Prog, Strangeness and Charm

I've been buying up quite a bit of old vinyl this year, mostly from the splendid market at Tynemouth station, where there are usually a couple of record stalls worthy of a good browse. Cheap too, £3-4 usually for a reasonably well looked after LP. I've picked up copies of albums by Kate Bush, Frank Zappa, Yes, Genesis, Martin Carthy & Dave Swarbrick, Jelly Roll Morton, and best of all Alex Glasgow. Should have perhaps anticipated that, being in the North East. There were a lot of old Lindisfarne and Tygers of Pan Tang albums too, if anyone's interested...

Anyway, it did strike me as ironic that a couple of these LPs were replacements for copies which I had owned and then ditched or sold as a stupid and callow youth. During a gradual period of musical revisionism, I persuaded myself to disown certain records by artists of the Prog Rock genre - which I am now busily reacquiring in Oxfam shops and market stalls across the land. There were a few records I hung onto during this musical Night Of The Long Knives - all my Pink Floyd stuff, a couple of Jethro Tull albums, and the Genesis live album from 1973. Other works by ELP, Marillion, Yes etc were handed over in a shame faced fashion to those arbiters of musical coolness on the counter at Selectadisc, where they were exchanged for a few quid to be spent on whatever C86 release was out that week.

It's not only vinyl copies of these previously rejected records which I have been buying again; I recently ordered from Amazon a double expanded CD of Hawkwind's marvellous Space Ritual. It's terrific stuff, maybe you have to be in the mood, but they were doing very similar things to German groups who became far more feted than themselves, in the cosmic / space rock genre. Or indeed Spacemen 3, who came a few years later and did a similar churning two chord drone with obvious debt to Hawkwind. I saw them at Hull Adelphi in the late 80's and a remember thinking 'hang on, these are just like Hawkwind!'

It's a truth universally acknowledged, in this house anyway, that a lot of the prog bands were huge influences on punk. Van Der Graaf Generator, King Crimson, Yes, and some of the more angular underground stuff too. Then there's the prog / folk crossover which is all sorts of cool these days but has been found to be equally risible down the ages; Comus and Roy Harper spring to mind, along with anyone who thought it was a good idea to keep playing for longer than three and a half minutes and to tinker with song structure, arrangement and instrumentation and lyrical influence.

I haven't undergone a wholesale rehabilitation; I'm not about to put aside three hours to listen to an ELP box set, or to make an apology for Tales From Topographic Oceans, but I have enjoyed revisiting a lot of this kind of stuff recently, with the benefit of a few years distance from the indie Year Zero when I turned my back on almost all of it. In a year when King Crimson have turned up in sample form on a Kanye West record and been covered by The Unthanks, maybe the prog rehabilitation is complete.