The Stooges – Fun House

Written  for the 2006 book 100 Albums That Changed Music, edited by Sean Egan.

THE STOOGES

FUN HOUSE

Released US August 1970 UK December 1970

US: Elektra

UK: Elektra

TRACKLISTING: Down On The Street, Loose, TV Eye, Dirt, 1970 (aka I Feel Alright), Fun House, LA Blues

PRODUCED BY: Don Galluci 

ACCORDING to Henry Rollins, it is the greatest album ever recorded: “Fun House is thirty-some minutes of loose and dangerous music played by bad men and should be heard once at least,” he wrote on Amazon.com in his choice of favourite music. “I remember screaming in my head, ‘This is Detroit!’ And that’s what Fun House is to me, the very definition of Detroit rock & roll, and by proxy, the definitive rock album of America. The record’s passion, attitude, power, emotion and destruction are incalculable,” wrote Jack White of The White Stripes in the liner notes to the Rhino 2005 double-disc edition. Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction always used to play it before going onstage: “It’s pretty hard to go out in a bad mood when you’ve just heard Fun House.”

It is an iconic album, a revered piece of music. Yet for about 10 years after it was released in 1970, nobody outside of a tiny clique much cared about Iggy & The Stooges and sales of Fun House were pitiful. Even after the upheaval of punk, the Stooges album of choice tended to be Raw Power, a comparatively straightforward record in comparison with the screaming intensity of their second.

The Psychedelic Stooges were, according to Iggy Pop, “low-brow guys” who spent the first year of their existence as a band thinking up their name. A typical Stooges live show consisted of the two minutes of song followed by some wild free form improvisations. The Stooges were signed to Elektra records in 1968 by Danny Fields, who also signed the MC5, worked with The Doors and Love and eventually managed The Ramones. Elektra was the pre-eminent American rock label, capturing the spirit of the times with innovative releases by artists as diverse as The Doors and Judy Collins. Yet for all the success they had had marketing teen rebellion, they didn’t really have much of a clue as to what they should do with Iggy. Initially they tried to sell them – unsuccessfully – as a teen pop act. Their debut The Stooges – no longer psychedelic – was produced by John Cale, recently departed from The Velvet Underground. It was recorded in a hurry – Real Cool Time, Not Right, and Little Doll were apparently written in one night to pad out the album – but remains a classic. Fun House was recorded in Los Angeles and was produced by Don Galluci, former keyboard player with The Kingsmen, the Oregon garage combo who’d scored a major hit in 1964 with their cover of Louie Louie. He wanted to try and capture the live sound of the band as much as was possible and so they started recording almost as a live set, playing the songs on the album in the order that they appear.

The first order of business was to rip the studio apart: the carpets were taken up, the walls were moved. Then they just miced up all the amps – Iggy sang into a hand-held mic standing in front of the band – and played.

What you hear is what you get: there are no overdubs, no studio wizardry, no frills. According to Ron Asheton, apart from adding a bit of rhythm guitar on a few tracks, what was released was pretty much what they played.

It was recorded in sessions that lasted in total just under eight hours. It was very much against the grain of the way that records were made at that time. It had more in common with the way jazz musicians worked: they would book time in the studio, jam, listen back to the bits they thought worked and then release them.

The Stooges originally intended that Loose would be the first song, but the label preferred the slightly more downbeat Down On The Street. Iggy drafted in sax player Steve MacKay, ex of Detroit avant garde noise band Carnal Kitchen, literally 48 hours before they started recording.

MacKay brought an intense hard jazz quality to hard rock songs like 1970, as well as an almost John Coltrane-like free form horn to the title track. LA Blues was actually the most insane part of this wig out excerpted and turned into a separate piece, an idea credited to Galluci. MacKay later said that he was on acid while they recorded the original 17 minute long track which was originally called Freak.

The album was reviewed favourably but sold badly: the world wasn’t quite ready for hard rock delivered with this urgency and intensity. The prevailing sound was a more laid back stoner-country rock vibe. Not long after its release the band started to disintegrate, due mainly to everyone’s involvement in hard drugs. Elektra dropped them from its roster and for most of the mid 70s, the album was actually deleted. Yet Iggy always had influential champions, among them Lester Bangs, David Bowie and Nick Kent, who kept the flame burning even when it semed that Iggy had reached the end of the line. The Damned covered 1970 on their first album Damned Damned Damned which, for a new generation, was their first taste of Iggy. And although his influence on punk is undeniable, the influence of Fun House goes much wider: early hardcore bands like Black Flag, Husker Du and The Minutemen, John Zorn’s maniac jazz, the more extreme variants of heavy metal, Primal Scream all openly give thanks for that insane 30 odd minutes of freakish primitive distorted rock that still sounds like it was composed by cavemen from Mars. 

Filed under: Classic Rock, Heavy Metal, Jazz rock, Music journalism, Psychedelia, 1969, Fun House, fusion, Iggy Pop, punk, Stooges

Prog 2.0

This is a piece written for Classic Rock two years ago, a rant about the rise of the new prog scene.

It’s official: prog rules…still. Whether it’s the neo-Floydian stadium prog of Tool, the sheet-metal art of Isis or the pulverising complexity of Mastodon, we have new prog bands coming at us from every angle. We have bands like Radiohead, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Sigur Ros who emerged from the late 90s indie scene, former Norwegian black metallers like Enslaved, Ulver and Solefald  who have reinvented themselves as avant garde experimental bands. Then you have a whole movement of countless bands spawned by the US hardcore and emo scene, such as The Mars Volta, Coheed & Cambria and The Dillinger Escape Plan who have forged their own particular take on artrock. You have bands like Spock’s Beard and Symphony X inspired by Dream Theater and Iron Maiden who have emerged from the more traditional realms of metal. And there are too many to count – English folk-prog eccentrics Circulus for example and British prog stalwarts Porcupine Tree – who just don’t really fit in anywhere neatly.

These bands have one thing in common, which is a desire to push themselves beyond the commonplace, to place themselves at the head of something new, apart from the crowd. It’s not necessarily a kind of elitism – they are all, at the end of the day, entertainers – but in a world dominated by anonymous meat and two veg bands, they are reclaiming their position as artists in an artless world.

These bands are pretentious as fuck, but as Brian Eno wrote in his 1996 book A Year With Swollen Appendices, it’s time to stop using the term as an insult: “Pretension is the dismissive name given to people’s attempts to be ‘something other than what they really are’. It is vilified in England in particular because we are so suspicious of people trying to ‘rise above their station’. In the arts, the word ‘pretentious’ has a special meaning: the attempt at something that the critic thinks you have no right even to try… The common assumption is that there are ‘real’ people and there are others who are pretending to be something they’re not. There is also an assumption that there’s something morally wrong with pretending.” 

Time then too for everyone to get over the term progressive, which is still used as a pejorative term by some snooty critics, bands and fans.

“I like the term in terms of the dictionary definition of progressive music, moving forward and trying things that push boundaries,” says Cedric Bixler of The Mars Volta.

Mostly its detractors focus on the easily mocked surface characteristics that were actually only applicable to a small handful of progressive bands. In terms of making music that progresses, however, prog rock never ever really went away.  

In the immediate aftermath of punk – which, according to many lazy hacks, “finished” prog – a new school of bands tried to make music that did more than repeat the same three chord formula. Public Image Ltd, John Lydon’s post-Pistols combo forged a truly uncompromising and original fusion of dub, metal and avant garde noise that owed more to Can than the New York Dolls; Glasgow’s Simple Minds, particularly on their Steve Hillage-produced 1981 double album Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Call, incorporated many elements from classic Genesis along with krautrock, disco and the avant garde; Ultravox, on their classic Systems Of Romance, made an album that seemed to continue the direction that Roxy Music abandoned after For Your Pleasure; Wire – arguably a synthesis of Ramones-style minimalist punk and high prog complexity – recorded a 15 minute track called Crazy About Love for a John Peel Show session in 1979, and Peel grumbled that it was a step backwards.

Rather than punk seeing prog off there’s a case for saying that it was prog that ultimately triumphed.

Throughout the 80s there were bands like Marillion and IQ who were unashamedly prog and others, from the Cocteau Twins to Sonic Youth who may never have used the term, but who were undoubtedly progressive in their approach to music. In the 90s techno artists like The Orb, Orbital and Ultramarine started making music that evoked everything from Pink Floyd to Canterbury bands like Caravan and Soft Machine. Indie bands like ex-House Of Love guitarist Terry Bickers’ Levitation and the much hyped but short lived Ultrasound heralded a short-lived revival of interest in prog in some quarters. And plugging away without much in the way of commercial or critical acknowledgement was Steven Jones and Porcupine Tree, who virtually was prog rock in the UK.

Prog rock has always survived and thrived away from the attention of the mainstream media. Without press coverage, TV or radio support, unashamed prog bands like Dream Theater are able to sell out major venues.

“We used to be resentful in the old days when we were starting out, we’d turn on MTV and see these bands that can’t play their instruments and only play three chords selling millions of records. It used to piss us off but those bands don’t have a career anymore and we do. It’s proved that our long hard road has paid off,” says Mike Portnoy.

So why has prog come out of the closet now? Possibly the word itself has lost the embarrassment factor that conjures up images of Rick Wakeman staging King Arthur on ice – magnificent but bollocks – and possibly after years of relentless simpleton music both bands and fans want something more.

“I see us as much as a band coming from punk rock and hardcore as from a progressive tradition,” says Cedric Bixler. “I think that we represent a synthesis of a lot of those ideas. The energy of punk and the creativity of progressive bands like King Crimson and Yes and the Mahavishnu Orchestra.”

“I hope that Blood Mountain [Mastodon’s third studio album] pushes a lot of people to do something better, to try and outdo us” says Mastodon founder and drummer Bran Daillor. “I think that rock music has been complacent for years. I really hope that this is a new age of progressive music. That doesn’t mean that the bands should all sound like Yes but that they should be trying something different.”

“You listen to those bands from the 70s and there’s a sense of friendly competition,” says Cave In’s frontman Stephen Brodsky. “It’s not like Yes were out to rip off Genesis or vice versa, they were just pushing their own craft to the furthest possibilities. Listen to The Mahavishnu Orchestra, they went 100 per cent. It couldn’t get crazy enough and they just kept going.” 

The release of Tool‘s masterpiece Laeteralus and its subsequent commercial and critical success was a kick in the teeth for the legions of marketing-led dumbed down Muppets. A 70 minute album with no perceptible tunes, songs averaging 7 minutes, no pictures of the band on the cover (who aren’t exactly what you’d call pretty boys anyway) and lyrics written in Enochian, the language supposedly spoken by Adam in the Garden of Eden? Eminem was not exactly shitting himself but when the band went on tour in 2003 with King Crimson, it was pretty clear that something was happening.

“Tool attract thousands of goth metallers who I’m sure have no idea who King Crimson are yet these people are sitting through 13 minute long songs so there’s obviously a market out there,” says Dream Theater drummer Mike Portnoy.

“[King Crimson guitarist] Robert Fripp said he’d been writing a lot of heavier songs in response to what he’s heard from us, which is terrifying to have him go out and open for us, because he’s the master,” says Tool singer Maynard James Keenan. “We’ve always copped to being influenced by King Crimson and to have them play ahead of us…. I’m afraid that the kids are going to hear King Crimson and go, ‘Tool ripped these guys off.”

These were young kids packing out these stadium shows and not only were they not merely tolerating Crimson, they were actively digging it and then sitting through two hours of Tool. They were obviously unaware of the received wisdom that kids today have goldfish-like short attention spans.

Tool‘s success along with the continuing superstar status of Radiohead and more recent hits like Sigur Ros’s Takk and Muse’s Black Holes And Revelations is part of a general reaction to dumbed-down pop world. Whether this shift is something to do with a reaction against the over-produced over-marketed over-simplified ‘rock-lite’ that fuels the MTV/modern rock radio axis of evil may be wishful thinking but the evidence shows that not everyone is content with slick metal fodder from the production line.

There’s a story that may or may not be true: when the head man at EMI heard Radiohead’s Kid A, he immediately cancelled everyone’s Christmas bonuses. Kid A, despite being an incredibly difficult album, sold respectably well but this does show the mentality of the major labels. They are quite uncomfortable with ‘art’ these days.

‘Art’ is one of those nebulous terms that makes you sound like a jackass the second you try to define it. In this context art means reaching for something profound, pushing the limits of what you can do with rock and roll, having the guts to do something exactly the way you want to do it and not how ‘the market’ dictates that you should. At its worst, it means making noise that nobody actually likes or making it for a few hard core punters who will, in an emperor’s new clothes style, hail you as a genius, but that’s only because it makes them feel superior to the rest of us. In other words, one man’s art is another man’s arse.  

It’s ironic, that there are some self-styled progressive bands who are actually very retro. There are loads of progressive revival bands out there, laboriously recreating Peter Gabriel era Genesis or Tales From A Topographic Ocean period Yes.

But the new school of bands are not so much a revival as picking up the baton that was dropped somewhere in the 1980s and running with it again. They are informed by everything else that has happened in music since, from punk, thrash, hardcore, hip hop, house, techno, death metal, doom metal and nu metal. Recent works Tool, Enslaved or Porcupine Tree could not have been by any stretch of the imagination actually made in 1974.

This is progressive rock 2.0; a reboot of the open mindedness that made the early 70s the most fertile period in rock’s history. Reviving that will be real progress.

Filed under: Classic Rock, Heavy Metal, Music journalism, Progressive rock

Black Widow – Sabbat bloody Sabbat

This was a Vault piece from Metal Hammer about the pioneering heavy prog band Black Widow. When I was 10 I heard Come To The Sabbat on my uncle Ian’s copy of Fill Your Head With Rock and it made a huge impression upon me. It was to be about another 30 years before I heard it again. I’d love to travel to the parallel universe where the Broadway show actually happened.

ALTHOUGH Black Sabbath are usually credited as being the first band to forge the link between heavy music and ‘satanism’, there are several other more obscure claimants to the title. In fact, in their early days, Sabbath were often confused with a Leicester band called Black Widow. Shock-horror reports in the Sunday papers about ‘LSD-crazed devil worshipping rockers’ used sometimes accused Sabbath of having performed mock human-sacrifices onstage, something that they never did. Black Widow, on the other hand, built their whose stage show around plunging a knife into a naked virgin.

By 1969, the hippy dippy nursery rhyme psychedelic whimsy of Donovan, ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ and early Pink Floyd was dead. The dying days of hippiedom coincided with a massive revival of interest in the occult. The new face of the hippie dream was the thousand yard stare of Charlie Manson, who declared himself to be Jesuis and the devil, on the cover of Life magazine.From Hammer films and the novels of Dennis Wheatley to the scary black-robed Process Church cult who used to walk around West London, there seemed to be satanists everywhere. Like Sabbath, Black Widow emerged from a moderately successful local pop act called Pesky Gee who wanted to jump onto the ‘underground’ gravy train and were astute enough to latch onto the imagery of the ‘dark side’.

The stage show (choreographed by members of Leicester’s Phoenix Theatre Company) featured the mock sacrifice of a nude woman, which predictably had the tabloid hacks queueing around the block in search of a story. The band were also reputedly taking advice from self styled “king of the witches” Alex Sanders.

The band were snapped up by CBS and their debut album ‘Sacrifice’ was rushed out in 1970.

“We had a lot of bad luck,” says flautist/sax player Clive Jones who now runs a management company. “CBS released it on the same day as Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Waters’ [one of the biggest and fastest selling albums of the 70s].”

The pressing plants were working overtime on the soft rock classic and consequently very few copies of ‘Sacrifice’ actually made the shops.

Despite all the tabloid notoriety, it barely scraped the lower reaches of the album chart – though the inclusion of ‘Come To The Sabbat’ on the budget double compilation ‘Fill Your Head With Rock’ helped to spread its unholy word.

The Sabbath/Widow confusion was exacerbated by the fact that both bands shared the same management. But anyone who was looking for a Sabbath knock-off would either be disappointed or pleasantly surprised. 

Although the name Black Widow is such a quintessentially perfect heavy metal name, the actual sound was more in keeping with the emergent progressive rock. Heavy organ-led songs full of jazz structures, folky melodies and unconventional instrumentation – violins, flutes, ‘primitive’ drums – gave it a flavour that was closer to bands like Jethro Tull than to Sabbath.

One track, however, stood out: ‘Come To The Sabbat’ started with ritualistic drumming and chants, launched into a song about a quest for knowledge, before hitting us with one of the most chilling ‘choruses’ of all time. “Come, come, come to the sabbat/come to the sabbat/satan’s there” is intoned over a stark drum, building up into a frenzy. Tame stuff these days, but back in 1969 it must have been enough to have the priests round to exorcise the place.

The band made two more albums but dropped the occult theme in an attempt to reach a wider audience.

According to Clive Jones, this was a central split in the band with two of the members wanting to go ‘mainstream’ and the others wanting to stick to the occult themed show.

Various projects – such as an attempt to take their stage act to Broadway – failed to materialise and the band split up after recording a fourth album – never released at the time – without anyone really noticing.

That might have been the end of the story were it not for the fact that there has been a constant interest in the band bubbling under thanks to the efforts of bands like Witchfinder General and Cathedral who were inspired by Black Widow throughout the 80s, 90s and beyond.

And now a film of the band’s entire ‘Sacrifice’ stage show has been unearthed and will be released next year on DVD.

Furthermore, Clive Jones is working on new Black Widow material 30 years after the original band split. The devil will have his revenge.

 

Filed under: Goth, Heavy Metal, Metal Hammer, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia

The Syd Problem

This was originally published in issue one of Classic Rock presents…Prog, part of a much bigger piece on Pink Floyd generally. It reworks some material from a Vox article written in the mid 90s which I can no longer find either in the stack of mouldy mags in the box in the attic or online.

 

Dateline Cambridge, the mid 1990s. In the words of that bloody song by the TV Personalities, I know where Syd Barrett lives. It wasn’t really very hard to find his house, a few phone calls, a couple of letters and here we are. It’s been a quarter of a century since Syd’s last disastrous stage appearance – with Stars, also featuring ex-Pretty Things and Pink Fairies drummer Twink – and since then all has been quiet. Too quiet…

 

His absence has been maddening. In our arrogance, we have come to seek him out, to doorstep him as though her was some dodgy company director or politician. To get him – force him, even – to explain himself. How dare you revolutionise rock’n'roll and then give it all up and just walk away without a word! Not even having the good manners to die young!

Of course there are no illusions that we are the first hacks, fans and weird obsessives to come looking for Roger ‘Syd’ Barrett. And as one grouchy neighbour makes clear, we’re weren’t even the first that day.

 

After half an hour of knocking the door, I stuff a note through the letterbox and we sit in the car and wait. By midnight there’s no sign of anyone. If he was hiding in the house, he was sitting there with all the lights out. We give up and leave; if I’m honest, I’m glad and relieved not to have found him. It was never that Syd was ‘lost’, he just really never wanted to be found.

 

Like Robert Johnson, Syd Barrett’s recorded legacy is slim. There are 40 odd songs, mostly written during a rich creative period from 1966 to 1967, ranging from the cosmic freak-out of Interstellar Overdrive to the childish whimsy of The Gnome to the cracked and melancholy Jug Band Blues. Yet these songs drew up the blueprint that would shape Pink Floyd for three decades – they never really emerged from his shadow – as well as for the post-psychedelic progressive rock scene.

 

His two solo albums and the handful of demos and out-takes that have surfaced in recent years, collapsed into his own little world, Edward Lear-like nonsense poetry and jittery post-acid comedown folksiness, they sold poorly at the time though a devoted cult of believers has tended to his flame through the long decades of his silence.

 

You could argue that Syd looms large in the history of punk rock, the lo-fi indie scene and the new generation of psychedelic folkies like Devandra Banhardt. Everyone from The Jesus And Mary Chain to David Bowie have covered his songs and paid some homage to his inspiration. And the inspiration was not just his music. Everyone loves a mad genius, a star that explodes and leaves a vacuum in its wake. Better to burn out than to fade away.

 

His is a potent myth: a heartbreakingly beautiful man, the person that everyone wanted to be around, a powerhouse of musical and artistic talent. The drugs which helped to fuel and sustain this maverick creativity also helped to push him over the edge into the realm of mental illness. At the peak of their fame on an American tour, Syd started to behave oddly. He would go into catatonic trances. He would be unable even to mime let alone perform his songs. In the space of a year the man who had helped to revolutionise – no exaggeration – English rock’n'roll was a burnt out case, ejected from the band he had formed and shaped.

 

The solo albums that followed were dark and disturbing and sold poorly. After the second one, everyone – not least of all Syd himself – seemed to have given up on his music career. In an interview with journalist Giovanni Dadomo, around the recording of his second album Barrett in 1970, though published in the Syd Barrett fanzine Terrapin in 1974, when asked if he was looking forward to performing again he replied, “Yes, that would be nice. I used to enjoy it, it was a gas. But so’s doing nothing. It’s art school laziness, really.”

 

Syd, it seemed, both burned out like a supernova and then spent the decades until his death fading away. His absences was maddening. In a world where Iggy Pop advertises car insurance and where The New York Dolls and the MC5 regularly tour and record despite key members having died off decades ago, there was something about Syd’s retreat from his own legacy that really rankled. Being insane isn’t a barrier to a comeback: look at Roky Erickson, Brian Wilson, Arthur Lee and even Sly Stone. Nobody is too mental to come back, do one of those fawning broadsheet retrospectives, play Glastonbury, do a duet with some twat like Pete Doherty and maybe do an ad for Apple Computers.

It wasn’t for lack of trying: people had tempted Syd for years. Jimmy Page and Brian Eno expressed an interest in producing him in the early 70s, later on The Damned approached him to produce their second album Music For Pleasure (they settled for Floyd drummer Nick Mason instead).

 

But, goes the myth, Barrett was beyond it all, a chronic basket case, a recluse, holed up in his mother’s Cambridge house, lost forever in an acid casualty wilderness. At various times it was reported that he was in a mental hospital, that he had died, even that he was recording in secret.

Most famously, he turned up in the studio when Pink Floyd were recording Wish You Were Here (it’s a matter of conjecture as to whether or not they were actually working on Shine On You Crazy Diamond, their soaring tribute to him.) Overweight, hair and eyebrows shaved, it was the first time that any of the band had seen him in almost five years. Roger Waters was apparently reduced to tears. When asked what he thought of Wish You Were Here, Barrett said it sounded “a bit old”. He later attended Dave Gilmour’s wedding and slipped away from the party. That was the last time any of the band saw him.

 

Some psychedelic stories are a long strange trip but the story of Syd is more akin to being shot out of a cannon. Barrett arrived in London to join The Tea Set (aka the T Set, the Screaming Abdaba, the Abdabs and the Architectural Abdabs) in 1965. Syd wasn’t yet 20, a self taught guitarist inspired by Stax mainstay Steve Cropper and Bo Diddley, he gave the band their name when they found themselves on the same bill as another group called the Tea Set. The Pink Floyd Sound soon became part of the tiny London underground scene. Barrett pioneered new guitar techniques that involved feeding it through echo boxes, using a Zippo lighter as a slide. The band were booked at the UFO Club in late 1966 and soon became the British underground’s first superstars.

It’s hard to convey how quickly the music scene changed. In 1966, most British musicians had few ambitions beyond playing R&B. A year later they wanted to surrender to the void and journey to the innermost centre of eternity.

 

LSD had been doing the rounds in underground circles for a few years. It was not actually made illegal in the UK until 1966. All of The Pink Floyd had used it and Barrett was seen to gobble it like Smarties. While there is no doubt that psychedelic chemicals opened the user’s mind to new possibilities, The Pink Floyd were bringing to rock music some of what progressive jazz musicians like John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk had been doing for some time (admittedly similarly chemically inspired).

 

The long drawn out songs like Interstellar Overdrive would be the template for post-Syd Pink Floyd and the psychedelic and progressive bands who followed. The fairytale songs like Bike tapped into other traditions like music hall songs, children’s songs and folklore. The debut album The Piper At the Gates Of Dawn was bloated with possibilities.

 

Dave Gilmour has gone on record as saying that he believed that Syd’s drug use merely exacerbated a problem that was already there, that the breakdown would have happened anyway. The band were touring incessantly and Syd was under pressure to write another hit single to follow up Arnold Layne and See Emily Play. The mentalness increased: Roger Waters referred to “The Syd problem” as Barrett became increasingly isolated from the band and unable or unwilling to perform. One solution that was mooted was that Syd would record and write but not tour. Syd on the other hand suggested hiring two sax players and a girl singer. By early 1968 after a few shambollic gigs as a five piece – Barrett’s friend Dave Gilmour had been drafted in as a second guitarist and, it was vainly hoped, a stabilising influence on Syd – Barrett was out. The band’s second album A Saucerful Of Secrets was recorded with little input from Syd. The closing track Jugband Blues is a bleak evocative description of a breakdown, a sad farewell to the Floyd. His last contribution to the band was the song Vegetable Man. Then manager Peter Jenner said: “It’s just a description of what he’s wearing. It’s very disturbing. Roger took it off the album because it was too dark.”

 

The two solo albums that followed are a more low key expression of that dark insanity. Recorded with Dave Gilmour – the musicians had to play around Syd, who seemed incapable of playing the same song the same way twice – they sound like psychedelia stripped of all the effects and studio wizardry, leaving only the actual musical and lyrical weirdness beneath.

 

Syd then joined Stars, a sort of three piece supergroup with Twink. At one show Syd froze onstage and then walked off. A few days later Twink recalls meeting him in the street. Syd read him a bad review of the show and quit there and then.

 

And that was Syd’s career in music. Afterwards, according to legend, he became a hermit. A virtual shutaway, lost forever in his own psychosis, unable to communicate, a total basket case.

 

Since his death, however, another picture of Barrett has emerged. According to his sister Rosemary, in an interview with The Times, Syd was neither mentally ill nor was he a recluse. He had spent a short time in a private “home for lost souls” and had seen a psychiatrist, though he was not on any medication nor in a therapy programme. He was shy and retiring, though loved the company of his nieces and nephews, was chatty to the staff in the DIY and gardening stores he frequented, and had lived alone and looked after himself since the death of his mother in 1991. He had turned his back on music and wanted nothing to do with it, but he was a keen gardener, he had returned to his first love, painting, and had even written a book about the history of art.

 

“He avoided contact with journalists and fans. He simply couldn’t understand the interest in something that had happened so long ago and he wasn’t willing to interrupt his own musings for their sake,” she said.

 

Syd would paint large canvasses, photograph them and then destroy them. He didn’t like to be reminded of the past; he went round to his sister’s to watch a BBC TV documentary about him and the Pink Floyd, but left, complaining it was “too loud”.

 

Driving away from Cambridge that night, I like to think that a neighbour would then give Syd the secret knock and whisper: “It’s OK, they’ve buggered off back to London.” Syd would then emerge from his refuge, maybe make a cup of tea, pick up his guitar and then sing one of the many songs that he’d written but never recorded, songs that he alone would ever hear.  

Filed under: Classic Rock, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia

The Damned – Phantasmagoria

This is a review of two Damned reissues published a few months ago in Classic Rock magazine. The Damned are criminally overlooked, perhaps because a lot of people of a certain age see them as a comedy band, or they bring out the knee-jerk anti-goth prejudices of the Uncut set. My favourite Damned album is still Music For Pleasure, the second album that everyone still seems to think was some kind of a monumental disaster. But Phantasmagoria is a fantastic album too: hugely important in the narrative of post-60s psychedelic rock.

The Damned
Phantasmagoria
Anything
Universal

When Captain Sensible quit The Damned in the mid 80s, it took the brakes from frontman Dave Vanian’s ambitions for the band, allowing them to shed the last vestiges of their comedy pop-punk past and mutate into something darker. The Damned arguably started the perennial youth subculture known as goth (no Damned, no My Chemical Romance) and by God they weren’t about to allow upstarts like Sisters Of Mercy snap up all those cadaverous Hammer horror scream queen girlies in purple velvet and PVC.

It was a new beginning: after a long stint with indie Chiswick and a brief tenure with Bronze, they were snapped up by MCA who had the money and muscle to push them to the stadium level, maybe even to break them in the US.

Phantasmagoria was heralded by the eerie non-album single Eloise, a surprise hit that set the tone for the new era of The Damned. This carried over into the bloody Morricone-like Shadow Of Love on the album and the lo fi Doors-like psychedelia of Grimly Fiendish. This appeared at the start of a small scale 80s psychedelic revival that at one extreme produced novelty acts like Doctor & The Medics and at the other a lost Paisley underground, bands like the Mood 6 and the Prisoners. After a comparatively long stretch in the wilderness, The Damned seemed to be back on form again. On the subsequent album Anything, The Damned took this gothic psychedelia a step further, covering Love’s Alone Again Or, which along with Gigolo and the album’s title track were released as singles though barely got anywhere near bothering the Top 30. But whatever momentum they had built up with Phantasmagoria was lost with the follow up which was poorly received by press and punters alike and saw an end to their stint with major label MCA. In fact it was to be their last album for a decade. Not that Anything is a bad album; the Love cover and the closing track Psychomania are classic Damned. It simply isn’t their finest hour.

Still, you hang on long enough and your former corporate masters will dust off your turds, polish them up and unleash them all over again, lovingly repackaged with loads of bonus tracks and the magazines that ignored you back in the day will wail about how under-rated you always were. These, sadly, are the breaks.

Tommy Udo

Filed under: Classic Rock, Goth, Music journalism, Psychedelia

La Dusseldorf

A fine way to start today.

Filed under: Uncategorized, Krautrock

A cosy confab with Marilyn Manson

This originally appeared in Metal Hammer two years ago.

THE air conditioned elevator takes us up to the heart of darkness. The curtains in the tastefully anonymous room are drawn and the lights are dimmed. Manson sits curled up in a chair, sunglasses on, sipping a glass of sickly green absinthe that actually looks a lot like that horrible chalky indigestion medicine. He has just recently risen. From bed, not the grave. Manson is nocturnal but because of the jet lag he has to create his own night in the hotel room. It is only mid-day.

Good absinthe? Hammer asks.

“Grrr, yeah, it’s a great start to the day,” sniggers the 21st century’s greatest goth icon.

Absinthe for breakfast. Well of all things…

Of course it’s all theatre, a personal performance to be reported faithfully to you folks out there in record-buyer land. And reader, even if it was the case, you don’t really want to hear that he was wearing old Adidas trackies and a stained t-shirt and didn’t have a lick of make-up on his face? If you were ever in any doubt, Marilyn Manson is now Marilyn Manson 24 hours a day every day.

During a previous stint – almost in a previous life – when Hammer met Manson while he was struggling to promote ‘Portrait Of An American Family’ there were a few people in the band and the entourage who referred to him as ‘Brian’. Today there are none who would dare to address him as such. But given that his activities now encompass painting, film-making and writing, is there any possibility that some of this work may come with a Brian Warner signature rather than a Marilyn Manson one?

“I think that is all just a matter of semantics,” he says thoughtfully. “For a while there I had no sense of my own identity, or rather I felt that I had lost sight of who I actually was. That was a struggle but now I feel that I have a very clear idea of who I am and what I do.”

He sips the absinthe.

Brian Warner exists in the same way that our appendix still exists: as an unused and forgotten vestige of a less evolved past. Manson’s transformation is total.

We meet on the day after that Korean nut-job Cho has massacred a whole bunch of his fellow students at Virginia Tech. Maybe the Manson fan-base is now a bit older and goes to college and university rather than high school. We ask Manson how long he reckons it will be before the media hang the blame upon him.

“When I was watching the coverage of it I kept asking myself ‘Well what is the agenda here?’ It’s always interesting to look at what else is happening in the world at the moment: a lot of people killed in Iraq today, a lot in Afghanistan, that hasn’t really made the news,” he muses. “I also kept thinking about that film – which I haven’t seen yet but friends of mine are talking about a lot – 23. Y’know, he killed 32 people, he was 23 years old…”

Are you still regarded as a figure of fear in the US though?

“I don’t know,” he sighs. ”It’s not something that I can spend a whole lot of time thinking about one way or another and even if it’s a good thing or not.”

Alas poor Manson. One minute you are being blamed for high school massacres, the Satanic moral degeneracy of ‘generation x’ (remember them?) and the rising tide of black nail polish on the hands of lardy high school jocks. The next you are just another B-list tabloid horrorshow like Britney or Lindsey or Jade Goody. Over the past year Manson has been all over the pages of Hello and Grazia and all those other dumb ‘sleb’ mags that are read by people who move their lips while they read and that have never knowingly heard a note of his music. Manson almost slipped into that niche of being famous for being famous. There was his celeb marriage to burlesque queen and fashion designer Dita Von Teese followed by their high profile break-up and his current relationship with 19 year old actress Evan Rachel Wood, star of the underrated ‘weird’ 90s TV show American Gothic as well as recent independent hits like the disturbing Thirteen.

Manson’s creative energies seemed to be going into his paintings and into a film project called Phantasmagoria that he was planning to direct, a look at the dark side of author Lewis Carrol and his Victorian bestseller Alice In Wonderland. There were hints and rumours that he was planning to quit music altogether, rumours that he now says were not without foundation.

Manson told Rolling Stone magazine that he was moving from music to filmmaking: “I just don’t think the world is worth putting music into right now. I no longer want to make art that other people – particularly record companies – are turning into a product.”

“I was very serious because as I’ve said I had lost sight of who I was,” he says languidly. “As an artist or a performer I’m supposed to be able to make a lot of people feel a certain way. But the one person who was closest to me was the person I couldn’t seem to reach at all and it made me wonder what I was doing it all for.”

The split was acrimonious. They aren’t ‘just good friends’ or any of that crap. He seems at once eager to put it behind him and to rake over the sordid details at the same time. After a period of reassessment and – frankly – some heavy drinking and partying, Manson reached some moment of clarity around the end of last year and started work on a new album. The resulting ‘Eat Me, Drink Me’ may not be his best work ever, but the fact that it exists at all is some cause for celebration.

“It’s the most straightforward album I’ve ever done,” he says. “There wasn’t a lot of agonising over the concepts because this time the songs were being written about me. When it starts off ‘Christmas morning 6.30…’ that’s actually when the song was written.”

The title and some of the songs on the album allude to Alice In Wonderland (when Alice goes down the rabbit hole, she finds a cake labelled Eat Me that makes her grow and a bottle labelled Drink Me that makes her shrink). Hammer asks him if this is in some way connected to the film project.

“No that wasn’t in any way intentional. It’s just that these were things that I was thinking about a lot at the time that I wrote the songs and they had some resonances with my own life,” he says. “We’re going to start shooting the film in October but it is entirely unconnected to the album.”

He has also just made a video for ‘Heart Shaped Glasses’ using Titanic and Terminator director James Cameron’s 3D software. It is an extract from a 3D horror movie which apparently Manson will continue filming with Cameron.

“It looks totally amazing. It was a lot of hard work but I can honestly say that I have never seen anything quite like it. It’s also I believe one of the most expensive promo ever made. Evan is in it and she got the highest fee ever for a promo.”

How much was it?

“Ah, I’m not allowed to say.”

Was it….one million dollars?

Manson laughs: “Yeah but I see that the dollar is way down against the pound so maybe that isn’t too impressive.”

Manson has also just had a meeting with the great Russian/French/Mexican cult film director Alejandro Jodorowsky.

“We’ve already been talking about one script (King Shot)that he has that he wants me to appear in as a 300 year old pope,” says Manson, becoming animated, almost excited for the first time. “But he’s also written another script, a sequel to El Topo, that he wants me to star in.”

Manson seems to practically vibrate with glee.

“I mean I have //got// to make this happen, we have //got// to get the money to do this” he says shaking his head. “For somebody like Jodorowsky who has meant so much to me and to find that he is enthusiastic about me…it’s really mind-blowing.”

If the album is a lot more basic and straightforward does this mean that the stage shows will be toned down.

“No, the opposite,” he says. “We’re got the guy who designed the Diamond Dogs show for Bowie in the 70s doing the sets. It’s going to be spectacular. When I wrote the album I really had this stage show in mind. I had already decided that ‘If I Was Your Vampire’ would be the opening song in the set.”

Interesting that Manson has written his first vampire song: that was one aspect of the whole goth package that he consciously seemed to steer clear of.

“I think I agonised too much over that and yes I very much avoided that in the past,” he says.

He’s on record as saying that it’s the new ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ which may come as good news for the undemanding but bad news for those who see Manson as something more than just another goth cliché. It’s easily the strongest song on the album.

As much as ‘Eat Me, Drink Me’ was inspired by his break-up with Dita, it’s also about his relationship with Evan.

“I used to wonder why my life couldn’t turn into one of those movies like True Romance or Bonnie And Clyde that I loved so much, why there wasn’t that massively romantic ending for me,” he says.

“I think what amazes me about her is the fact that she finds so many of the things that I do so cool. Like, we went to the London Dungeon last night. And for the cover shoot I covered a room in my house in blood and she loved it so I’ve just kept the room that way.”

Real blood?

“Yeah.”

Your own?

“No. If I used that much of my own blood I’d be dead,” he cracks a smile. “I’m looking forward to seeing headlines about me spraying my room with blood.”

Doesn’t it smell?

“No, but the one thing that gets me…it’s all over the windows and you can see right in, yet none of the neighbours has actually sad anything,” he says. “If I saw that in one of their houses, I would definitely have called the cops by now.”

Filed under: Goth, Heavy Metal, Marilyn Manson, Metal Hammer, Music journalism

Eastern Hero – Stephen Chow

Play the Milwall way

This is a piece I wrote for DVD Review a few years ago, about Stephen Chow, who had just made Kung Fu Hustle, one of my favourite films of the past few years.

STEPHEN CHOW

UNTIL fairly recently, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the glory days of the Hong Kong action movie were over. The puritan censorship of the Communist mainland made it impossible to imagine such dark, violent films like The Killer, Streets On Fire or Full Contact being made in the former colony while all the industry’s major talent – directors Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, and John Woo, actors Jet Li , Chow Yun Fat, and, of course, Jackie Chan – had been lured to Hollywood. The whole infrastructure that had been built up over decades collapsed very quickly.

Yet such setbacks, as they say in old Chinese proverbs, can also be great opportunities. Although to Western audiences he seemed to arrive fr0om nowhere, at 43 Stephen Chow is hardly an overnight sensation, his talents as a martial artist, an actor and a director having been honed over decades. Chow’s career began inauspiciously enough as a TV star and a bit part player in numerous rather hokey knock-offs and sequels. His first film as director, 1994’s Love On Delivery, was a rather poor rom com – albeit a rom com with lots of high speed high kicking kung fu action – that has only recently been available outside China. It was hardly an announcement that there was a new sheriff in town. But fast forward to 2005 and, in the wake of his incredible, highly stylised martial arts gangster musical comedy Kung Fu Hustle, he practically is the Hong Kong movie industry.

The hustler

Kung Fu Hustle rams in as much scatological and slapstick comedy, stunts, CGI and ballet-like fight scenes as one movie can stand. At times it’s as close to The Benny Hill Show as it is to any other kung fu movie you’ve ever seen.

“It is, that’s it took me three years to make the film,” says Chow. “To make a kung fu film is quite easy. To make a good kung fu film totally different from any other is something really difficult.”

Set in a fantasy 30s Hong Kong, Chow takes on the top hat-wearing axe-wielding gang terrorizing the lowly inhabitants of a tenement called Pig’s Sty Alley. As the ante is upped – more martial arts mercenaries are hired by each side until the fight scenes become an apocalyptic cross between classic Shaw Brothers 70s kung fu mayhem and a Golden Age of Hollywood Fred Astaire musical, like a chorus line except with axes. It is totally absurd – they had even planned to have scene involving a kung fu fight against a shark underwater but nixed it for technical reasons – but you will believe every minute of it. Although it is extremely violent, it’s closer to the level of a Bugs Bunny cartoon than to the more visceral gore’n’guts of, say, a Tarantino flick.

“Because it’s a story about the battle between good and bad, first of all I have to build up a bunch of gangsters to be really scary and horrifying,” says Chow. “It’s hard for me to avoid all of that, because when you talk about a bad guy there has to be some description of how cruel they are. But actually I already tried my best to eliminate the violence, keep it to a minimum. But still, how they kill people and carry out their crimes, if I don’t have this in the beginning of the film then the whole structure of the story fails.”

Perhaps it is the fantasy element and the fact that the violence is so cartoonish that allows Chow to flourish, even under the stern eye of the Communist Party. Yet with Chinese films such as the historical epics Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero and House Of Flying Daggers bringing in valuable foreign revenue, they seem willing to allow Stephen Chow some the space he needs as an artist.

Actor, director, screenwriter, producer, Chow – an auteur in the proper sense of the term – is already hotly tipped as the next Eastern hero to take a one way ticket to Hollywood. Yet Chow is emphatic that despite the fact that he makes no secret that he would like to work in the US with both western and Chinese expats, this isn’t going to happen.

“I want to say categorically that I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going to Hollywood. I’m not compromising my vision,” he told US interviewers earlier this year when Kung Fu Hustle opened there.

Although he is loathe to criticize actors like Chan or Li, he is aware that they have been roped in as virtual coolie labour on substandard multiplex fodder. Yet it isn’t just the prospect of appearing in Rush Hour IV that puts him off: there is the botch up that Miramax made of his 2001 comedy Shaolin Soccer, with 23 minutes worth of scenes gouged out, leaving the film almost incomprehensible. (Fortunately, with the DVD release, you have the option of seeing the movie exactly as he intended. One small victory for Chow.)Although the editing was nowhere near as savage on Kung Fu Hustle, Western audiences still saw a slightly different movie to the one Chow made in Hong Kong.

“I think the Asian version has more blood. But I don’t think they’ve cut it too much, there are no specific scenes that they took away. They just took away the blood,” he says.

Although few of the Hong Kong old school have made a particularly happy relocation to the US – there’s a story that Jackie Chan, rumoured to be considering a return to China, was referred to by one American meathead director throughout filming as “the Jap” – Tsui Hark has said that Chow would do well, partly because of his excellent command of English. Chow’s films, like the early Bond-send up From Beijing With Love to Kung Fu Hustle are loaded with references to Western movies.

“One of my favourite comedians of all time is Charlie Chaplin,” he admits.

Chow also takes recent Hong Kong-influenced films like The Matrix and Kill Bill and sends them back. His character Sing becomes The One, a kung fu superhero, which some have said was a lift from The Matrix.

“The idea of my character becoming ‘The One’…..that’s not a Matrix joke. I think that idea of ‘the One’ is originally from that old Hong Kong kung fu folklore, a long time ago. It makes sense to us, with the story of a man from nowhere becoming a Superhero, the One, is commonly used in kung fu novels or comic books in the old days. I think The Matrix took that idea. So for me it’s our traditional story structure.”

Like Tarantino, Chow has the knack of finding actors considered past their prime by the powers that be in the studios, and giving them a new lease of cinematic life. Hardened kung fu nerds certainly appreciate the cast that Chow assembled: “Yuen Wah (who has appeared in countless movies including the seminal Fist of Fury) was always in my mind because he has never left the movie industry in Hong Kong. He has been acting in TV comedy for a long time. I saw him on TV every day, so he was straightforward to cast. When I thought about the landlord Yuen Wah was the first person to come to mind. The landlady did take a long long time to find, someone who is old and fat and can do all these stunts, it was very difficult.”

In the end, Chow settled for Qiu Yuen who was – amongst other things – a Bond girl, appearing in The Man with the Golden Gun in 1974. The landlady, one of the most memorable characters from the film, is almost like a direct lift from the old Shaw Brothers comedy The House of 72 Tenants. Both Wah and Yuen were synonymous with the great films that came out of the Shaw Brothers stable, classics such as The Five Venoms, The Wu Tang Clan, The One Armed Swordsman and others. Even the sets of Kung Fu Hustle look deliberately like the wobbly sets on the sound stage where a majority of Shaw Brothers films were made.

“If you ask me about influences I would say the Shaw Brothers’ movies in the 60s influenced Kung Fu Hustle more than any others,” says Chow.

As an actor and a kung fu fighter there are already the inevitable comparisons with Chinese cinema’s first and greatest superstar Bruce Lee. Chow is flattered and recalls The Big Boss, the first film that he ever saw.

“I remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday. We were in a very run-down theater, but I didn’t mind it at all. I was simply overwhelmed by the movie experience. Watching this film in the darkness, I felt as if my heart was going to burst, and I had tears in my eyes. Bruce Lee was so incredible, not only because of his martial arts expertise, but also because of his furious spirit. He just filled the screen. He became everything to me. I decided then that I wanted to be him – I wanted to be Bruce Lee,” he says.

“Being a martial arts expert was really my first career choice; being an actor was the second – after all, that’s exactly what Bruce Lee was,” says Chow.

Despite his success at home and abroad, Chow still hasn’t achieved the sort of superstar status that gets Jackie Chan mobbed when he returns to China.

“No, I’m not a big star like Jackie Chan. I’m more like a film producer, a filmmaker, and I think that’s how they look at me there. I’m absolutely free all the time, nobody chases after me. I don’t have those problems. I’m not an idol or a star. Actually I make a movie once every three years, so people don’t really remember who I am,” he says modestly.

Chow, then, is hot. There is an inevitable Kung Fu Hustle sequel underway, as well as talk of a project with Hong Kong horror master Tsui Hark.

“We are brainstorming at the moment, lots of different ideas, rehearsals, but mostly the sequel is not better than the first film so it is a very hard job,” says Chow.

His days as an all rounder may be over: with his new found status, he can assemble the team that he needs to get his vision on the screen and no longer has to – by necessity – b e involved in every stage of the process.

“Right now my plan is just to focus on directing for my next project. Not to act, direct and write the script and produce – all that work at the same time is really tough.”

Where does you find the energy?

“I don’t know. But that’s true, every time I complete a movie and I look back I ask myself how I did it. Sometimes I don’t understand how I could do so much work at the same time. But I get it done.”

For the sake of the entire Hong Kong film industry, that’s good news.

Filed under: Uncategorized

A short talk with Omar from The Mars Volta

Prog now!

Their new album Octahedron is imminent and it’s a fantastic piece of work. This is a transcript of an interview done a few years ago essentially for a sidebar on prog that appeared in Metal Hammer.

The Mars Volta

What is prog?

“Progressive means pushing the boundaries of music, always trying new things. I don;t think it means that you sound like Yes circa 1973. I mean in another hundred years are we still going to be listening to songs that have that same verse chorus bridge verse chorus structure? It needs to push forward. There’s something that John Wetton says ona King Crimson album: “Well here’s our next assault on culture’ and that’s what I hope we’re doing, not that we would dare to compare outrselves with King Crimson.”

Do you consider what you do to be prog rock?

“I hope so, I hope it is progressive. It’s for other people to say whether or not we always succeed in being progressive, but we always try to do something new. I know that we do sometimes repeat ourselves. I have such a short attention span and get burned out on the old stuff really really quickly so we are constantly trying new things.”

Why are so many prog bands embarassed to be called prog?

“A lot of people are quite happy with music that doesn’t do anything particularly different and that’s fine. We had that annoying person Courtney Love hanging around us at the beginning and she was like ‘You guys are gonna have to tighten up…tighten up’ and I was like Why?”

Some ‘prog’ bands seem to be retrogressive – ie apeing the sounds and styles of Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis, Rush etc – can they still be prog?

“No I don’t think so. When I was in At The Drive In I felt so limited. We toured with bands that just blew us away, who were doing something different every night and that made me feel like such a fraud. We were getting a lot of attention, probably because we were so young, but to me everything we were doing with At the Drive In had already been done better by bands like Nation Of Ulysses. I don’t see any point in repeating things.”

What do you think of the following interpretation: in the 70s prog rock got too indulgent, with too many guitar solos and 20 minute songs, so punk came along and brought things back to basics, killing prog and staying true to the spirit of rock’n’roll?

“I’m not sure. I mean, after punk it was really unfashionable but then you had bands like Public Image Ltd who were doing similar stuff, mixing up rock and dub. I see us as having as much to do with Black Flag as with Can. I mean, in terms of what we listen to it’s more krautrock than prog. You listen to Greg Ginn’s guitar sound though and that’s out there.”

Is there more than one kind of prog rock? [eg are Tool part of the same prog rock as Dream Theater etc]

“I’m not putting them down but I listened to Dream Theater and I can’t really see that they are doing the same thing as us at all.”

Is a high standard of musicianship essential to prog?

“Well as one of the non-musicians in this band we’ve always surrounded ourselves with people who can really play who really know what they are doing.”

Is it possible to make prog cool again?

“I don’t care whether people think that it’s cool or not.”

Do bands like Opeth, Tool and The Mars Volta have more to do with the original spirit of prog than the likes of Dream Theater or Queensryche?

“Well that’s for other people to say.”

Filed under: Classic Rock, Music journalism, Progressive rock, Psychedelia

Did punk really kill prog?

This is a rant published a few years ago in Classic Rock, my big idea that I continue to bang on about at length.

Pistols 76

IN all of the interminable books, memoirs, articles and TV documentaries contemplating the meaning and legacy of punk rock, there’s one thing that they all seem to agree upon: punk rock killed progressive rock. “Almost overnight, after the Sex Pistols, prog rock came to a halt,” declaimed one pundit on a recent BBC documentary. A neat assessment, very well phrased, the final word on the subject. Apart from the fact that it is totally untrue.

In the same period that saw the Pistols shoot and burn, not only did prog not die, but in fact it enjoyed one of its golden ages. Pink Floyd, Yes, ELP and Genesis all released some of their biggest albums and played some of their most gargantuan UK tours. New bands like Rush, Kansas and Happy The Man were starting to break through. And in the immediate aftermath of punk, former three chord bands like Simple Minds, Ultravox, Magazine, Wire and Public Image Ltd were playing something that was definitely progressive rock in all but name.

The fact that Johnny Rotten once wore a Pink Floyd t-shirt with the words “I HATE” scrawled in Biro above the band’s monicker is always held up as evidence that punk rock was some kind of reaction to prog. Yet Rotten nee Lydon was a huge fan of Hawkwind, Van Der Graaf Generator, Can and various other bands whose progness was never in any doubt. Punk was more about a burning desire to join in and make music. There are aspects of the music scene in the mid 70s that were loathsome to many fans, not least the fact that many bands never really bothered to play here, but none of these were particular to prog rock.

Prog, then as now, was just one of many competing strands of post-psychedelic rock. It wasn’t a particularly dominant one: despite the fact that some prog bands enjoyed huge sales, you virtually never saw bands like Gnidrolog, Renaissance or Jethro Tull on TV or heard them on the radio. And the attitude of the music press at that time was almost wholly as sneery as that of the mainstream press today. It was perfectly possible to be a young music fan and actually remain completely unaware of the very existence of prog. The idea that punk “had to happen” because a whole generation was idly fuming away at the complexity of King Crimson or the overblown theatricality of Rick Wakeman’s – admittedly daft – staging of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table on ice is just absurd.

And as a crop-haired angry young man myself, I can’t recall ever wasting a minute of 1976 , 77 or 78 thinking about how much I hated prog. Like most of my contemporaries I was having too much of a good time to really give a toss about prog, disco, rockabilly, pub rock or chart pop one way or another. There were too many other things in the world to hate. If there was anything, musically, that I couldn’ts stand it was the constant diet of crap novelty records and golden oldies and smug DJs that ruled Radio One and Top Of The Pops in those days.

It was in the pages of NME, Melody Maker and Sounds that we were told that prog was the class enemy and encouraged to feel hatred. This was a revolution and, to paraphrase VI Lenin, what use is a revolution without firing squads? The thesis was that punk was a product of the salt-of-the-Earth discontented proletariat while prog was made exclusively by evil right wing toffs and consumed only by Tory voters, fox hunters and those addled by false consciousness. The reality, of course, was that while prog certainly had its share of former public school boys, it was probably no more a preoduct of poshos than of punk: the difference seemed to be that at least the prog rockers were honest about their origins while public schoolboys like Joe Strummer felt that it was important to fake a prolier than thou past for themselves. At my comprehensive school, as well as a small smattering of punks, the popular artists of the day in 1976 were Frank Zappa, Mahavishnu Orchestra and – for some reason – The Incredible String Band. Conversely, the boys from the nearby fee paying school were always trying to convince you that they were “too street” to listen to anything more compicated than The Ramones and that their spare time was spent sniffing glue, getting nicked by the pigs (maaaan) and smashing the state.

The attitude of prog musicians to punk was sometimes pretty condescending: Rick Wakeman signed a letter to the head of his label A&M asking to have the Sex Pistols dropped; Roger Waters made it clear that he hated punk; the lack of musicianship was decried. You could sense that they felt threatened though obviously they needn’t have. Outside of the fantasy world created by the music press, it was prog that really ruled.

In the official history, 1977 was the year of Anarchy in the UK, the Clash, no future, maaaan. But it was also the year of Rush’s A Farewell to Kings, Pink Floyd’s Animals, Yes’s Going for the One, Genesis’s Wind & Wuthering, all Top 10 albums (Yes, reunited with Rick Wakeman, going in at Number one and also enjoying a Top 10 single with Wonderous Stories), all accompanied by massive tours, their biggest ever.

In the last years of the 70s, they still continued to outsell punk bands both on album and live: the decade culminated with one of the most massive prog albums ever, Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

It wasn’t just the same old faces: in the late 70s and early 80s new bands like UK, IQ, Pendragon, Twelfth Night, Marillion, After The Fire and Pallas all formed at this time, while a realignment of prog’s superpowers created bands like Asia. It says much about the hubris of the media that having failed to notice these bands, there is a sort of collective assumption that it doesn’t exist. With practically no press, radio or TV coverage anywhere, these bands regularly sold out shows and sold millions of albums.

What’s more, away from the stadium level bands, the thriving UK progressive underground continued to make challenging and innovative music: Soft Machine, Henry Cow (and successor band The Art Bears), Van der Graaf Generator and Bill Nelson (formerly of Be Bop Deluxe and later Red Noise) made some of their best albums around this time.

Ultravox (pre-Ure!)

Perhaps even more interesting were the bands who emerged in the immediate aftermath of punk who tried to make music that did more than repeat the same three chord formula. Cabaret Voltaire from Sheffield incorporated electronics, sampling and Hawkwind-like light shows; Glasgow’s Simple Minds, particularly on their Steve Hillage-produced 1981 double album Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Cal’, incorporated many elements from classic Genesis along with krautrock, disco and the avant garde; Ultravox, on their third classic album Systems Of Romance, made an album that seemed to continue the direction that Roxy Music abandoned after For Your Pleasure.

Indeed the fact that many of the post-punk generation were making a new kind of progressive lost was not lost on some more conservative commentators: “It’s bloody Curved Air,” sneered Nick Lowe when asked about Siouxsie & The Banshees, whose first three albums definitely pushed the boundaries of punk rock to their limits. And when Wire – arguably a synthesis of Ramones-style minimalist punk and high prog complexity – recorded a 15 minute track called Crazy About Love for a John Peel Show session in 1979, he grumbled that it was a step backwards.

Rather than punk seeing prog off there’s a case for saying that it was prog that ultimately triumphed: there were effectively two separate and distinct schools of progressive rock active in the 80s and 90s. A nice argument, yet punk too continued to thrive throughout the 80s and 90s when its one-time champions had abandoned it too.

Today, prog is almost all pervasive: there are so many bands, from the Dream Theater prog metal school to the experimental post-indie rock of Radiohead to leftfield superstars Tool, who can all be termed prog and are indeed comfortable with the tag. The influence of King Crimson, Pink Floyd and Yes is ridiculously all pervasive and King Crimson themselves still make incredibly cutting edge music. Not bad for something that supposedly “came to a halt” 30 years ago.

This is all a rather neat demonstration that things are never so simple as to be choices of either/or. You write off entire genres, styles, bands and subcultures at your peril.

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