<\/p>
Everyone knows rock music achieved perfection in 1974: it\u2019s a scientific fact.\u2019 These are the wise words of Homer Simpson, no less. And while he may well have been thinking of all sorts of other kinds of rock music \u2013 album releases that year from The Who, Queen, The Rolling Stones or David Bowie \u2013 I like to think he was referring to the high water mark, 50 years ago, of that most unique of species: Progressive Rock. Or, to use its\u00a0ugly abbreviation, Prog Rock.<\/p>
Instead of being Glam, Hard, Soft or Bluesy, this largely British sub-genre grew out of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper<\/em> and psychedelia in the late 1960s and flourished globally for a few years before its snarling, consciously primal antipode, Punk, conspired (with only partial success) to snuff it out in time for the Queen\u2019s Silver Jubilee in 1977.\u00a0<\/p> From my first teenage encounters, I knew that this was the \u2018pop music\u2019 which shared the ambition, breadth and drama of classical music. Here was the same rich harmonic<\/a><\/strong> vocabulary and technical mastery, a rhythmic sophistication that went far beyond four beats in a bar, a searching pursuit of extended structures and the same textural breadth that ranged from delicately intimate to floor-shakingly explosive. \u00a0<\/p>