I’ve not had any prog rock for a while so here is Italy’s finest, Premiata Forneria Marconi (or PFM,) with a beezer. (Just wait for the hook about one and a half minutes in.)

Thank God if sometimes your oyster holds a pearl.

PFM: The World Became the World

And for added value here’s a video of the band performing Celebration on The Old Grey Whistle Test.

I was watching “Prog at the BBC” last week. It featured the usual suspects – except for me Soft Machine always tipped too far over into seemingly improvised tootling to be prog.

But they also showed Atomic Rooster.

Atomic Rooster?

Fair enough their drummer Carl Palmer went on to become a member of those highpriests of the overblown, ELP, but Atomic Rooster themselves were more or less straightforward rock (even if the Wiki link above does say they were a “progressive” rock band.)

As witness Tomorrow Night, the track played on the programme (by which time Palmer had already left):-

Atomic Rooster:€“ Tomorrow Night </center.

I must have been one of the last to catch up with the news of the death last month of “Woolly” Wolstenholme, one of the founders of prog rock group Barclay James Harvest. I almost skipped the Guardian’s obituary page on Friday. I’m glad I didn’t now. (Though the picture does the band no favours, making them look like a bunch of effetes. Still, it was the seventies, a lot of bands looked like that then.)

BJH were one of the main purveyors of the branch of prog rock that took the adjective “symphonic” and Wolstenholme was perhaps the main driver of these leanings towards classical music.

They were famous notorious for touring with a live orchestra – though they gave that up pretty quickly as being too expensive.

While not providing the bulk of the group’s songs – John Lees and Les Holroyd did that – Wolstenholme’s contributions lent the band a distinctive tone.

The fullest extent of Wolstenholme’s classical extensions to their work is probably the track Moonwater from the Baby James Harvest album.

A more typical flavour of his songwriting can be gleaned from listening to Beyond The Grave from the album Time Honoured Ghosts or Sea of Tranquility from Gone To Earth though Harbour from XII (of which this is a performance by successor band John Lees’ Barclay James Harvest) is more folkish. I have a sneaking regard for Ra from Octoberon but haven’t found a net-playable version.

XII was the last BJH album to which Woolly contributed. It featured the track below, which seems to be the favourite of those devotees who have posted on You Tube.

Barclay James Harvest: In Search Of England

Woolly’s death is even sadder in that as a sufferer from depression, he took his own life.

Stuart John “Woolly” Wolstenholme. 15/4/47-13/12/10. So it goes.

I happened to hear this song by the Kinks on the radio the other day. I thought (again) how strange it is. It seems to have as many galloping hiccups as “Bohemian Rhapsody” and sounds as if it has at least three different melodies. As a result I began to wonder if there were different time signatures involved and if perhaps it could be claimed as a progenitor of prog rock. After all, the Kinks songwriter and éminence grise Ray Davies has been credited with inventing heavy metal with the riff driven You Really Got Me and All Day And All Of The Night so why not prog too? Note here that his song writing skills undoubtedly rank as high as anyone in the rock/pop pantheon – and I mean anyone.

So I listened to it again more carefully and, yes, there are key changes, but, to my ears anyway, it follows a resolute 2/2 throughout. (Either that or it’s a quick 4/4.)

Despite the apparent complexity, it’s actually very simple rhythmically.

The man was/is a genius. Hear for yourself.

The Kinks:Autumn Almanac

I mentioned Procol Harum a few posts ago. When I wrote about America by The Nice I said, under the influence of a programme I’d seen on the history of the form on BBC 3 or 4, that it seemed that was where Prog Rock began. However it is arguable that Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade Of Pale, with its debt to Air on the G String, is a truer progenitor.

Among other reasons, A Whiter Shade Of Pale is famous for the opacity of its lyric. I confess to a soft spot for the follow up single, Homburg, (based more on Sheep May Safely Graze) where the lyric is not quite so opaque. The verses are a shade apocalyptic but not the refrain.

Verse 2 runs like this:
The Town Clock in the market square stands waiting for the hour,
When its hands they both turn backwards and on meeting will devour
Both themselves and also any fool who dares to tell the time,
And the sun and moon will shatter and the signposts cease to sign.

SF/fantasy imagery or what?

But then we get a refrain dealing with (a lack of) sartorial elegance.
Your trouser cuffs are dirty and your shoes are laced up wrong,
You’d better take off your homburg cause your overcoat is too long.

Utterly bizarre.

I couldn’t find a version where the first few notes are not omitted.

Edited to add. I have now.

Since the nice Mr David O’List has commented on one of my previous posts about his early ground-breaking band I thought I’d link to the You Tube rendering of America (2nd Amendment) performed by the Nice – credited on the label to Sondheim, Bernstein, Emerlist Davjack – so you could hear what we were both rabbitting on about.

The embedding is of the long version as on the single. There is no video with the clip; just a picture of the band. I avoided the shorter four minute cut (which was given a play on Radio 2’s Sounds Of The Sixties a couple of months back) as it has, to my ears, a clumsy edit about ¾ of the way through.

The single is sub-titled 2nd Amendment. The second amendment to the US constitution is of course the famous one about the right to bear arms.

I was at school at the time of the single’s release and my music teacher expressed interest in the “rock version of the New World symphony” that he’d heard about – as I said in my previous post about it the track quotes from Dvorak – so I brought America in and he played it to the class. All went well until the spoken bit at the end where he went ballistic about “ruining a perfectly good piece of music with political rubbish.” So much for social comment.

Not only was this single over twice as long as was then common, the track was also, except for the spoken outro, an instrumental. By that time in the sixties, unlike earlier in the decade, instrumental releases had become unusual and hits extremely rare. A doubly brave decision, then.

This, it seems, is where prog rock may have started.

The Nice: America