What if we informed you that each one these endlessly perpetuated tropes for many years about punks and prog rockers being mortal enemies had been a load of hogwash from the very begin? The press performed up punk’s Yr Zero stance and New Wave’s no hippies agenda, however the entrance traces of the late 70s rock revolution had been truly filled with prog admirers. And there was far more overlap between the 2 worlds than you may think.
On reflection, possibly issues couldn’t have been every other method. For the first-gen punks to realize even half of their iconoclastic goals, they in all probability had little alternative however to take a scorched-earth view of rock’s previous, burning their bridges, gleefully stomping out the ashes with their Doc Martens, and declaring the up to date musical canvas a tabula rasa. However that doesn’t imply it was all legit.
Punk’s prog-hate marketing campaign kicked off early. One in every of John Lydon’s most attention-getting clothes in The Intercourse Pistols’ early days was a Pink Floyd t-shirt on which he’d scrawled the preface “I hate…” However many years later, with the stakes exponentially lowered, he confessed to The Quietus’s John Doran, “you’d have to be daft as a brush to say you didn’t like Pink Floyd. They’ve done great stuff.” The erstwhile Johnny Rotten even got here inside a spiky hair’s breadth of singing with them. “When they came to LA,” he revealed, “they asked me would I come on and do a bit of Dark Side Of The Moon with them and the idea thrilled me no end…. I came so close to doing it.”
The Van Der Graaf Generator connection
However even within the Pistols’ heyday, Lydon was already coming clear about his prog influences. In a 1977 Capital Radio interview, he sang the praises of Van Der Graaf Generator’s Peter Hammill to DJ Tommy Vance. “He’s great,” stated Lydon, “a true original, I’ve liked him for years… I love all his stuff.” For his half, Hammill had prefigured punk quite remarkably with 1975’s prescient Nadir’s Huge Probability, which probably helped set the desk for the Pistols and was duly singled out by Lydon on the radio present. In 1979, when Lydon had already moved on to the artier environs of Public Picture Ltd., Hammill informed Trouser Press’s Jon Younger, “When the whole new wave thing started up, I gave myself a long wink in the mirror.”
California hardcore hero Jello Biafra of The Lifeless Kennedys had a comfortable spot for Van Der Graaf too, telling The Phrase’s Jim Irvin, “They were a darker side of prog. With teeth… I liked good prog, space-rock. I still love Magma and Hawkwind.” The latter band was a formative affect on Pistols guitarist Steve Jones too.
Punk and prog within the UK
The Damned beat The Intercourse Pistols to the punch within the 70s by being the primary UK punks to launch a report, 1976’s “New Rose” single. However they went as far as to draft Floyd drummer Nick Mason to provide their second LP, Music for Pleasure. Guitarist Brian James informed NME’s Charles Shaar Murray, “I listened to the Floyd’s albums, and they sounded as if he knew his way around a studio.” By 1980, The Damned unveiled undeniably proggy epics just like the 17-minute “Curtain Call.”
The Stranglers had been immersed within the early British punk scene however had been a little bit older than their friends (frontman Hugh Cornwell performed in a teenage band with Richard Thompson). So they’d extra alternative to take in the art-rock aura of the early 70s and the garage-psych sounds of the earlier decade. Even on their first album, they had been unspooling tracks just like the prolonged prog-punk suite “Down in the Sewer,” and keyboardist Dave Greenfield’s old-school sound was a signifier from the beginning. Bassist J.J. Burnel later informed Uncut’s Nick Hasted, “Dave hadn’t heard of the Doors. He was a prog-rocker, into bands like Yes. Playing like [Doors keyboardist] Ray Manzarek was just weirdly natural to him.”
Buzzcocks offshoot/post-punk heroes Journal additionally got here inside a hair’s breadth of prog on their first album. The comparatively rococo likes of “Burst,” “The Great Beautician in the Sky,” and “Parade” ran in extra of 5 minutes and felt nearer to classic Roxy Music than to something their friends had been placing out. Even post-punk poster boys Various TV’s second album, 1979’s Vibing Up the Senile Man, eschews in-your-face riffs and jackhammer beats for what can solely be described as avant-prog experimentation. Immediately, streaming websites make no bones about it, categorizing the album merely as prog rock.
Blondie and prog
Throughout the fence, there was no scarcity of the outdated guard leaping in to combine it up with the brand new crew, and each side had been the higher for it. King Crimson important man Robert Fripp lent his liquid guitar tones to Blondie’s eerie “Fade Away and Radiate” on their 1978 breakthrough, Parallel Strains. In 1980, he informed ZigZag’s Kris Wants, “at Hammersmith Odeon, Chris [Stein, Blondie guitarist] could say to me two minutes before going on, ‘Hey, Iggy‘s turned up, do you wanna play ‘Funtime’ with Iggy?’ I said I’d never heard the song, how does it go? He said, ‘B flat, C to D, and it goes to E a couple of times,’ and then went on stage. It didn’t matter I’d never heard the song, come on and do it.”
Steve Hillage
Peter Gabriel had already assimilated a New Wave affect into his late 70s solo work when he produced and co-wrote Sham 69 singer Jimmy Pursey’s solo single “Animals Have More Fun/SUS.” The UK punk hero all of a sudden sounded nearer to Gabriel’s publish punk/artwork rock amalgam than the ability chord ramalama of Pursey’s outdated band.
However maybe the quintessential instance of the prog-punk connection got here when Pursey was nonetheless a Sham man. The 1978 Studying Rock competition marked the primary time the annual occasion had been dominated by punk and New Wave artists. Along with Sham 69, the primary day of the three-day competition included The Jam, Penetration, Ultravox, Radio Stars, and extra. However there was an out-of-control skinhead aspect within the crowd who took it upon themselves to stomp any longhairs who crossed their path.
Because it occurs, Pursey had unexpectedly befriended Steve Hillage lately, when one of many British music papers introduced them collectively for what they anticipated could be a confrontational interview. The other occurred, and so they struck up a mutual admiration society, so Pursey invited Hillage to hitch Sham 69 for his or her upcoming Studying slot. As lead guitarist for psychedelic house cadets Gong and a quite trippy solo artist, the wool-hatted, hirsute Hillage was about as hippie as you possibly can get. So when he started peeling off lacerating licks amid Sham’s endearingly out-of-tune assault on the latter’s anthem of togetherness, “If the Kids are United,” it despatched a message loud and clear to the teeming lots.
That ought to have been the tip of the entire punks vs. hippies canard proper there, however as soon as a falsehood’s been unfold, it’s powerful to wind it down. Hillage even went on to provide a slew of New Wave information, by Easy Minds, Robyn Hitchcock, Actual Life, and others. Trying again many years later, he informed Malcolm Dome in Report Collector, “I understood that a lot of punk musicians came from a psychedelic background, and I had respect for what they were doing. This was reciprocated. For instance, the first time I met Johnny Rotten, he came up and pointed at me… said, Flying Teapot, [a classic Gong album] and gave me the thumbs-up sign.”
By the early 80s, the inevitable started to happen. British youngsters who got here of age being transported by their older siblings’ Camel and Mild Big information started forming bands like Marillion, Twelfth Evening, and IQ, merging prog influences with a post-punk edge and claiming their very own piece of the pie, as neo-prog grew to become a subgenre to be reckoned with. However the connections had been there earlier than punk even existed. You possibly can go all the best way again to proto-punk godhead Lou Reed’s 1972 solo debut, the place he was accompanied by Sure’s Rick Wakeman and Steve Howe.
The Ramones prog connection
And if we will agree that punk qua punk started with the roar of The Ramones (who by no means deserted their longhaired look), the battle is over earlier than it’s begun. Not that CBGB’s authentic three-chord avatars ever dipped into odd signatures or Moog fanfares, however after Joey Ramone’s loss of life, an interesting little bit of historical past surfaced.
Joey’s private report assortment went up for public sale in 2013. It consisted of just about 100 items of vinyl he’d bought over time. There was scarcely a soupcon of New Wave or punk to be discovered. However nestled amongst a reasonably eclectic assemblage of albums had been basic LPs by Sure, Genesis, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, together with sprawling art-pop milestones like Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Street.
The picture of Joey banging his head to “Roundabout” or air-conducting the synth orchestra on the 11-minute “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding” is unimaginable to withstand. Punk aficionados bamboozled into anti-prog bias could not prefer it, however the details can’t be denied: There’s hardly a grain of sand separating Tales from Topographic Oceans and “Rockaway Beach.”
Have one other instance of punk and prog colliding? Tell us within the feedback under.
