In the beginning...

As a new discovery (to me at least) I'd been listening to a lot of Big Big Train at the start of the year, and they're not afraid to wear their influences on their sleeves, and a big influence on them is obviously early Genesis (and especially Anthony Phillips) - and just lately they've inspired me to re-listen to the originals, and I've been soundtracking my short drive into work and the working day itself with the substantial Genesis back catalogue.

Although Marillion have their claims, Genesis must be the strongest contender for My First Prog Love. True, I heard Marillion first, but I didn't know they were prog at the time (to be fair, I didn't know what prog was) and I didn't get into them quite so deeply until a little later. To start from the beginning...

It was the summer of 1984, aged 16, and a friend and I had decided we liked Marillion, after seeing Garden Party on Top of the Pops, and hearing another friend's copy of the album Fugazi (still remember this as being more or less at the same time, but can't have been as Fugazi was a year after Garden Party!). They were different from any of the pop around at the time, and we fancied ourselves as poets (didn't all sixth fomers, as we were about to become?). The intricacy and, lets be honest, pretentiousness of their music and lyrics appealed to us. We hadn't heard much but we liked what we had.

My friend's uncle was a full blown 70s vintage prog-fan, and hearing that we liked Marillion suggested we should listen to Genesis, and lent us a couple of albums - Selling England By The Pound, and Trick Of The Tail, and thinking about it these remain my favourites. Is that just because they were the first I heard, or because the uncle had chosen wisely? I like to think it's the latter.

We did also have access to more, as at the time I was a saturday boy at the library in town, which had a record section, where loans were free to members of staff. In addition to the two LPs from Uncle, I borrowed Trespass (because I liked the cover) and what I now know to be a compilation called "Rock Theatre", which included one track from Selling England (I Know What I Like), three from Nursery Cryme (Harlequin, Harold The Barrel, and Fountain of Salmacis, and two from Foxtrot (Watcher of the Skies and the mighty Supper's Ready). Although by this time I was "into" Mike Oldfield and my first LP of his, Crises (from 1983) had shown you could have a piece of music that took up the whole of one side of an LP, Supper's Ready was the first exposure to a proper prog 20-minuter. Epic stuff, quite mind expanding for a teenage

 boy brought up on glam rock singles, the New Romantics and 80's electro-pop.

Of course, these were the days (God I sound old) before internet file sharing, when you bought vinyl LPs and cassettes (CDs were new and rare) and home taping was "killing music". It's true, I did my share of taping, but you had to find someone with the original to lend you, or hope it was in the record library before you could tape it, so it took a good couple of years before I'd heard everything by Genesis. Nowadays a few mouse clicks and you could hear just about everything they'd done in a few days, or download it (legally or not) to listen to later. Back then, I couldn't afford to buy all their albums, if they were even in the shops, and the record library didn't have them all either. I think I was half way through university when I'd finally heard everything they'd released (up to that point, at least), and had at least a cassett copy of them all. I should stress that although I was a home-taper, I've since bought at least one copy of everything Genesis released, in some cases two or more copies as they release re-mastered versions every few years!

Nothing quite touches the magic that surrounded those early explorations into their music, there was (and is) something special, very English, very folk-tale (in a slightly sinister wasy) about their earlier work, up to the point where Steve Hackett left. They made good pop and rock music after that, some of it like "Home By The Sea" has a special charm of its own, but never quite as other-worldly as those first albums. Eventually, thanks to a Genesis discography book (again, remember these were pre-internet days) I discovered the previously unknown pre-Trespass debut in a German record shop (before it was massively re-released in the UK in many forms) and the existence of solo albums by mysterious original guitarist Anthony Phillips...

...but that's another story.

But is it Prog?

So I'm listening to the second album by The Buggles, and asking myself, is it prog? There are connections - for those who don't know, after their first album (The Plastic Age) Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes of The Buggles joined the definitely prog group Yes, shortly after Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman had quit (Jon for the first time, Rick for the second). The resulting album Drama is one of my favourites, and is unquestionably prog-rock. It's got a cover by Roger Dean, and at least one song is 10 minutes long, that's all the proof you really need.

But when things didn't really work out, Yes fell apart, Downes and Yes guitarist Steve Howe went off to form Asia, and Trevor Horn finished off the second Buggles album more or less by himself. It's largely electronic pop, but there are shades of prog-ness about it all, including a different version of "Into The Lens" from Drama, here re-titled "I Am A Camera". There's a cinematic sweep to it all that could very well be in prog territory - but is it prog? Really?

More importantly, does it matter, if I like it what difference does a label make? The only benefit of such labels is maybe to tell other people "if you like X, you might like Y", which is how I got from Marillion to Genesis, Genesis to Yes, Yes to Porcupine Tree and so on. Labels do serve a purpose, as long as we use them to guide us on a voyage of discovery rather than tie us down and restrict us. The key element of progressive music for me is that there should be no borders, no restrictions, no pre-conceptions. Which is why I can start from The Buggles and go in one direction to Yes, another to The Art of Noise (although there are actually multiple connections between the prog behemoths and the electronic pioneers), or even a third way to Dollar (though that's a direction I may not go down very often!).

Prog Blogging!

It seems recently that progressive or "prog" (as a term applied to a musical genre) is no longer such a dirty word, which is good news for me as so much of the music I enjoy could easily have the prog label applied. No longer a guilty secret, it's now acceptable to step out of the wardrobe (if you can fight your way through all the silver capes) and say loudly and proudly (and preferably in 3/4 time with a key change in the middle) I Like Prog!

So when I decided to dip my toes into the cool waters of the blogosphere where better to start than with a blog on prog? Well, probably several better places but hey ho, I've started now. This won't be structured, it won't be chronological, it may not even make sense, but it's all good practice in writing and if no one else reads it at least I will!

I'm not going to set myself the impossible task of defining what is or is not progressive rock, not yet at least. But the music I like that can be considered under that heading includes the big names from the 70s like Genesis (my first prog love), Yes, Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull, the second wave from the 80s like Marillion, IQ and Pendragon, and more contemporary exponents like Porcupine Tree, The Pineapple Thief and Big Big Train.

What do they have in common? I suppose a striving for something, well, bigger. More sweeping and passionate than standard pop music, something with a classical sensibility, and one not afraid to be influenced by or reference a wider variety of sources and musical forms than any narrow genre constraints.

Why call my post The Wonderer? Well, in full it's Melmoth the Wonderer, a poor pun on the title of a fine gothic novel "Melmoth the Wanderer" by Charles Maturin. Very complex, very passionate, very romantic, much like the music I love. I'm self delusional, I know, but I see myself as a Romantic - that is, in the Beethoven and Wordsworth sense of the term, not the Barbara Cartland version. Wind swept and interesting as Billy Connolly would say. Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, that sort of thing. I've amended it to The Wonderer to suggest the sense of wonder I get from the best music, and also because heading a blog The Wanderer sounds like someone who rambles a lot and moves away from the point all the time... hmmm, shot myself in the foot there.

That'll do for now, a sort of introduction - consider it as a sort of prelude or an overture, and hope something more meaningful follows afterwards! That may be a consideration of my beginnings in prog, or musings on what I'm listening to now. We'll see...