song of the week 32: focus - la cathédrale de strasbourg

At the weekend I was out drinking with a couple of fellow quinquagenarians.

At some point the conversation must have got round to seventies Dutch prog/jazz/rock bands. It can happen.

We all agreed that Focus were just great...

80s balladeers uncovered!

Stackridge @ 100 Club, 6th November

What we learned tonight:

• Stackridge have been going for ages
  
• In fact, they performed at the first Glastonbury Festival in 1970
• They probably get filed under "folk" in HMV but I can spot elements of prog and guitar pop too...
  
• They've often been compared to the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band
• ...which may or may not be due to their occasional Wurzel-like trombone-based West Country oompah songs (boo!)
  
• But wait, they also do a nice line in BigStaresque jangly guitar songs (hoorah!)
  
• What's more, in another life they were the Korgis:

Double hoorah!!

reasons to feel guilty, part 3

Having extolled the virtues of the Carpenters and the Style Council in recent posts, I now stride fearlessly on in the quest for a hat-trick of Guilty Pleasures (TM). This week BBC4 brought to our homes its five-night Prog Britannia season in an appreciation of the 1970s musical behemoth that was progressive rock.

Like the music itself, the season had its ups and downs. The hour-and-a-half historical documentary which opened the season seemed to claim that it was at the very time when punk appeared to drag popular music out of the Court of the Crimson King and into a sweaty, pogo-ing crowd at the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall, that the music of the main prog acts (Yes, ELP, King Crimson) had begun to cross an ill-defined line into overblown self-indulgence. In reality, you only have to look at Rick Wakeman's spangly cape and huge bank of keyboards and listen to the cod mysticality in, say, Jon Anderson's largely nonsensical lyrics to know that self-restraint was never the prog way.

It's a fair enough assessment though that prog was a logical development of some of the psychedelic meanderings which had begun to appear, for example, in later Beatles albums, and for musicians involved--Steve Howe (Yes), Carl Palmer (ELP), Bill Bruford (Yes/King Crimson)--to claim that they were attempting to combine the complex structures of classical music, the irregular rhythmic metres of jazz and world musics and their own extreme instrumental dexterity, and so create something genuinely original.

Some of the programmes in the season were quite painful to watch. Nothing to do with the music though. Two words. Phil. Collins. Now, I have to admit a certain affection for the early Collins-era Genesis albums, Trick of the Tail, And Then There Were Three, Duke. Lord knows though, it's difficult to warm to him as a man... We'll leave it at that.

Anyway, that's not to generally denigrate the music. I reckon there are some good tunes buried in there among all those 27/8 time signatures and all that instrumental noodling. How about this YouTube gem for example, from the 1971 Genesis album Nursery Cryme? At least Collins could hack it as a drummer...