From Q: September 1997...Prog Rock, The return.
Why is everyone going on about Radiohead being new prog rock?
Check out the Pink Floyd influences on OK Computer. And have you heard Paranoid Android? Classic prog rock, mate.
Which is what, exactly?
Noodling guitars, inordinate length, "weird" sounds, singer going on about something that's too deep for anyone but nuclear physicists to understand. Oh...and sixth formers.
Six formers?
Abosolutely. Prog rock is the ultimate music for people who think they're cleverer than they are. When Peter Gabriel was in Genesis back in the early '70s he wore an enormous marigold head-dress on stage. That was considered deep. When Rush wrote entire sides of albums consisting of just one song with titles like Cygnus X-1 and Hemispheres, young Grammar School boys spontaneously combusted with excitement at the sheer genius of it all.
So that's why Radiohead are into that stuff, then...
Exactly. They're well-educated chaps. They've sat in Oxford common rooms wearing prefect badges, listening to Marillion, laughing at The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Hence Paranoid Android - aka Marvin The Paranoid Android from the witheringly dull '80s book/album/TV "prog".
He has the brain the size of a planet...
So he said. Clever, y'see
So this prog revival: is it just Radiohead then?
No way. US "post-rock" bands Tortoise, Trans Am and Ui (yes, really) are not averse to a spot of King Cromson-emulation and "electronic listening" types Orbital aren't a million miles from symphonic synthers Tangerine Dream. So far, no-one's rehabilitating archproggers Yes, but...
Fortunately, Radiohead are brilliant but they'd better be careful. It starts with "stretching out a bit". It ends with a rock opera. With moogs. Remember Julian Cope? Bright and bouncy post-punk floozy with Teardrop Explodes? Now he's following ley-lines all over the place, and wearing a wizard hat. That's prog rock for you.
So whatever next?
God knows, but if Northern Uproar suddenly decide to do a double, vinyl-only concept album about the travails of the MIR space station then...then...we'll all be stuffed.