale, but it had drama. | 1:06:39 | 1:06:43 | |
But this quest was even more arduous than the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour. | 1:06:44 | 1:06:49 | |
Audiences were showing signs of fatigue. | 1:06:49 | 1:06:53 | |
Robert had stopped King Crimson, | 1:06:59 | 1:07:00 | |
Robert Fripp had stopped King Crimson around that time. | 1:07:00 | 1:07:03 | |
Very prescient. Very smart. | 1:07:03 | 1:07:04 | |
I mean, I'd only just settled down. Just got my sticks out. Just settling in. | 1:07:06 | 1:07:10 | |
But that's a bit like... That's life in King Crimson. | 1:07:11 | 1:07:14 | |
It broke up at least three times, in my certain knowledge. | 1:07:14 | 1:07:19 | |
Probably several other times while I was in it! | 1:07:19 | 1:07:22 | |
If Fripp sensed an artistic cul-de-sac ahead when he put the brakes on King Crimson in 1974, | 1:07:25 | 1:07:30 | |
others put their foot down | 1:07:30 | 1:07:32 | |
and drove headlong into fame, fortune and near-fatal solos. | 1:07:32 | 1:07:38 | |
These bands were... shockingly, to my mind... | 1:07:40 | 1:07:44 | |
going on a transition away from | 1:07:44 | 1:07:47 | |
the kind of honesty and real experimentalism we were involved in, | 1:07:47 | 1:07:53 | |
into an un-self-consciously showbizzy way of doing things. | 1:07:53 | 1:08:00 | |
In the Genesis camp, Peter Gabriel's taste for the theatrical | 1:08:02 | 1:08:06 | |
threatened to swamp the subtlety of the music. | 1:08:06 | 1:08:09 | |
But enthusiastic audiences and an attentive press | 1:08:09 | 1:08:12 | |
pushed the band closer to commercial success. | 1:08:12 | 1:08:15 | |
Americans, particularly, pushed past the rest of us | 1:08:15 | 1:08:19 | |
to say "Great show, Pete! Great show! | 1:08:19 | 1:08:21 | |
"You were great tonight!" And I just got fed up with it. | 1:08:21 | 1:08:24 | |
So I made my feelings known about that. | 1:08:25 | 1:08:29 | |
It did irritate us a bit that he got all the attention, but we kind of knew that in the back of our minds. | 1:08:33 | 1:08:37 | |
We knew it gave us incredible publicity as well. | 1:08:37 | 1:08:40 | |
So we weren't too sad about that side of it. | 1:08:40 | 1:08:42 | |
I didn't have a problem. Maybe once during The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. | 1:08:42 | 1:08:46 | |
A couple of costumes went too far, you couldn't sing through them. | 1:08:46 | 1:08:50 | |
But I always liked the visuals. | 1:08:50 | 1:08:52 | |
It was all part of what we did, | 1:08:53 | 1:08:55 | |
and nobody else was really doing it. | 1:08:55 | 1:08:57 | |
# Welcome back, my friends, To the show that never ends | 1:08:57 | 1:09:01 | |
# We're so glad you could attend, Come inside, come inside... # | 1:09:01 | 1:09:05 | |
ELP were busy establishing the power of British prog, | 1:09:05 | 1:09:08 | |
conquering the four corners of the globe with tours built on showmanship. | 1:09:08 | 1:09:12 | |
Technical extravaganzas light years away from underground clubs and hippy ideal. | 1:09:12 | 1:09:18 | |
# Rest assured, you'll get your money's worth... # | 1:09:20 | 1:09:24 | |
You have to say that by '75, '76, | 1:09:24 | 1:09:29 | |
it all got over-indulgent. It just all did. | 1:09:29 | 1:09:33 | |
This is the Hilton, is it? | 1:09:33 | 1:09:35 | |
Conrad, Conrad. If you're looking in, I've got one soft one, and one hard one. | 1:09:35 | 1:09:39 | |
What use is that? What's all that about? | 1:09:39 | 1:09:41 | |
I remember doing some filming with ELP. | 1:09:41 | 1:09:44 | |
They had three 40-foot trucks. | 1:09:44 | 1:09:50 | |
There was this moving ELP thing across... | 1:09:50 | 1:09:53 | |
It just seemed to me a betrayal. | 1:10:00 | 1:10:03 | |
How could these people, who were my heroes... | 1:10:03 | 1:10:05 | |
how could Keith Emerson do that? | 1:10:05 | 1:10:07 | |
There was no finesse, to my mind, or sophistication or sensitivity about what they were doing at all. | 1:10:15 | 1:10:22 | |
It was hysterical. | 1:10:22 | 1:10:24 | |
This whole stadium thing, with Yes coming out of big petals that opened, | 1:10:25 | 1:10:30 | |
and stage design...there'd almost begun now...a tipping point | 1:10:30 | 1:10:35 | |
where the presentation, the stage design and everything else | 1:10:35 | 1:10:38 | |
was almost taking over from the music in terms of importance. | 1:10:38 | 1:10:42 | |
They were all out-doing each other. | 1:10:42 | 1:10:44 | |
"We think that progressive rock, the things you do, | 1:10:46 | 1:10:49 | |
"is overblown, it's pretentious, | 1:10:49 | 1:10:51 | |
"completely over-the-top and thoroughly pompous. | 1:10:51 | 1:10:54 | |
"What do you say to that?" | 1:10:54 | 1:10:55 | |
Yeah, you're about right, really! | 1:10:57 | 1:10:58 | |
Then... | 1:10:58 | 1:11:00 | |
some people came along who thought, "We can make this sexy," | 1:11:00 | 1:11:04 | |
and you've got Queen... | 1:11:04 | 1:11:06 | |
# Mama mia, mama mia... # | 1:11:06 | 1:11:07 | |
..who had a lot of prog elements but managed to get back to having tunes, | 1:11:07 | 1:11:12 | |
and just devastating emotional climaxes | 1:11:12 | 1:11:16 | |
instead of intellectual doodlings. | 1:11:16 | 1:11:19 | |
MUSIC: "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen | 1:11:19 | 1:11:21 | |
When Peter Gabriel left Genesis in 1975 to go solo, | 1:11:28 | 1:11:32 | |
grammar school interloper Phil Collins | 1:11:32 | 1:11:34 | |
became the front man for the Charterhouse boys. | 1:11:34 | 1:11:37 | |
A new Genesis became even more successful, with Trick Of The Tail, | 1:11:37 | 1:11:43 | |
an album that seemed to sniff an approaching storm in its return to simpler songs. | 1:11:43 | 1:11:48 | |
# "Am I wrong to believe in the city of gold | 1:11:48 | 1:11:53 | |
# "That lies in the deep distance?" he cried | 1:11:53 | 1:11:57 | |
# And wept as they led him away to a cage | 1:11:57 | 1:12:00 | |
# Beast that can talk read the sign... # | 1:12:00 | 1:12:04 | |
Some of the things became very simplified in some people's... | 1:12:04 | 1:12:09 | |
or shortened, or "commercialised" is the dirty word. | 1:12:09 | 1:12:12 | |
They think that was my fault. I won't take the glory or blame for that. | 1:12:12 | 1:12:17 | |
There are certain songs that people always put down, "That's a Phil song." Phh! | 1:12:17 | 1:12:23 | |
After Peter left we were kind of conscious that do you carry on and do what you've always done, | 1:12:23 | 1:12:29 | |
these long, half-hour pieces or concept albums? | 1:12:29 | 1:12:32 | |
You think maybe you've done that, you know, and you move on a bit. | 1:12:32 | 1:12:37 | |
MELLOW ROCK MUSIC PLAYS | 1:12:37 | 1:12:39 | |
-What's this song called? -It's not a song, Stubbs. | 1:12:45 | 1:12:49 | |
It's the first movement of a rock symphony - | 1:12:49 | 1:12:52 | |
Apotheosis Of The Necromancer. | 1:12:52 | 1:12:54 | |
That's a dead cert for Top Of The Pops(!) | 1:12:54 | 1:12:57 | |
Rick Wakeman may be your God, but let me tell you something - concept albums are out. | 1:12:57 | 1:13:03 | |
There was a scene in The Rotters' Club where the school band | 1:13:03 | 1:13:07 | |
morphs from being a progressive band to a punk band in mid-song. | 1:13:07 | 1:13:10 | |
MELLOW ROCK MUSIC PLAYS | 1:13:10 | 1:13:12 | |
Bollocks to this for a game of soldiers. | 1:13:12 | 1:13:15 | |
HE CHANGES HIS DRUMMING STYLE | 1:13:17 | 1:13:19 | |
That was meant to be a sort of comic caricature of what actually happened in '76, '77. | 1:13:19 | 1:13:25 | |
# Anarchy in the UK | 1:13:27 | 1:13:30 | |
# Is this the UDA? # | 1:13:30 | 1:13:33 | |
Punk stumbled on a time tunnel back to pre-Sergeant Pepper days | 1:13:33 | 1:13:37 | |
and returned armed with only three chords and angry as hell. | 1:13:37 | 1:13:41 | |
# Or just | 1:13:41 | 1:13:43 | |
# Another | 1:13:43 | 1:13:46 | |
# Country... # | 1:13:47 | 1:13:50 | |
It was a big explosion | 1:13:50 | 1:13:52 | |
of resentment | 1:13:52 | 1:13:54 | |
against the... | 1:13:54 | 1:13:57 | |
..highbrows. | 1:13:58 | 1:14:00 | |
What they were saying was, | 1:14:02 | 1:14:04 | |
"This glam rock and progressive rock is not communicating to me... | 1:14:04 | 1:14:10 | |
"..and I feel marginalised." | 1:14:11 | 1:14:14 | |
I didn't think it was us they were talking about. | 1:14:16 | 1:14:19 | |
OK, let's lose the guys that go... HE IMITATES A PRECIOUS MELODY | 1:14:20 | 1:14:25 | |
Let's get rid of that! | 1:14:25 | 1:14:27 | |
What I didn't like was the great hate that those people | 1:14:31 | 1:14:35 | |
pretended to have for the establishment | 1:14:35 | 1:14:38 | |
of rock bands at that particular point. | 1:14:38 | 1:14:41 | |
Anybody that played, like, you know, | 1:14:41 | 1:14:43 | |
something a bit more complex or a bit interesting, that was out the window. | 1:14:43 | 1:14:48 | |
MUSIC: "Teenage Kicks" by The Undertones | 1:14:48 | 1:14:51 | |
On one hand I liked it because it was trashing things, | 1:14:51 | 1:14:54 | |
but on the other hand, I didn't because it was a return to infancy. | 1:14:54 | 1:14:57 | |
There's this permanent tension in rock music between the three chords and the truth merchants - | 1:14:57 | 1:15:03 | |
you know, four-four and three chords - | 1:15:03 | 1:15:06 | |
and the other people, like me, | 1:15:06 | 1:15:08 | |
who say, "What if we add a fourth chord and put it in five-four?" | 1:15:08 | 1:15:12 | |
There's always people like me messing up what these people think is pop music. | 1:15:12 | 1:15:17 | |
A lot of pretty good bands came out of punk, but they were excellent writers and musicians, | 1:15:19 | 1:15:25 | |
but that wasn't what punk was about. Punk was all about NOT being musical. | 1:15:25 | 1:15:30 | |
The British Isles was the only country that fell for it. | 1:15:30 | 1:15:35 | |
They didn't manage to do it anywhere else. | 1:15:35 | 1:15:39 | |
One of the things proper musicians objected to with punk was that they were always out of tune. | 1:15:40 | 1:15:46 | |
If you listen to Schoenberg and Cecil Taylor, | 1:15:46 | 1:15:50 | |
there's no such thing as out of tune. It's just another bunch of notes. | 1:15:50 | 1:15:55 | |
If you're going to play the same three chords, instead of learning all kind of fancy ones, | 1:15:55 | 1:16:01 | |
why not have them play the guitar out of tune? That'll give you something different. | 1:16:01 | 1:16:05 | |
That was a very lovely, home-made solution to harmonic inventiveness. | 1:16:05 | 1:16:10 | |
Just don't tune up. Don't sing in tune. How far out can you get? | 1:16:10 | 1:16:15 | |
The notes between the notes, we're hitting them. | 1:16:15 | 1:16:18 | |
SHE PLAYS BOOGIE-WOOGIE | 1:16:18 | 1:16:20 | |
The next generation had arrived, determined to overthrow Daddy in the Oedipal battle for supremacy. | 1:16:22 | 1:16:29 | |
Only this time, Daddy was a prog rocker. | 1:16:31 | 1:16:34 | |
You initially grow up with the music that the generation before you, your parents, have chosen. | 1:16:34 | 1:16:41 | |
And you don't want it. My mum and dad used to listen to Pearl and Teddy Johnson. | 1:16:41 | 1:16:47 | |
# Darling, darling, sweet Elizabeth | 1:16:47 | 1:16:50 | |
# Say you'll be mine - hey! Always be mine - hey! # | 1:16:50 | 1:16:54 | |
I don't want to listen to Pearl and Teddy Johnson so along comes The Who and bands like that. Yeah! | 1:16:54 | 1:17:00 | |
Absolutely, that's what I want! | 1:17:00 | 1:17:03 | |
And it belongs to you. I mean, prog rock, to some extent, killed the pop bands. | 1:17:03 | 1:17:09 | |
The pop bands killed the crooner. Punk killed prog rock. | 1:17:09 | 1:17:14 | |
ABSTRACT ROCK MUSIC PLAYS | 1:17:14 | 1:17:17 | |
'70s Britain bore no resemblance to the imagined, mystical worlds of prog rock and Roger Dean. | 1:17:20 | 1:17:27 | |
It was plagued by shortages, strikes and post-'60s disillusionment. | 1:17:29 | 1:17:34 | |
In 1979, an Iron Lady would be crowned Queen in the Court of the Crimson King. | 1:17:36 | 1:17:41 | |
Lyrically, progressive music in the '70s was very divorced from social reality. Just not interested in it. | 1:17:42 | 1:17:50 | |
The lyrics are always a problem in this kind of music | 1:17:51 | 1:17:54 | |
because it is about music, doing interesting things with instruments | 1:17:54 | 1:17:59 | |
and making interesting musical shapes and landscapes, | 1:17:59 | 1:18:03 | |
but if you're gonna have a singer, what's he going to sing about? | 1:18:03 | 1:18:08 | |
Often the solution was to go down the talking Roger Dean route, | 1:18:08 | 1:18:13 | |
to sing about fantasy worlds and so on, | 1:18:13 | 1:18:16 | |
and there's a kind of embarrassment about that now which I certainly share. | 1:18:16 | 1:18:22 | |
Genesis missed the British punk revolution. | 1:18:25 | 1:18:27 | |
Like many progressive bands, they were too busy being successful abroad. | 1:18:27 | 1:18:32 | |
On their return, they not only weathered the punk front, now sitting firmly over the country, | 1:18:35 | 1:18:41 | |
but, perversely, enjoyed an Indian summer. | 1:18:41 | 1:18:43 | |
We were unaware of punk because we were touring so much, not really aware of anything else going on. | 1:18:43 | 1:18:50 | |
All we knew really was that groups like Yes had disappeared a bit, | 1:18:50 | 1:18:55 | |
so in a sense we were the last ones left standing | 1:18:55 | 1:18:58 | |
so we picked up everybody else's audience. | 1:18:58 | 1:19:00 | |
We always had that side to us which was based more on the songwriting than on the playing, | 1:19:00 | 1:19:07 | |
and that carried us through. | 1:19:07 | 1:19:09 | |
MUSIC: "Follow You Follow Me" by Genesis | 1:19:09 | 1:19:12 | |
And we started having hit singles. | 1:19:28 | 1:19:31 | |
Follow You Follow Me opened a door for us. It was a reasonable hit. It wasn't massive. | 1:19:31 | 1:19:37 | |
But after that, we were able to put out singles and they'd always get played for many years. | 1:19:37 | 1:19:43 | |
A lot of them did well so suddenly that meant the potential audience became much bigger. | 1:19:43 | 1:19:49 | |
Most bands weren't so lucky. | 1:19:52 | 1:19:54 | |
Procol Harum's 10th album, Something Magic, | 1:19:54 | 1:19:57 | |
an ambitious concept in which their instruments played characters | 1:19:57 | 1:20:01 | |
in a story that was narrated, not even sung, became their swansong. | 1:20:01 | 1:20:05 | |
We'd finished it. I don't know how we managed to record this thing. | 1:20:09 | 1:20:13 | |
And then we turn around and there it is, of course, punks and... | 1:20:13 | 1:20:18 | |
The way we left was just to sort of pack up on our last night of a tour and we said, "That's it, then." | 1:20:21 | 1:20:28 | |
And we all went our separate ways. | 1:20:28 | 1:20:30 | |
In the 1980s, original King Crimson lyricist Pete Sinfield uncovered a secret path into pop music | 1:20:46 | 1:20:54 | |
as a writer of chart-topping hits. | 1:20:54 | 1:20:56 | |
MUSIC: "The Land Of Make Believe" by Bucks Fizz | 1:20:56 | 1:20:59 | |
Try and write something a lot of people will like quickly, | 1:21:09 | 1:21:13 | |
yet still get something of you in it. | 1:21:13 | 1:21:15 | |
"Something nasty in your garden, waiting till it'll steal your heart," | 1:21:15 | 1:21:20 | |
which for me, is like a King Crimson line. | 1:21:20 | 1:21:22 | |
I've just taken it into a different setting. | 1:21:22 | 1:21:25 | |
MUSIC: "The Land Of Make Believe" by Bucks Fizz | 1:21:25 | 1:21:30 | |
King Crimson itself, staged several comebacks and its 1974 album, Red, | 1:21:34 | 1:21:40 | |
would, in time, influence grunge guru, Kurt Cobain. | 1:21:40 | 1:21:44 | |
Somewhere in 1987, | 1:21:47 | 1:21:49 | |
I probably gave up noisy rock. | 1:21:49 | 1:21:53 | |
I mean, there was the odd reunion tour. | 1:21:53 | 1:21:55 | |
But in my mind, I was redefined as a jazz musician, | 1:21:55 | 1:21:58 | |
which I probably should have been in the first place. | 1:21:58 | 1:22:01 | |
Yes, teamed up with hip '80s producer, Trevor Horn, | 1:22:03 | 1:22:06 | |
who helped tune their songs to the ears of a very different decade. | 1:22:06 | 1:22:10 | |
MUSIC: "Owner Of A Lonely Heart" by Yes | 1:22:10 | 1:22:14 | |
But the expedition to the far reaches of pop music, | 1:22:52 | 1:22:55 | |
had left camp in the late '60s, was by now lost, forgotten, | 1:22:55 | 1:23:00 | |
or only spoken of in hushed tones. | 1:23:00 | 1:23:03 | |
Prog had become a really dirty word, you know. | 1:23:07 | 1:23:11 | |
It's the sort of thing that you didn't mention in public. | 1:23:11 | 1:23:14 | |
It's almost the only kind of music where people write off everything | 1:23:14 | 1:23:20 | |
that's in the genre, | 1:23:20 | 1:23:21 | |
without embarrassment, actually, and just say, you know, "It's all shit." | 1:23:21 | 1:23:26 | |
People would go to a record store and say, "I'd like some, er... | 1:23:27 | 1:23:33 | |
"couple of Country and Western, a bit of New Age, | 1:23:33 | 1:23:39 | |
"and bit of Modern Romantic, please, as well. | 1:23:39 | 1:23:40 | |
"A couple of punk albums, I'll have that, thank you very much, | 1:23:40 | 1:23:44 | |
"a bit of classical, and, um... | 1:23:44 | 1:23:45 | |
"..(have you got any prog rock?)" | 1:23:46 | 1:23:48 | |
There were people out there that might not have liked Yes, | 1:23:48 | 1:23:51 | |
but liked a bit of Genesis, | 1:23:51 | 1:23:53 | |
might not have liked the Floyd, but liked Jethro Tull. | 1:23:53 | 1:23:56 | |
"Er, yes, Sir, hold on. I'll do it under the counter." | 1:23:56 | 1:23:59 | |
They do it under the counter in a brown paper bag and round the side. | 1:23:59 | 1:24:03 | |
It was like...it was like the porn of the music industry. | 1:24:03 | 1:24:07 | |
I went out and bought the first Sex Pistols album, | 1:24:07 | 1:24:11 | |
and didn't mind telling people I had, and that I listened to it. | 1:24:11 | 1:24:15 | |
Whereas Jonny Rotten, at the time, wouldn't admit to listening to Jethro Tull. | 1:24:15 | 1:24:18 | |
But, many, many years later, admitted that one of his, sort of, | 1:24:18 | 1:24:22 | |
seminal influences was the Aqualung album. | 1:24:22 | 1:24:26 | |
I met Rat Scabies in an airport, right about to get on a plane, | 1:24:26 | 1:24:33 | |
and he came up to me... | 1:24:33 | 1:24:36 | |
..and he said, "Just want you to know, I'm a big fan of yours." | 1:24:38 | 1:24:42 | |
But, you know, he just wanted to make sure nobody was looking. | 1:24:42 | 1:24:46 | |
We were living the dream, you know, but it would be stupid | 1:24:46 | 1:24:50 | |
for people to keep thinking that life was easy because of that. | 1:24:50 | 1:24:54 | |
It's not easy. | 1:24:54 | 1:24:55 | |
It's a lot of hard work and these lines on my face are evidence! | 1:24:55 | 1:25:00 | |
The lost chord! | 1:25:02 | 1:25:04 | |
You're always looking for that thing you haven't heard yet. | 1:25:04 | 1:25:08 | |
Not everyone persevered in The Land Of Make Believe. | 1:25:08 | 1:25:12 | |
There had been early casualties. | 1:25:15 | 1:25:18 | |
The reason I stopped doing it rather suddenly... | 1:25:18 | 1:25:22 | |
..was...simply because of my dependent psychology. | 1:25:25 | 1:25:30 | |
I needed praise and I wasn't getting it. | 1:25:31 | 1:25:34 | |
It was a bit like a child that dies aged three of malnutrition. | 1:25:37 | 1:25:44 | |
You know, it gets born, there's all sorts of hope and... | 1:25:44 | 1:25:51 | |
good expectations. It learns to walk, it learns to run, it learns to talk, | 1:25:51 | 1:25:56 | |
and suddenly it gives up, because it didn't get enough nourishment. | 1:25:56 | 1:26:01 | |
It was like that. | 1:26:01 | 1:26:03 | |
For me. | 1:26:04 | 1:26:05 | |
At its purest, progressive rock wasn't about money, celebrity, | 1:26:12 | 1:26:17 | |
record contracts or the audience. | 1:26:17 | 1:26:20 | |
It wasn't even a type of music. | 1:26:20 | 1:26:23 | |
It was a belief. A value system of the early '70s. | 1:26:23 | 1:26:25 | |
One that now seems like old time religion. | 1:26:25 | 1:26:29 | |
Its creators, often precocious, sometimes indulged, | 1:26:31 | 1:26:34 | |
occasionally deluded, but always uncompromising, baptised the decade | 1:26:34 | 1:26:39 | |
with a soundtrack of stark virtuosity, weird time signatures... | 1:26:39 | 1:26:44 | |
strange poetry and surprising beauty. | 1:26:44 | 1:26:47 | |
The musical experiment, now labelled prog rock, | 1:26:47 | 1:26:51 | |
and stored under the counter, or placed almost out of reach, | 1:26:51 | 1:26:55 | |
on the top shelf. | 1:26:55 | 1:26:56 | |
It grew out of rock music, and that's why it was written about | 1:26:59 | 1:27:02 | |
in the rock press. But it's kind of a shame it ever became regarded | 1:27:02 | 1:27:05 | |
as part of rock and roll, because... | 1:27:05 | 1:27:07 | |
because it's not. I think the ethos is completely different, | 1:27:07 | 1:27:10 | |
and if you judge it by the standards of rock and roll then it fails. | 1:27:10 | 1:27:14 | |
It's actually a bunch of very talented musicians, | 1:27:14 | 1:27:18 | |
who were kind of cursed with very musically intelligent brains, | 1:27:18 | 1:27:23 | |
who got bored very quickly with playing three chords all the time, | 1:27:23 | 1:27:27 | |
and wanted to do stuff which was more complex and more challenging. | 1:27:27 | 1:27:32 | |
-I say, John? -Yes? -Tense up, control room. We're ready to do one. -Right. | 1:27:32 | 1:27:37 | |
There's an expression which I like a lot, which is, success is buried in the garden of failure. | 1:27:37 | 1:27:43 | |
So, if you're willing to go to that garden, and dig and dig and dig, | 1:27:43 | 1:27:50 | |
and try and try and try, | 1:27:50 | 1:27:52 | |
eventually you'll succeed with some ideas and some success. | 1:27:52 | 1:27:57 | |
So if you possibly, tense up a little and we'll try and wax a hot one. | 1:27:57 | 1:28:02 | |
Ah, that's better. Thank you. Um, sorry. What were you saying? | 1:28:12 | 1:28:17 | |
# And you can fly | 1:28:17 | 1:28:20 | |
# High as a kite if you want to | 1:28:20 | 1:28:25 | |
# Faster than light if you want to | 1:28:25 | 1:28:29 | |
# Speeding through the universe | 1:28:29 | 1:28:34 | |
# Thinking is the best way to travel. # | 1:28:35 | 1:28:40 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 1:28:40 | 1:28:43 |