When Pop Went Epic: The Crazy World of the Concept Album

WHEN POP WENT EPIC: THE CRAZY WORLD FKA U391D/01 BRD000000

MUSIC: King Arthur by Rick Wakeman

Me and my musical chums dressed up

to play a track about the Arthurian legends.

Grandiose music, a heroic subject, outlandish costumes.

This could only be the '70s -

heyday of that much maligned creature, the concept album.

I mean, be honest, the dreaded words "concept album"

probably conjure up visions of straggly-haired rockers

jabbering on about unicorns, goblins and the end of the world.

But back when people actually listened to LPs

from start to finish, there was nothing more rewarding.

Some of these records tell a story, others explore a mood or a theme.

But they all create their own world and draw you in.

And some performers - me included - may have got a bit carried away.

In the '70s, the bombast and excess of concept albums,

and the bands that made them, grew ripe for parody...and they got it!

OK, there may have been some wrong turns along the way,

but these records explored the far frontiers of music

and gave us some of our best-loved LPs.

So join me to explore this strange parallel universe -

the weird and sometimes wonderful world of the concept album.

Let's venture into the maze.

OK, let's meet a concept album...

'This is Apollo Control at 102 hours into the flight of Apollo 11.'

..not from the '70s, but from 2015.

The band is Public Service Broadcasting

and the concept is in the title, The Race For Space -

a theme that so pervades the album, it's practically a documentary.

NASA RADIO CHATTER

I find writing conceptual albums to be very liberating.

The Race For Space is a very diverse album - it's got electronic stuff,

it's got funk stuff, it's got post-rock stuff on there,

and I feel it's the conceptual idea behind it providing the glue,

the sort of the backbone to the album that allows you

to take these journeys off into these different styles and genres.

-'Lift off?'

-'Go.'

-'Flight Op?'

-'Go.'

-'Guidance?'

-'Go.'

-'Control?'

-'Go.'

I still feel there's a perceptive and demanding audience

for the album format and I think you can get a lot more out of music

and the relationship between tracks by a correctly sequenced,

or a well-sequenced set of tracks.

So the concept album didn't stop with the '70s

and prog rockers like me,

but has kept on going, crossing the decades and the musical boundaries,

and it's taken a bewildering variety of forms.

So it's worth stopping and asking -

what, in essence, is a concept album?

Either it's a narrative or it's descriptive or it has elements,

maybe individual songs, but they're still...

talking on the same subject.

It's like putting together a movie for somebody's ears.

You've got to get a story, you've got to find the dynamics, um...

You've gotta find the right drama in it.

But it's not always that simple,

because some records are hailed as concept albums for other reasons.

There's a theme and there's a vibe. Or there's this THING. I always say,

"Does it sound like it'd be in the same movie?"

And sometimes the concept is for the listener to discover.

I make sure that I understand the narrative.

I don't necessarily give other people that privilege.

Sometimes the concept escapes onto the cover,

or it's the alter ego that artists create for themselves.

Sometimes it's so obscure

that no-one can put their finger on what the concept is.

So tracing the story of the concept album is like going through a maze.

There are unexpected turns, the occasional dead-end

and exits that turn out to be new openings.

But some of the things you find on the way are among the most

accomplished and exotic creations in the history of rock,

and the whole glorious odyssey starts back in 1940s America.

WOODY GUTHRIE INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC

You can't tell the story of the concept album without

the daddy of them all.

Before MP3s, CDs, tape cassettes and even vinyl LPs,

Woody Guthrie turned his own experiences

of the hardships of rural America during the Depression

into a folk music classic.

# On the 14th day of April

# Of 1935

# There struck the worst of dust storms

# That ever filled the sky... #

The concept is straightforward -

Guthrie wanted to tell America about suffering on its own doorstep.

# ..And through our mighty nation

# It left a dreadful crack... #

But for Woody, a concept album... He had to be there.

He had to be right in the setting,

he had to be experiencing what everyone was experiencing,

so he was one of those hundreds of thousands of people

who sat in dust up to his chest.

# I'm a dust bowl refugee

# I'm a dust bowl refugee

# And I wonder, will I always

# Be a dust bowl refugee?... #

When Woody started out, an album was exactly that -

a bulky collection of 78s, each side lasting only a few minutes,

bound up like a photo album.

But in 1948, a new development presented artists

with a broader canvas to make a bigger statement.

Vinyl.

For the first time, boffins had found a way

to get 40 minutes of music on one disc.

The era of the long-playing record had begun.

MUSIC: Beethoven's 5th Symphony

The vinyl LP was largely invented

in order for pieces of classical music to expand in a symphonic form,

instead of being broken up into chunks, as it was on old 78s.

And all of a sudden, the vinyl 33 and a third LP

allows musicians to stretch out a bit.

It allows people to be able to kind of construct albums

on longer themes.

MUSIC: You Make Me Feel So Young by Frank Sinatra

And not just themes, but stories.

# You make me feel so young

# You make me feel so Spring has sprung... #

Taking classical music as a blueprint,

one artist led the way in exploiting the broad canvas of the long player.

Frank Sinatra put storytelling at the heart of the concept album

with a string of pioneering LPs for Capitol Records in the 1950s.

# Each place I go

# Only the lonely go... #

The great step that he took was to say to himself,

"I won't just sing individual songs that tell stories,

"but I will group them together

"so that a group of 12 of them tells a larger story,"

in the same way that a 19th century classical song cycle

like Schubert's Winterreise might tell a story.

# It's quarter to three

# There's no-one in the place

# 'Cept you and me... #

Only The Lonely was a perfect example of that.

It is a story that picks

the narrator up

in romantic difficulties

and leaves him alone in a bar,

telling the tale to the bartender

at a quarter to three in the morning.

# ..We're drinking, my friend

# To the end

# Of a brief episode... #

In terms of setting the mood,

you put on that album not to listen to a particular hit,

you put it on because it absolutely created this emotion,

this feeling,

and worked best as an album,

and that's kind of the fundamental that you need for concept albums,

which is they are their own whole, like a movie or a book -

they work best in their entirety.

# Just making one for my baby

# And one more

# For the road... #

Sinatra's gift was to sing other people's songs as though

the emotions were his own.

But with the next decade, things were set to change.

The LP became the canvas for a new breed of artist in the 1960s -

singers and bands who wrote their own songs

and invited you into their world.

And no subject was off limits.

# Wouldn't it be nice if we were older?... #

Pet Sounds, released in 1966,

is the first album on our journey whose concept

is the artist's own inner life,

which might seem odd coming from The Beach Boys -

known so far for breezy songs about girls, cars and surfing.

And it's not just its emotional sincerity that made a splash -

if you'll pardon the pun.

The real true, mind-bending artistry

that went into Pet Sounds, the attention to detail,

the drive to make something like that, is extraordinary.

# ..Hold each other close the whole night through... #

The artistry sprang from songwriter and resident genius Brian Wilson.

He said he wanted the record to express "feelings from my soul"

and he hired lyricist Tony Asher

to help put his emotional life into words.

I think Brian felt like he wanted all the songs to be fresh

and original and new and not necessarily what you'd expect

from The Beach Boys.

# Oooh-ooh... #

The album is tinged with the heartache of a young man

on a journey from innocence to experience.

And to achieve what he called this

"new type of sophisticated-feeling music"

he turned to the recording studio.

# I can hear so much in your sighs... #

And herein lies one of those technology-driven turns

that altered the course of the concept album.

Because the studio was now more than just a place you recorded in.

It was an Aladdin's cave of enabling technology - synthesisers,

mellotrons and, crucially, the multi-track tape recorder

which allowed musicians to build up layers of sounds

and set free the imagination.

UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYS

Pet Sounds achieved only modest sales in the US -

maybe it was just too weird.

But in Britain it was a hit.

More importantly, it established the idea of the concept album

as a beacon of technological innovation.

The Beach Boys had set a high bar

and within a year, The Beatles produced

their most experimental record yet...

# We're Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band... #

..Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The concept?

It's all on Peter Blake's iconic cover.

The most famous group in the world are calling themselves...

something else.

It's the idea that a fictitious band is playing the songs

that gives the record coherence.

This playful use of alter egos inspired others

and expanded the notion of what an LP could be.

But it was another British band that gave us what may be

the concept album in its most ambitious form yet - the rock opera.

# He stands like a statue

# Becomes part of the machine

# Feeling all the bumpers

# Always playing clean

# He plays by intuition

# The digit counters fall

# That deaf, dumb and blind kid

# Sure plays a mean pinball!... #

Tommy by The Who, released in 1969,

tells the story of a deaf, dumb and blind boy

and his quest for spiritual fulfilment.

It has the scale and ambition of a classical opera.

# Feel me

# Touch me

# Heal me... #

Tommy is completely different from Sgt Pepper or Pet Sounds.

It's not just thematic, it's linear and chronological.

It really is a story

and no surprise that in the years to come, it turns into a film.

Of course it does, it's the ultimate concept album.

# Ain't got no distractions

# Can't hear no buzzers and bells... #

With stars like Elton John,

Tommy burst into life

in Ken Russell's flamboyant movie treatment.

# That deaf, dumb and blind kid

# Sure plays a mean pinball. #

In a way, it was surprising this breakthrough album

had come from the Who.

# I can see for miles and miles... #

Back in 1968, they were known mainly for a string of singles.

Oh, and for smashing up their gear at the end of gigs,

but The Who's creative driving force, Pete Townshend,

had set his sights on higher things.

Pop music is crucial to today's art

and it's crucial that it should remain art,

and it's crucial that it should progress as art.

Townshend wrote much of the material

during the band's tour of the States in 1968.

He wouldn't do any partying or anything.

He'd have these charts and he'd devise these schemes

and plot structures - all on Holiday Inn paper and stuff.

So detailed! And he's thinking...

You'd think, "Christ, you should get out more."

The band's manager, Kit Lambert,

was worried he was getting a bit carried away.

Kit Lambert kept saying,

"Look, it's all right you pretending to be Wagner -

"we need a single," you know?

And he said, "I'm not going to write any singles now,

"I'm going to concentrate on this."

Tommy was released in May 1969 as a double album.

It came with an overture, complete with recurring musical motifs,

in true classical style.

The band booked Ronnie Scott's jazz club as the venue

to present this new rock opera to a sceptical press.

When they went in, the press were pretty hostile.

Townshend got angry at that, so he turned round

and said to John Entwistle and the others

words they loved to hear.

He said, "Right, let's play it very loud - seriously effing loud."

So they turned it up really loud, went into Tommy,

just played the whole thing really fast all the way through

and they got a standing ovation.

# Tommy doesn't know what day it is

# He doesn't know who Jesus was or what praying is... #

Tommy was a forerunner of rock musicals

like Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell,

but our next record moves us away from fiction into hard reality

and comes from a musical culture

where the concept album was quite alien.

MUSIC: I Heard It Through The Grapevine by Marvin Gaye

# Ooh, I bet you're wonderin' how I knew

# 'Bout your plans to make me blue... #

Detroit, home of Motown - the ultimate hit singles label

and the home turf of Marvin Gaye, master of the soulful love ballad...

that is, until he started to look at what was going on around him.

They push us around, they arrest us for nothing,

they call us niggers, they say we stink, they insult our women.

We've had this for years, as long as we can remember -

and the point simply came

when somebody decided he wouldn't take it any more.

Marvin Gaye had been shocked

when racial tensions in black suburbs boiled over into riots...

and the reality of the Vietnam War was brought home to him

when his own brother was called up.

He said, "With the world exploding all around me,

"how am I supposed to write love songs?"

The result was the first-ever R&B concept album -

What's Going On, released in 1971.

# Oh, what's going on

# What's going on

# Yeah, what's going on

# Tell me what's going on

# Ooh... #

Marvin was compelled by the Vietnam War, the peace movement,

the assassination of Martin Luther King.

I mean, you know, I think he just really felt prophetically called

to make that record.

# ..Oh, but who are they to judge us

# Simply because our hair is long? #

This is the concept album as social comment.

What's Going On is not a question - it's a statement.

It so baffled Motown owner Berry Gordy

that initially he refused to release it.

It's grounded in the Motown tradition,

but it completely expands it,

you know, really rewrites the book on what R&B is.

# Rockets, moon shots

# Spend it on the have-nots... #

I was so glad when Marvin did it,

cos he did it real R&B church-sounding -

politically, socially, you know, commentary in the songs -

but he still did it with that Marvin Gaye smoothness

of Sexual Healing, even though he's talking about What's Going On.

It still sounded like a love song.

# Oh, make me wanna holler

# The way they do my life, yeah

# Make me wanna holler

# The way they do my life

# This ain't livin'... #

What's Going On is so anchored in reality

it's practically a news bulletin...

..but elsewhere, artists were moving in a different direction.

MUSIC: Ziggy Stardust by David Bowie

# Ooh, yeah... #

The '70s was the decade

when the concept album entered the Space Age

and no-one did it better than David Bowie.

He created a brilliant pop fantasy,

a futuristic fable that charted the rise and fall

of the androgynous rock superstar, Ziggy Stardust.

MUSIC: Starman by David Bowie

# There's a starman waiting in the sky

# He'd like to come and meet us

# But he thinks he'd blow our minds

# And there's a starman... #

Released in 1972, the album is about an alien

who brings humanity a message of hope

five years before the end of the world,

but the story is less important than the alter ego Bowie created.

The concept album has moved on so much now,

we're getting concept artists -

we're getting rock singers

that aren't just saying, "Here is my wonderful work,"

they're saying "I am my wonderful work."

You know, the name is not his own name,

the hair, the face, the visuals are not his own.

# I had to phone someone so I picked on you... #

Unlike Sgt Pepper,

Ziggy didn't just exist on the album cover

and, once in character,

Bowie was free to explore - well, just about anything.

Here you had a different kind of pop record

that melded glam rock and pop

and intellectual thinking in a way that The Beatles didn't.

It was thinking about the apocalypse, the end of times,

sci-fi - all these different subjects in one place,

and did it in a record that completely captivated so many people

in a very direct way.

# There's a starman waiting in the sky

# He'd like to come and meet us

# But he thinks he'd blow our minds... #

Also in the early '70s you've got a further refinement

of the idea of the concept album with artists like Pink Floyd,

and what they do is bring out an album like the Dark Side Of The Moon

where all the tracks seep into each other like blood through a bandage.

MUSIC: Speak To Me/Breathe by Pink Floyd

Floyd's 1973 release was serious stuff -

a sombre meditation on life and death,

yet it became the biggest-selling concept album ever.

Something like that was obviously so of its time.

This kind of, like, mind-expanding time, but still,

you know, I still picked it up when I was a teenager

and I still listen to it regularly.

I mean, it's a phenomenal record, you know?

All the uncanny, weird things that they do,

yet it's so... It's so musical, it's so expressive,

it's so perfect, you know?

I think they would probably say that, too.

The people that made it probably stood there and said,

"Man, that's cool."

Dark Side Of The Moon is about really adult, strange themes.

It's about death, it's about life, it's about contemplating mortality.

It becomes immersive. It reflects the fact that we now have stereos,

the fact that we're now rolling joints on gatefold album sleeves,

the fact that we're now completely immersed in this total experience.

# Breathe, breathe in the air

# Don't be afraid to care... #

For fans, a key part of that total experience was the album cover -

created by one of the most cutting-edge design teams around.

Hipgnosis was run by Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson.

Up to then, they'd specialised

in producing surreal photographic designs for Pink Floyd

and other leading bands.

Rick Wright, the keyboard player, said to us,

"You know what? I'm a bit fed up

"with your sort of weird photo designs.

"Why don't you try and do something which is a little bit more

"like a Black Magic chocolate box?"

And we were, "What? We don't do that!"

So, we were looking through a French photographic book from the '50s,

and there was an early colour photograph in there

of a prism sitting on a sheet of white music,

with light coming in through a window,

and it created this rainbow effect,

and Storm turned round to me and said, "I've got it,"

and somehow that image resonated with people,

and has become the symbol of Pink Floyd.

# Run, rabbit run... #

You know, it opens up nice and soft,

takes you in, runs you up, you know,

then you move into the wonderful soul-like, wailing section

at the end...

FEMALE VOCALISATION

..and then that's the end of side one,

and the stylus is going, "Dip-dip-dip."

Then you've got to get up off your seat, right?

Or up off your beanbag, right? Turn the album over

and then when Money hits,

you're basically going back to sit down again,

-and it's like...

-HE MIMICS "Money" BASSLINE

# Money

# Get away

# Get a good job with more pay and you're OK... #

..and then it goes back into the curve again,

and leaves you with that wonderful, you know,

with that wonderful, huge ending.

# And everything under the sun is in tune

# But the sun is eclipsed by the moon. #

And now we come to two key points in our tale.

First, it's the early '70s -

the era when the concept album was, for a time,

practically joined in marriage

to the genre we know as progressive rock.

And, second, it's where I come into the story.

# Cold summer listening

# Hot colour... #

In 1971, I joined what was perhaps the last word in prog rock bands.

Yes.

# I still remember the dream there... #

Here is the ultimate in pretentious rock -

that's what Yes' great appeal was.

No, we're not Slade

and we're not going to wear funny glasses like Elton John.

This is a group of classically trained musicians,

who are trying to meld the best of classical music

with the best of rock music,

and poetry and tripped-out mystique and Krishna and everything on top.

# Dawn of light lying between a silence and sold sources... #

I was with them for some of their best-known records -

not least the infamous 1973 double album

Tales From Topographic Oceans.

# Coloured in pastures... #

Everyone agrees it's a concept album,

but no-one can quite put their finger on what the concept is.

I've got no idea!

Listen, I find that a really strange album.

I think it divided, split a lot of Yes fans.

Side one and side two, I love.

Side three and four rarely gets on the turntable.

As for singer Jon Anderson's lyrics,

even he didn't claim to know what they meant.

I think I work a bit backward,

because I write a tune and then I write the lyrics -

not so much for the idea behind the lyrics,

but for the sound of the words.

And even if you haven't heard the music,

you've probably seen the album covers.

The person tasked with creating art for the most obscure lyrics ever

was Roger Dean.

Fortunately he'd already illustrated previous Yes albums

and had evolved a bold strategy -

to come up with a concept of his own

and apply it across a series of records.

I was thinking in terms of creating a world

whereby... Where the music may have come from,

so, it was the music, the world and a culture,

and I had this idea for a story that took place in this culture

that wove in and out of albums.

This is the first one I did for Yes. This is Fragile.

The story is about a little boy who dreams that his world is going

to break up

and he has to galvanise his parents and friends to build

a space ark and take all the bits of the world to find a new home.

# What happened to this song

# That we once knew so well? #

The story idea, though, was followed through on the live album.

This is Yessongs, there is

the space ark taking the segments of the planet to a new world.

# I must have waited all my life for this

-# Moment

-Moment

-Moment... #

Colonising the planet, there's cities being built, pathways,

bridges. So we come to Tales From Topographic Oceans,

perhaps the most controversial of the Yes albums.

The music immensely complicated.

# The future poised with the splendour just begun... #

There was never an attempt to illustrate the music, but

fortunately, a lot of people think it worked very well.

# ..Of liquid into sun... #

There was a great correlation between the music and the imagery.

# And for a moment when our world had filled the skies

# Magic turned our eyes... #

But, for me,

some of Yes's grandiose ideas were spiralling out of control.

It is pretty well known that my least favourite LP

of Yes is Tales From Topographic Oceans.

Truth of the matter is, we had too much material for a single LP

and not enough for a double LP.

In fact, I'm not even sure I know what it was all about.

Something to do with the vision of a Hindu yogi

and the Shastric scriptures, I think.

There's great bedtime reading for you!

# My words but a whisper Your deafness a shout

# As the last wave uncovers... #

I wasn't the only musician starting to have

doubts about the marriage of the concept album and prog rock.

# But your new shoes are worn at the heels... #

In particular, Ian Anderson, front man of Jethro Tull,

had produced a spoof concept album.

It had a title you might call anti-pretentious.

# To be thick as a brick... #

What Thick As A Brick came from was really a bit of a naughty dig

and I was having a little bit of fun with it,

because it was easy to poke fun at people who were actually

better musicians than we were, but had grandiose ideas,

sometimes perhaps a little bit, dare we say, above their station.

To make it even more absurd, I thought,

we'll put this in the words of an eight-year-old precocious schoolboy.

Could this be a dig at certain writers of precocious lyrics?

Who knows?

But certainly taking the mickey is what the cover is all about.

I thought, "We will go for broke here,"

and the idea of presenting it all as

a newspaper featuring a spoof story.

And so we had to find all the material to come up with

a spoof, very parochial, rather silly English newspaper.

With headlines such as, "Non-Rabbit Missing," the album,

cover and all, went down very well with the public.

And therein lies an irony.

When you set out to poke fun at the concept album and then, of course,

it then becomes a number one in the Billboard charts, whatever...

..then you've joined the club, almost,

and suddenly Jethro Tull became very much the prog rock band.

Well, it seems that's just the way it was in the early '70s.

Audiences wanted it big, loud and conceptual.

So, when I left Yes, I did a few concept albums of my own.

But ones where you could actually understand what the concept was.

I had already dipped my toe in the water with my 1973 album,

The Six Wives Of Henry VIII. Surreal character studies in music.

The critics slaughtered it,

but it flew up the charts and sold millions of records, which

just goes to show that when it comes to concept albums, you can

never underestimate the good taste of the record-buying public.

So I followed that up with another one.

This time based on Jules Verne's Journey To The Centre Of The Earth.

"They advanced with difficulty, over granite fragments

"mingled with flint, quartz and alluvial deposits,

"eventually reaching a plane covered with bones like a huge cemetery..."

Journey To The Centre Of The Earth was a grandiose affair,

with the London Symphony Orchestra, the English Chamber Choir

and David Hemmings as narrator.

Premiered with two sell-out shows at the Royal Festival Hall.

"Exploring the forest, they discovered a herd of gigantic

"animals, mastodons, which were being marshalled by..."

20,000 people came to see the live show at Crystal Palace,

complete with two giant inflatable dinosaurs.

Unfortunately, one of them sprung a leak during the show

and let off giant farts throughout the entire performance.

Or was that my bass player?

But despite the flatulent dinosaurs, it was clear there was a

public appetite for concept albums turned into spectacle.

So when it came to staging my next album,

The Myths And Legends Of King Arthur, I decided to think big.

Castles, horses, knights, the odd maiden, medieval costumes.

"Impossible," they said.

"Holiday On Ice were in just before you, so it will be an ice rink."

"Not a problem," I said, "I will do it on ice."

I actually went to see this on ice, at, I think,

was the Empire Pool, Wembley.

I truly didn't know what I was seeing

and I mean that not in a good way.

You'd got guys with the pantomime horses,

skating around while Rick is...

IMITATES FLASHY KEYBOARDS

A concept too far, in my view, definitely a concept too far.

Thanks, mate. I love you, too(!)

But in terms of taking concept stage shows to the edge,

I wasn't the frontrunner.

That distinction probably has to go to Peter Gabriel of Genesis.

# No... #

He had already made his mark with the bizarre personas

he had adopted to put over the darkly serious

intent of albums like Foxtrot and Selling England By The Pound.

But the ultimate was the stage show spawned by this album.

# And the lamb lies down on Broadway... #

The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, released in 1974,

had a darker theme than anything Genesis had done before.

And quite unexpected.

The album is a concept album, but it rests on the concept of,

in a sense, a Puerto Rican street

punk in New York, which is a rather unusual concept, perhaps, for

a bunch of public schoolboys from, you know, England to fall upon.

# The wind is blowing harder now

# Blowing dust into my eyes

# The dust settles on my skin

# Making a crust I cannot move... #

You can see why it lent itself to the stage.

It is a kind of Pilgrim's Progress through the streets of Manhattan,

but populated with demons and strange visions.

The cover was by the graphic art team Hipgnosis,

famous for their work with Pink Floyd.

In their archives is a folder of documents that shed

light on the birth of the concept.

OK, so this is an original folder which probably hasn't been

opened in about 40 years.

"Row with oversized ravens is gentle...."

HE LAUGHS

There's all sorts of things, funny things, here.

We've got the Genesis logo that we designed for

Lamb Lies Down On Broadway.

You've got things like... This is interesting, this is a letter

that Peter Gabriel wrote to Storm, my partner in Hipgnosis,

outlining exactly what Lamb Lies Down On Broadway was about.

You know,

there's a whole explanation here so that we could try

and work up the imagery that would go with the album.

That's what I call a real concept album.

And look here, at the end of it you have got alternative endings.

He hadn't decided, Peter Gabriel,

at the time, which ending he wanted, so he gave

an option of both of them.

# I wandered lonely as a cloud

# Till I came upon this dirty street

# I've never seen a stranger crowd... #

The great thing about Genesis is that they had their cake

and ate it, every last crumb.

The music on The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway was easily the best

they ever made with Peter Gabriel.

And the show was fantastic.

# His skin's all covered in slimy lumps... #

Gabriel, at one point, comes out in this...

like an Elephant Man kind of costume.

# We, like you, have tasted love

# Don't be alarmed at what you see... #

And the pictures look absurd because it was wonderfully absurd.

But if you were at that concert,

it was no different from seeing a fantastic Broadway show or

West End show, but for a new, more switched-on generation.

# You're in the colony of slippermen

# There's no who, why, what or when

# You get out if you've got the gripe... #

The concept as total theatre was now a hot ticket.

One American artist put his own twist on the spectacular live show.

In a galaxy far away,

George Clinton and his Parliament-Funkadelic collective

were conjuring up a funk universe every bit as creative as prog rock.

The concept, black people in space.

# We are partying on the mother ship... #

Having seen Pink Floyd, Sgt Pepper,

those were like rock operas.

I said, "Let me do a funk opera."

If you went to see the band, they had their own mothership that

came down and Dr Funkenstein came out.

# If you hear any noise

# It's just me and the boys... #

At that point, you had only seen Star Trek. The girl

was the only black person you saw in outer space

that you identified with being in outer space.

# Do not attempt to adjust your radio, there's nothing wrong... #

In a genre where one normally didn't even see black people,

he was, like, claiming that as a place where black people were

not going to be erased, we were not going to be absent,

we were not going to be made invisible.

# We want the funk, come on

-# Give up

-Give up, yes, now

# We need the funk... #

So while on the surface the concept is space funk,

this is really about black empowerment and aspiration.

George is really important in terms of figuring out

that you can be as impactful, but speaking in code, you know?

So it is all there, but it is there to be deciphered.

# Aahh

# You got a real type of thing going down... #

You can explore any kind of concept,

go places where no man has ever gone before!

You know, you never know what is going to happen

when you've got a spaceship.

# A whole lot of rhythm going round... #

We now come to a rather distressing part of the story

because, in the late '70s,

we prog rockers suddenly found the heathen were at our gates.

Along came punk and burst our bubble,

and prog rock became the porn of the music industry -

records that you smuggled out of shops in brown paper bags.

# God save the Queen

# The fascist regime... #

I always remember John Lydon walking down the corridor

towards me, wearing a T-shirt that said, "I hate Pink Floyd."

The next thing I knew was that Jamie Reid, the designer, had designed

an album cover with torn-up bits of newspaper against a pink background.

And I knew the game was up.

# There's no future

# No future

# No future for you

# God save the Queen... #

Well, punk certainly knocked us off our perch,

but news of our demise had been somewhat exaggerated.

# We don't need no education... #

And as though to prove the point, in 1979,

this comes along.

# We don't need no thought control...

The Wall was one of Pink Floyd's bestselling albums.

A double, if you please.

# No dark sarcasm in the classroom... #

And Roger Waters, who came up with the whole idea,

wrote most of the songs.

He's got choirs, he's got strings -

he's making something cinematic.

He's making something for the ages.

Truly, it's like punk never happened.

And yet at the same time, it's got this fantastic edge,

this pulse.

# Hey, teacher

# Leave them kids alone... #

A dark edge perfectly captured in Alan Parker's 1982 film.

I thought The Wall was genius.

You know, I loved the aggression and I loved the anger,

and I related to that.

Wrong! Do it again!

# All in all, you're just another brick in the wall... #

The Wall had a second wind on a new medium.

Do you know what the best part of MTV is?

But it was a false friend.

MTV comes along at the start of the '80s

and that, far more than punk,

sounded a death knell, really,

for many of the great progressive rock groups.

It was less a time for records with a narrative,

that began at the beginning

and ended at the end of side two and had a story to tell.

MUSIC: "Thriller" by Michael Jackson

Suddenly, we're not about really seeing concept albums,

we're really seeing concept videos.

You know, Michael Jackson with the Thriller video

was a landmark moment.

For a time, it seemed prog rock and the concept album were dead.

But that didn't stop people kicking the corpse.

We are Spinal Tap from the UK!

The movie This Is Spinal Tap took a well-aimed swipe

at the world of '70s prog rock,

with its grandiose concepts and elaborate stages.

And, of course, we all like to think,

"That's us! They got that from us!"

Because they picked up on something that could only have been us.

And I think whoever wrote this scene

had seen the extravagant props we had at Yes gigs.

At one show, we put Alan White, our drummer,

into a giant seashell pod in the middle of the stage.

Unfortunately, the gearing mechanism failed

and he was left in there gasping for air, he couldn't get out.

It was pure Spinal Tap.

The crew eventually broke into it to let him out

and he came out clawing the air, he was in a terrible state.

It was very dangerous.

No, it was very funny.

SONG REACHES CRESCENDO

CROWD CHEERS

And that could have been a dead end.

The concept album going down with prog rock, outdated and irrelevant.

But not quite.

# Do you remember? #

Coming out of the punk era, we get Misplaced Childhood by Marillion,

a concept album on the theme of lost love

that became a best-seller in 1985.

# Do you remember

# The cherry blossom in the market square?

# Do you remember

# I thought it was confetti in our hair...? #

I find it easier to write like that.

I mean, writing 12 songs about all different subject matters,

I find that difficult,

but, you know, when my mind is locked into a theme,

it puts me in a run where I know the direction that I'm going in.

# Lavender's blue

# Dilly, dilly

# Lavender's green

# When I am King

# Dilly, dilly

# You will be Queen... #

But as the '80s gave way to the '90s, this began to seem less

the glimmering of the future than an afterglow of the past.

By the time you get to the '90s, you know,

no self-respecting artist that wants to

be on the cover of the NME is going to admit in a million years

that their new album is a concept album or anything

so shameful or old-fashioned.

A villain behind bars, or you could say real rock from The Rock...

Fortunately for the concept album, some artists didn't care

if they were on the cover of the NME...

# I got a letter from the Government

# The other day

# I opened and read it It said they were suckers... #

..especially when they had been banned by radio stations across America.

# I said never... #

It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back by Public Enemy

was a landmark record with an unmistakable concept.

Black politics.

# ..Occurred to me The suckas had authority... #

We believed that we're First World people.

The Western world cannot throw us down the tube,

so to speak, just because they feel that, you know, we are inferior.

That's a bunch of crap.

# A rebel in his own mind

# Supporter of my rhyme Designed to scatter a line

# Of suckers who claim I do crime... #

Public Enemy led the way in rap music's embrace

of the concept album through the '80s and '90s.

They saw the record as a hip-hop version of Marvin Gaye's

What's Going On - with attitude to spare.

# Come on, y'all You too

# Terminator X... #

It's like an audio version of a Black Panther rally.

Whether it's the impact of the crack plague or mass incarceration,

all these hot button topics just spoke to the

possibility of people making blows against the state.

# Tables turn Suckers burn

# They can't disable the power of my label

# Def Jam, tells you who I am

# The enemy's public They really give a damn...

# Strong island where I got 'em wild... #

The concept album found a new energy in hip-hop.

In rock, its star had faded, but now and again

you'd get the odd blazing comet.

Oklahoma City, USA.

This is the Womb Gallery.

Yes, that's right.

Home of the category-defying band The Flaming Lips,

who, in 2002,

released Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots.

They found they'd made a concept album almost by accident.

We had been a sort of punk rock, drug rock,

loud, noisy rock and roll rock punk rock group for a long time.

Yoshimi was a Japanese musician the band and producer Dave Friedmann

happened to be doing some session work with.

And everything that we put in front of her,

she would do something on it.

Like, "Oh, there you go," you know?

We made a track of all this crazy screaming and stuff.

Dave said after we had made the track,

"It sounds like she's either having sex with a robot,

"or being killed by a giant robot."

BASS, WHOOPING AND METALLIC SOUNDS

In my mind, I was, like, "Yeah, it is, that's Yoshimi.

"She's being killed by a giant pink robot."

And I think we all looked at each other,

like, "Hey, why don't we just say it's that?" You know?

# Her name is Yoshimi

# She's a black belt in karate

# Hai, hai! #

And as so many of us have happily discovered,

once you've got a concept, ideas for new tracks start to flow.

# I thought I was smart I thought I was right

# I thought it better not to fight

# I thought there was a virtue... #

We came up with Fight Test, One More Robot, All We Have Is Now.

It rolls along and it sounds like

you're listening to this movie soundtrack

and if only we saw the movie, we'd probably know

all the little things that happened.

Which brings the story of the concept album to the 21st century.

And the internet has brought us a new music medium.

The MP3 download.

And you've got this ability to put onto an iPod,

or put onto your phone, whatever tracks you like

in whatever order you want.

And that's kind of lethal, in a way,

for the traditional production and sale of the album.

All the music ever made is now just a click away.

You can pick'n'mix it any way you like,

so maybe it's no surprise that serious artists

who feel they've got something to say

are still making albums with a beginning, middle and an end.

# Can't read my

# Can't read my

# No, he can't read my poker face... #

Lady Gaga has been drawn to the concept album from the off.

These days, people want to stand out.

It's very easy to get lost in the mire of the internet.

Um, so to make a grand statement is something that's quite powerful.

Her 2008 debut album The Fame explores celebrity and pop culture,

while the follow-up, The Fame Monster,

confronts the darker side of living in the media spotlight.

# The system broken, the school's closed, the prison's open... #

In 2010, Kanye West produced My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,

an album themed around extravagance, excess and consumer culture...

# In this white man's world We, the ones chosen

# So goodnight, cruel world I see you in the mornin'... #

..and Kendrick Lamarr's 2015 concept album To Pimp A Butterfly

picks up the baton from rap's pioneers.

It explores the personal and political costs of racial inequality.

# When my pride was low, lookin' at the world, like, where do we go?

# When we hate popo, when they kill us dead in the street, for sure

# I'm at the preacher's door

# My knees gettin' weak and my gun might blow

# But we gonna be alright... #

The song Alright became the anthem of the Black Lives Matter movement,

the campaign to end police brutality towards unarmed black citizens.

# We gonna be alright... #

To Pimp A Butterfly completely blew me away.

It proves that you can still make records of that quality

and of that much integrity, because the musicianship

and lyricism, the structure of the record

and everything about it

was...was brilliant.

Like high art.

So far, singer-songwriter Laura Marling

has made nothing but concept albums,

including the acclaimed 2013 LP Once I Was An Eagle.

# I am a master hunter

# I cured my skin Now nothing gets in... #

Through my own life circumstances,

I think there is probably a bit of heartbreak and a bit of confusion

about where I was going with my life.

I began touring this character,

um, Rosie, and her bird, her kind of spirit animal.

# I don't stare at water any more

# Water doesn't do what it did before... #

She goes on this journey and there's lots of archetypal imagery,

there's lots of water and there's lots of weather

and there's lots of creatures.

# When we were in love

# If we were

# When we were in love

# I was an eagle... #

The album is a 16-track story arc

in which the central figure angrily rejects love and naivety

and then rediscovers them at the end.

'I'm a fan of the form of an album

'and I take great care in structuring a record

'from start to finish.

'It gives me an internal structure.'

Once I've been in that tripped-out state

and whatever's risen from the unconscious has risen up,

and I've managed to catch it

and then take some control over it...

only I know what it's going to be...

and then, when it's done, other people can know.

And judging by Laura's chart success,

other people are very happy to enter into her world.

So it seems the concept album is in rude health.

My tour is almost done.

There's just one last stop to make.

And it's very gratifying for an old prog rocker like me.

I'm pleased to report

that the progressive rock concept album

has made a comeback too,

not least thanks to one of my great mates from the 1970s.

In 2014, Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson

released Homo Erraticus.

It made the top 20 in the UK album charts -

not bad for a record whose theme extends

from the dawn of civilisation and into an uncertain future.

# New blood, old veins

# Kids can't wait to be gone... #

'Well, Homo Erraticus was about one very simple thing -

'the migration of the human race.'

60... 70... 80,000 years ago,

when Homo sapiens went out of Africa,

that was very largely driven by climate change

and the need, just as is today, as we're seeing,

of people needing to find somewhere to go in order to survive.

Which epic thought brings me to the end of my tour

and to the question -

does the concept album have a future?

For me, the answer is a resounding yes.

First, because we'll never lose our age-old love of a well-told tale.

And second, because serious artists will always be drawn to big themes.

And in a world of bewildering choice, the artists who stand out

will be the ones who communicate the best stories

and the boldest ideas.

That's the big lesson I take

from the great concept albums of the past.

I'm sure that the best of these records really will last.

Some of them are up there with the finest work that art can offer

and there'll always be a very special place in my heart

for the sheer joy of the concept album.