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How a new generation embraced the complex sounds of the ’70s
Fifty years since peak prog, streaming has resurrected what punks tried to bury.
From left, Sam Cope, Liam Gough and Selene Messinis are among a new wave of prog rockers.Credit: Simon Schluter
The word “journey” comes up a lot in this story. Fifty years ago, it was right up front of a hit album by Rick Wakeman, he of the long golden hair and wizard’s cape dramatically draped between encircling tiers of synthesizers. The album was Journey to The Centre of The Earth. The image of the caped synth sorcerer was peak prog.
Prog? The term can twist rock fans into pretzels of joy or derision. With its multi-part neo-classical forms and uber-muso chops, some felt progressive rock was so elaborate and pretentious by the mid 1970s that revolution was called for. Punk, as any pop storybook will tell you, set righteous fire to those pompous designs.
Rick Wakeman in action in June 1973.
“The tide was turning and you could sense it,” Wakeman confirms today, back home in England after a 50th anniversary journey across America. “It always happens and always will as a new generation moves into teenage years and doesn’t want the music of their predecessors.
‘A lot of young people have discovered many differing kinds of music, including prog rock. Which is wonderful.’
Rick Wakeman
“It’s a bit different in today’s world though,” he says, alluding to the free streaming deluge that unshackles music from time and fashion. “Strangely enough, a lot of young people have discovered many differing kinds of music, including prog rock. Which is wonderful.”
And kind of mind-blowing. Here at the Cross Street Music Hall in Brunswick on a Sunday arvo, my toe is finding great difficulty tapping to a hair-raising synth-guitar-drums trio called Mad Vantage. Their first, very long selection is in 9/4, composer and synth player Selene Messinis will tell me later. There’s a middle bit in 6/4 and a double-kick drum solo in 17/4. I don’t do complex fractions but trust me, it’s exciting.
The tricksy time signatures illustrate a pitch of dexterity that pop/rock tends, as a rule, to find surplus to requirements — punk rock expressly so. To Sam Cope, whose prog band Psi-Phi is headlining today, the early ’70s Focus album he fell for as a teenaged piano student was “an invitation to go longer-form, borrow a little bit more from classical ideas of composition and structure”.
Selene Messinis, Sam Cope and Liam Gough have embraced a more complex musical style.Credit: Simon Schluter
Psi-Phi’s rhythm section is Will Hull-Brown and Ryan Monro, formerly of jazz-funk band the Cat Empire. Their jazz-trained guitarist, Kumar Shome, also plays with Mad Vantage because, well, not many could. Cope says playing with musicians of this calibre is half the fun. “Prog is more interesting than record industry-directed pop. It gives the composer and the player and the listener licence to go on more of a journey.”
In between their swashbuckling long-form originals, Psi-Phi’s journey includes astonishingly faithful covers of ’70s classics by Focus, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and Yes. The latter band, incidentally, is a recurring part of Rick Wakeman’s journey. Names keep popping up like that in the vast prog family tree.
‘It gives the composer and the player and the listener licence to go on more of a journey.’
Sam Cope
Other big ones from the original UK prog wave include King Crimson, Jethro Tull, Genesis and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Aficionados might add Van der Graaf Generator, Camel or Gentle Giant; Rush (from Canada), Magma (France)… but lips soon begin to purse over omissions and inclusions in this conversation. If you’re having it, as I find myself doing with Robert Ancell, a Melbourne gig promoter in a King Crimson T-shirt, you’re in too deep to turn back.
“I’m an ex-musician from the old prog school. We supported a lot of the bands you might have known back in the day but then – punk,” he says ruefully. “What I’ve always wanted to do is bring back progressive rock as a potential commercial consideration. It’s a dream,” he concedes, but lately he likes what he’s hearing.
“I got quite emotional when Psi-Phi played that Focus song,” he says, as Beautiful Bedlam, which includes his sons Luke and Scott, prepares to take the stage of another triple-band bill in Fitzroy. Beautiful Bedlam are loud and dense: heavy prog or prog metal is a whole other conversation that skips a generation to Tool, Dream Theater, Opeth and other stuff that Robert and I … well, we appreciate.
In that progressive spirit, he suggests I check out Firetail, a local outfit coming from a jazz-soul direction. Mildlife is another recommendation, a groove ensemble with an international following, light on time signature shenanigans but with plenty of retro-prog textures and freewheeling structures on their latest album, Chorus.
“It’s a hard thing to lock down in genre terms,” says drummer Liam Gough of Tambourine Jesus, a progressive power trio comprising former members of the Teskey Brothers, who launched their debut album in May. “To me, it’s a mixture of sounds and also arrangements … Pop audiences like the familiarity of verse-chorus-verse-bridge-solo [etc] … Prog tends to be a lot more adventurous in that area.”
Appropriately enough, one element that plays little part in the current crop’s quest is nostalgia. The old prog-versus-punk war means little to Dave Carr from Fabulous Contraption, a Sydney instrumental quartet scaling death-defying scaffolds of electric guitar, Moog synthesizer, six-stringed bass and drums.
“Discovering prog was kind of a reverse journey through history for me,” Carr says, beginning with the quirky harmonic ideas he heard in Nirvana and the extended song structures of Metallica. “That led to [Swedish guitarist] Yngwie Malmsteen playing classical metal fusion … then getting into Pink Floyd and King Crimson.”
Pink Floyd in 1973, the year they released The Dark Side of the Moon.Credit: Getty Images
These days, those painstakingly unearthed connections are coded in streaming algorithms. “Teenagers listen to music in a very different way to what I did,” Carr says. “They’ve got their Spotify playlists and the types of things that my [guitar and banjo] students are into are very disparate.”
More formally, the kinds of music explored in school and tertiary education systems also plays a big part in the changing complexion of rock bands down the pub.
When Melbourne music educator Phil Bywater was at school in the ’80s, “school music was classical music. You could have rock bands, but they were not part of the curriculum. That’s massively changed, especially in the last 10 to 15 years.
“Now pretty much every school has some kind of rock music program. Some kids will still just want to punk it out, but for the ones who don’t want to do that, there’s a whole structure around, ‘OK, let’s teach you how to do this shit with more complexity, with more sophistication, with more technical proficiency’.”
For prodigies like Selene Messina, who started playing classical piano at four, education and open-slather streaming made for a perfect storm.
“It was mostly instrumental music that appealed to me, so I didn’t have that kind of angsty singer-songwriter phase in high school, like most people do,” she says. “And then [at the Victorian College of the Arts] I started getting into this prog stuff through jazz artists, like the Japanese pianist Hiromi. I had a bunch of metalhead drummer friends as well, so that was a new sound I got excited about.
“The availability and access to different sounds is just unlimited these days, even just through [ubiquitous computer recording app] GarageBand: kids are way more on top of it than I ever was. So it’s only going to get more accessible and more weird and more wonderful.”
Rick Wakeman, for his part, is chuffed to hear that Psi-Phi have the chops and audacity to cover Heart of the Sunrise by his old band Yes, and that Fabulous Contraption and Mad Vantage are pushing elaborate old-school synth-rock back to centre stage. “I’ll be checking them out for sure,” he says.
But he’s also remarkably forgiving after being usurped and pilloried by a generation of punks for pushing rock in the direction of Bach, Grieg and Prokofiev. “I really liked some punk bands,” he says nostalgically. “If you only know a couple of chords and can’t tune the guitar… you can still have fun.”
1974: Peak Prog
Clockwise from top left: Journey to The Centre of The Earth; Red; Tubular Bells; Queen II; The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway; The Dark Side of the Moon.
Rick Wakeman’s Journey to The Centre of The Earth
Inspired by Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, the Yes synth guy’s rock-orchestral telling of Jules Verne’s sci-fi classic was the 10th biggest album in Australia in 1974. He’s planning to bring it back here in 2025.
King Crimson’s Red
Guitarist Robert Fripp’s deathly serious and endlessly mutating ensemble split after this sumptuous and sinister six-track heavy prog masterpiece, later cited as seminal by Kurt Cobain. The brand was reborn in the ’80s. But did they ever top Starless?
Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells
Studio wunderkind Oldfield played everything on this 40-million-selling classical-rock suite, released in ’73 but hitting critical mass in ’74. The creepy opening theme’s three bars of 7/8 then one bar of 9/8 made a perfectly unsettling motif for The Exorcist.
Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon
Another ’73 hangover that kept on giving, not least to the Sex Pistols. Johnny Rotten’s Pink Floyd T-shirt defaced with the qualifier “I HATE” is almost as famous.
Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway
Peter Gabriel’s last adventure with Genesis was an epic double with impenetrable narrative about a Puerto-Rican kid named Rael on some kind of urban American odyssey. Beware Lamia, Slippermen, Carpet Crawlers and slubberdegullions.
Queen II
Their strangest, proggest album coincided with being booed offstage at Sunbury ’74. Good thing they didn’t play The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. A year later Bohemian Rhapsody condensed the multi-part prog principle into pop radio gold.
Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells in concert tour includes Sydney’s State Theatre on August 3, Brisbane’s Fortitude Music Hall on August 11 and Melbourne’s Palais Theatre on August 17. Other dates at davidroywilliams.com