Table of contents for Issue 105 in Prog

NEXT ISSUE ON FEB 4 SALE Hello and welcome to issue 105 of Prog Magazine. I know this reaches you between Xmas and the New Year, but the last issue was out in November and it just seemed too early to share our Xmas card with you. Here it is for your enjoyment now. Thanks once again to John Langton for his wonderful work Last issue we bade farewell to Deputy Editor Hannah. This issue I am delighted to introduce you to her replacement, Natasha Scharf. Natasha’s been with Prog since our inception back in 2009 and has been our News Editor for the past five years. She beat off very strong competition to land the job and I’m really looking forward to taking the magazine forward into a new…

Toundra mark the centenary of early gothic horror movie Das Cabinet Des Dr Caligari by releasing their soundtrack album of the same name on February 28 via InsideOut. Acclaimed for being a psychological and political drama, the 1920 silent film explores what happens when good people begin accepting instructions from a psychopathic leader. The Spanish instrumentalists first set their music against the screenplay last year. “For all our 12 years we’ve wanted to do a soundtrack,” guitarist and pianist Esteban Girón tells Prog. “We had the opportunity of doing it live in a big cinema in Madrid, our home city. “We wanted to take the opportunity to record it and spread the message. It’s not just music, it’s not just an album from Toundra. It’s something different – an important…

Virgil Donati releases his new album, Ruination, in Europe on February 7. “I’ve gone for a huge melting pot of musical ideas,” he reveals. “I guess you could call the style progressive fusion. One thing I did decide was to introduce vocals for the first time on a solo album. I got Irwin Thomas, who also plays guitar, to do them, and the way he approached the challenge was to use his voice as another instrument.” Four of the album’s 11 songs have vocals, and first came out outside Europe in autumn 2019. So why did the virtuoso drummer, who’s also worked with Allan Holdsworth and Steve Vai, choose to delay the album’s European release? “I put out Ruination in America [first] because I was touring there at the time,…

Mobius will release their second album, Kala, on January 30 via Bandcamp. It marks a significant departure for the French/Middle Eastern outfit, who explore the nature of death with a sense of confidence. “We were influenced by jazz and classical music on the first album, but the new one is much more modern,” vocalist Héli Andrea tells Prog. She was inspired to the theme after the experience of finding the dead body of a relative, who’d been gone four days. “His body was decomposed, but not like in the films,” she recalls. “I thought I’d be traumatised, but instead I thought, ‘That’s how we become in the end. It’s not awful, it’s just recycling life.’ I thought it was really poetic, really inspiring. I’m a different person.” To achieve her…

Christmas is a time of indulgence, which is why every day of the year is Christmas for me. But I do try and get things into proportion as the end of the year comes in to view. New Year is a special time when I can sit back and reminisce about all the things that have happened in the previous 12 months. Then, as I slip slowly into total depression, I can cheer myself up by making New Year’s resolutions that, deep down, I know are impossible to keep. I found my previous year’s list a few days ago and it was interesting to note what a total waste of time it had been writing it in the first place. It read: Resolution one: As you are about to turn…

“I was raised on progressive rock. My parents were pretty much into everything, and I inherited this box of cassettes from them when I was between the ages of eight and 10. ELO’s Out Of The Blue really stood out. I’ve always been a fan of concepts. I grew up with Meat Loaf and I was a big fan of the rock opera; nobody has done it quite like Queen, Meat Loaf and ELO. They were such great songwriters. And ELO were one of those bands that you never realised how many songs they had until you looked at a greatest hits. Man, what a catalogue! Out Of The Blue is probably my favourite record by them, and it just so happens that was the one I got second-hand. They…

ALEXIS GEORGOPOULOS, AKA Arp, has been making waves in the sound-art and electronic music scene in New York and beyond for well over a decade. Unashamedly eclectic in his approach, his evolution as an artist operating initially within the airy textures of analogue synths of 2010’s The Soft Wave or the same year’s deeply textural acoustic-ambient collaborations with Slapp Happy’s Anthony Moore, have all marked him out as someone keen to explore different worlds and alternative directions. That wanderlust saw 2018’s Zebra embarking upon a more overtly jazzier area. “I don’t even know what ‘jazz’ means in a way,” he says, “I’ve always been most into people like Don Cherry, Alice Coltrane; people that are I suppose closer to the cosmic jazz side of things or what they used to…

November 2019 1 JEFF LYNNE’S ELO From Out Of Nowhere (RCA) 2 PINK FLOYD The Later Years – 1987-2019 (RHINO) 3 JETHRO TULL Stormwatch (RHINO) 4 NO-MAN Love You To Bits (SELF-RELEASE) 5 MUSE Simulation Theory (HELIUM 3/WARNER RECORDS) 6 MARILLION With Friends From The Orchestra (EARMUSIC) 7 HAWKWIND All Aboard The Skylark (CHERRY RED) 8 STEVE HACKETT Genesis Revisited Band & Orchestra Live (INSIDEOUT) 9 THE FLOWER KINGS Waiting For Miracles (INSIDEOUT) 10 TOOL Fear Inoculum (MUSIC FOR NATIONS) 11 OPETH In Cauda Venenum (MODERBOLAGET/NUCLEAR BLAST) 12 KING CRIMSON In The Court Of The Crimson King (PANEGYRIC) 13 WITHIN TEMPTATION Resist (SPINEFARM) 14 BRIAN ENO Apollo – Atmospheres And Soundtracks (UMC) 15 MOODY BLUES In Search Of The Lost Chord (UMC) 16 MARILLION Afraid Of Sunlight (RHINO) 17 SWANS…

“I feel like I’m having a midlife crisis, so I wanted to make this record representative of this moment in my life.” “WHEN I WAS 12, I had a guitar teacher who gave me a video of John Petrucci playing two Dream Theater songs. I played it over and over again, and I practised like mad,” says Jakub Zytecki. “Then I started getting into Allan Holdsworth and Eric Johnson, and I’m now really interested in production.” The uplifting Nothing Lasts, Nothing’s Lost is Polish guitarist Zytecki’s second solo release, and it’s a world apart from the prog metal grooves on his debut, 2015’s Wishful Lotus Proof. The vibrant 11-track album takes its title from a quote by US psychonaut Terance McKenna, and works in influences from psych and jazz. “I…

“Doing the Nightmare Scenario stuff, I can go into full psycho mode at home, working 12 hours a day producing this thing, then do some artwork, or some video installation stuff to go along with it. It’s nice and different to have that sort of immediacy.” Full psycho mode suits Dan Briggs. The bassist-turned-multi-instrumentalist lives alone in the woods in Greensboro, North Carolina, with no roommates around to roll their eyes if his amplifiers reach boiling point. This fertile ground for creation is perhaps partly why he has become so prolific in recent years, with new solo project Nightmare Scenario just another colourful planet in Briggs’ odd but undeniably classy universe. Menacing yet melodic prog metallers Between The Buried And Me are the focal point – the ‘day job’, if…

You know what it’s like when you need to find an item, you rummage in your cupboards and it’s not there. Or at least it’s not where you thought you’d left it. Photos, tapes, trinkets, leaflets, keepsakes… all seem to have a life of their own when it comes to evading the search for one’s memorabilia. Accruing ‘stuff’ seems to be one of the things that comes with getting older. As is forgetting where you put it – or whether you really had it in the first place. So imagine what it’s like if you were once a member of Gentle Giant. The band broke up in 1980 after an amazing decade-long career that produced a clutch of albums with some of the most adventurous and distinctive rock music of…

Edited by Jo Kendall jo.kendall@futurenet.com Mike Portnoy and Derek Sherinian’s supergroup follow up their 2017 debut Psychotic Symphony with… well, more of the same. The band toured fairly heavily off the first album, playing some 83 shows, so they’ve had some time to establish and build the chemistry between the five members: Billy Sheehan on bass, Bumblefoot on guitar and vocalist Jeff Scott Soto alongside Portnoy and Sherinian. But the band have yet to assert their own unique identity as a collective to the same extent that Flying Colors, another of Portnoy’s all-star projects, accomplished this year on their excellent third album. At the risk of stating the obvious, the main musical point of reference for Sons Of Apollo is Dream Theater, the band that first brought Sherinian and Portnoy…

With strings attached, Marillion get by with a little help… When properly employed, a string quartet can add instant class and credibility to pretty much any music. These qualities were already abundant in the nine songs Marillion have chosen to revisit and reimagine here, and they do so in very good company. Youthful, outward-facing, and enthusiastic for genres beyond the classical sphere, the Brussels-based quartet In Praise Of Folly are a great fit for Marillion’s ambitious, layered compositions. They’ve played with the band already – at their Weekends, at their triumphant debut concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 2017 – and along with French horn player Sam Morris and flautist Emma Halnan they were the ‘Friends’ on the recent, rapturously received Marillion With Friends From The Orchestra tour. “Rothery…

A sentimental journey to that Hergest Ridge sound. Probably best known for his contributions to Ommadawn, Les Penning had first played with Mike Oldfield prior to that 1975 release when the young Tubular Bells tyro, disorientated by success, elected to get his head together in the country and play “simple folk tunes” with Penning in the small restaurant Penrhos Court in the Hergest Ridge region. He had a role, then, in recharging Oldfield’s muse, and was distinctly audible on his light-relief singles In Dulci Jubilo and Portsmouth. Perhaps less recognised is the fact that, by contrast, he played the woodwind instruments on Echo & The Bunnymen’s dark, driving Heaven Up Here. In recent years he’s collaborated frequently with Robert Reed, on Reed’s Oldfield-homaging Sanctuary albums and his own 2017 piece…

Prog’s first super-missile; expanded and refried in high-tech sauce. King Crimson are one of the few bands that really did change the course of progressive music; in their case, through dazzling virtuoso musicianship, superior songs and awesome supernatural power. Before In The Court Of The Crimson King appeared in October 1969, progressive rock had yet to find its feet; Crimson’s seismic live set, then this album, made it grow up fast by grabbing all the disparate jazz, classical and folk strains flying around like kite-strings and welding them into their own startling new genre. As Greg Lake said, ITCOTCK “fired the starting pistol on progressive rock.” If any race was on, KC started out front and stayed there. “The swarm of bees in a robot’s pants are McDonald and Fripp.”…

VENUE ROYAL ALBERT HALL, LONDON SUPPORT THE BLACKHEART ORCHESTRA DATE 26/11/2019 The flags are out tonight. Literally. Onstage, there are upright standards bearing the cover art to several releases in Hawkwind’s catalogue, while every seat in the venue has a mini edition laid upon it, ready to be waved just like the audience do for Rule Brittania at the last night of the Proms. It’s a nice touch, indicating how proud Hawkwind must feel to celebrate their Golden Jubilee. From Group X to Hawkwind Zoo to the line-up we see now, Hawkwind’s journey has been eventful, to say the least (The sax! The drugs busts! The Brock and roll!). Band founder and leader David Anthony Brock grew up with 50s rock’n’roll, played in trad jazz and blues bands in the mid-60s…

VENUE ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL, LONDON DATE 04/12/2019 What do Dweezil Zappa, the London Symphony Orchestra and, let’s say, veteran singer Tony Bennett have in common? No? Well, all of them mostly do shows where they play only other people’s music, which technically makes them all cover acts. That’s an often derided term, but the modern concept of it is becoming increasingly not just acceptable, but also highly marketable. As major artists from the golden age throw in the towel or leave us completely, it’s important that some of the music is kept alive in a live context. Fortunately, there are plenty of musicians doing that extremely well, and plenty of fans who want to see them doing it. Frank Zappa’s music is amazing, thrilling, bamboozling, an ‘acquired taste’ and more,…

Steve Hackett’s Genesis Revisited project reaches an end of sorts when he recreates 1977’s double live album Seconds Out next winter. He left after the original tour, but, still in love with the music, will revive the full LP with additional material when he tours the UK in November and December 2020. “It’s a very personal thing,” Hackett tells Prog of Genesis Revisited, which he started in 1996. It’s informed his solo work too, as he argues: “Artists continually have to keep giving themselves pep talks, no matter whether you’ve done incredibly well or you’ve struggled away for years and years. I might change the delivery, but I’m keeping the intention of the music.” The tour hits many venues Genesis played in ’76, which Hackett says is a fluke of…

Steve Hillage, Miquette Giraudy and Roger Eno are just some of the collaborators on the forthcoming release from The Orb. Abolition Of The Royal Familia will be released via Cooking Vinyl on March 27. The new album, the band’s 16th studio recording, is the first collaboration between Alex Paterson and new writing and musical partner Michael Rendall, who was previously a member of The Orb’s touring band and studio engineer. Abolition Of The Royal Familia includes a tribute to cosmologist and fan Stephen Hawking (Hawk Kings) and is a companion album to 2018’s No Sounds Are Out Of Bounds, with its “anything goes” ethos. Alongside Hillage, Giraudy and Eno, the 12-track also features guest appearances from Killing Joke bassist Youth, who worked with the band on No Sounds…, as well…

When he first emerged as a leading light of the post-punk underground in the early 80s, Nick Cave could hardly have seemed further removed from anything remotely related to progressive rock. As drug-munching frontman with The Birthday Party, he made spiky swamp rock with malevolent overtones, before forming his own band, The Bad Seeds, for 1984’s From Her To Eternity. From then on, The Bad Seeds began to provide Cave with an extraordinarily versatile and distinctive vehicle for his always literate and emotionally supercharged lyrics. Over the past 30-plus years, Cave and his band have recorded a huge catalogue of critically acclaimed and often wildly successful records, perennially hailed by the mainstream but never bland enough to become part of the furniture. Still, for Prog readers at least, genuine prog…

What appeals to me about surround sound is the immersive experience. It’s the three-dimensional nature of being right at the centre of the music. In the early 70s, various attempts were made to market quadraphonic recordings on eight-track cartridge and vinyl. As successful as some of those early mixes were, the problem emerged when it came to deliver them. Competing systems required the consumer to fork out serious money for unique playback alternatives to the basic record player or cassette deck. Like the audio equivalent of the war between VHS and Betamax, it’s only when one format emerges as the ‘winner’ that any commercial foothold and future can be determined. In the 70s, the fight for quad never happened, so why is it that, more than 40 years later, surround…

Ho ho hum! If Santa didn’t bring you everything you wanted for Christmas, this month’s competition is for you. Just feast your eyes on this bumper bundle of goodies in celebration of 2019, surely one of the finest years in progressive music. One lucky recipient will bag the following CD packages: Jethro Tull’s Stormwatch: 40th Anniversary Force 10 Edition including previously unreleased material; Marillion’s Afraid Of Sunlight – Deluxe Edition with unheard tracks and brand new interviews; and the deluxe hardback book edition of Bruce Soord’s All This Will Be Yours with two bonus CDs. For good measure, we’ll also throw in a set of vinyl reissues of Karnivool’s first three albums: Themata, Sound Awake and Asymmetry. (Cold turkey not included.) For your chance to win this special bundle, visit…

Jethro Tull were given their name (that of an 18th-century agriculturist) in 1967 by Dave Robson, a booker at the Ellis-Wright agency, who dealt with the young band. If they had not been booked into the Marquee club soon after this christening, Ian Anderson, who didn’t particularly like the name, reckons that it would have been changed again. But as he was the group’s frontman, the writer of almost all of their material and the one who engaged most in the business side, he himself went on to become synonymous with the name, to the extent that some people actually referred to him as Jethro Tull. In the States in the mid-70s, this was even shortened by some to the both inappropriate and rather over-familiar ‘Jet’. Many had noted that…

“We’re sounding great and it’s getting better and tighter by the gig. We’re in a good place.”Roine Stolt Mirkko DeMaio has been The Flower Kings’ drummer for more than a year, but he’s still a little in awe of the boss. “Roine’s a miracle,” says DeMaio. He’s the healthiest guy I’ve met in this business. I mean, he eats a lot, but it’s all healthy stuff. When he walks in he’s like a king. He’s a man who lives for his art, and everything he does is driven by passion. And he looks younger than any of us.” The enviably well-preserved Roine Stolt is 63. DeMaio is 35, and Zach Kamins (who replaced the Kings’ long-serving keyboard player Tomas Bodin) is just 32. “Roine’s so great to work with,” says…

UK prog titans hook up and spark three years before Banks’ departure In 2010, ex-King Crimson electric violinist David Cross visited founding Yes member Peter Banks at his home studio for a one-off recording session. Before his tragic death in 2013, Banks expressly wished it would see release one day. “It hang-glides through twinkling fusion galaxies.” The set now appears as a glowing posthumous tribute, bolstered by guests from Yes’ half century history, including founding colleague Tony Kaye, Geoff Downes, guitarist Billy Sherwood, keyboard-toting Oliver Wakeman (son of Rick) plus drummers Pat Mastelotto, Jay Schellen and Jeremy Stacey. The line-up shows the esteem in which Banks is held, going back with Kaye to Mabel Greer’s Toyshop, who morphed into Yes. Banks came up with the band’s name before they recorded…

Blow-by-blow account of a classic. Frank Zappa once wrote that failure is one of the things that “serious people” dread. He also observed that failure was “nothing to get upset about”. “Unparalleled access to Zappa’s creative processes.” While Hot Rats was conspicuous by its absence from the US charts 50 years ago, record-buying punters put it inside the UK’s Top 10. Lacking the trenchant parody or overt stoner japes that were very much a part of his previous releases, Hot Rats is free of that kind of cultural carbon dating. Recorded in the summer of 1969, it’s all about starting anew, an artistic statement that’s about reinvention and a steely purpose, coming off the back of Zappa’s divorce from his band The Mothers Of Invention. It also marks the break…

VENUE THE MAGNOLIA, EL CAJON, CALIFORNIA DATE 27/10/2019 Repeat viewings of a favourite movie often yield new insight. Sometimes, it’s in regard to subtleties – say, an extra in the background who previously went unnoticed – while other times, you might pick up on a theme you’d never previously considered. Repeat viewings of a concert tour can be similarly enlightening. Earlier this year, we had the chance to see the first leg of Dream Theater’s Distance Over Time tour, during which the veteran progressive metal act are celebrating the 20th anniversary of their influential concept album, Metropolis Pt 2: Scenes From A Memory. The show was undeniably impressive, but excitement over seeing the band revisit the landmark 1999 release overshadowed the maiden performances of material from their latest album. That’s…

VENUE ISLINGTON ASSEMBLY HALL, LONDON DATE 16/11/2019 When Gong take the stage and Fabio Golfetti begins playing shimmering, ethereal glissando guitar, it feels like a way of gently clearing the mind for what is to follow. Kavus Torabi’s juddering guitar loops lead the band into the lengthy Forever Reoccuring accompanied by Fruit Salad’s stunning, head-spinning visuals, and as the music gains momentum there’s the feeling that this is the beginning of a mindblowing psychedelic space-prog voyage. Torabi, also the band’s main vocalist, has said in Prog that he doesn’t want to be thought of as the “prick that has taken over from band founder, the late Daevid Allen”. But that’s not likely; clearly the audience love the current Gong, and after one particularly tricky and powerful instrumental passage they burst…

VENUE ROYAL ALBERT HALL, LONDON DATE 14/11/2019 SUPPORT LUCY WOODWARD & CHARLIE HUNTER It’s some achievement to make a headline show at the Royal Albert Hall feel like a family celebration, but New York’s Snarky Puppy aren’t a normal band. With a rotating cast of about 25 members - 13 of whom are onstage this evening – the jazz/rock/prog/funk/jam pioneers end the evening with a standing ovation ringing around the venue, and it’s one of those shows, where it feels just as much a moment of triumph for the fans who’ve been a part of the journey as it is for those onstage. First up, more family members. Support comes from Lucy Woodward and Charlie Hunter, who, along with drummer Keita Ogawa, have all contributed to Puppy albums. Purveyors of…

VENUE ULU, LONDON SUPPORT THE OCEAN DATE 16/11/2019 It’s a long wait in the rain outside a sold-out ULU tonight and the line moves so slowly that people are still in the queue when The Ocean appear – well, appear isn’t quite the right word. From Germany, the collective take the stage immersed in a swirling fog, which seems to be their natural habitat. Their light show frames the band as silhouettes, lending the players an anonymity worthy of Ghost, and vocalist Loïc Rossetti’s keyboards are set up behind guitarist Robin Staps, often making him completely invisible from the front. It’s an unconventional presentation but The Ocean’s music is compelling and immersive, drawing from post-rock, metal and prog. They’re clearly fond of a heavy, half-time feel, a motif they use…

Where’s home? Bursledon, a village just outside of Southampton. Earliest prog memory? A friend introduced me to Operation: Mindcrime by Queensrÿche in 1988. I was 13 years old and really into Metallica and Iron Maiden, but everyone was talking about this thing called ‘a concept album’. I really loved it, and wore my vinyl copy out. Second prog album you bought? A few months after Queensrÿche it was Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son, regarded as one of their more progressive rock albums. Venus Records in Winchester was my record shop of choice. And the last? The latest Opeth album, In Cauda Venenum. First prog gig? Dream Theater at the Forum in London, December 1997, during Touring Into Infinity. And the latest? My friend [Cosmograf drummer] Kyle Fenton…

Nick Mason’s Saucerful Of Secrets are hitting the road again in April and May for what will be their biggest tour of the British Isles yet. Along with 14 dates across England, they’ll be taking in Scotland, Ireland and Wales as well, before heading out to mainland Europe. Almost 20 years ago to the day, Prog’s Editor Jerry Ewing – then a contributing editor at Classic Rock – talked to Nick Mason about Pink Floyd in an interview to celebrate the 20th anniversary of The Wall. He said, “This is the second time a major member has left and you’ve gone on to even greater things.” Mason replied, laughing, “Oh, as soon as I get rid of Dave [Gilmour], such great plans.” Few could have predicted that two decades later…

O.R.k’s Colin Edwin releases a song-based solo album, Infinite Regress, on Hard World on January 24. The collaboration with his long-time friend, vocalist and lyricist Robert RJ Peck came about in rather unusual circumstances. “I’d been working on my own on a load of instrumental pieces and one of the problems is that you don’t have anyone to bounce ideas off,” he explains. “So I sent Rob a couple of tracks saying, ‘What do you think of this?’ And the reply I got was that they came back with vocals and guitar on them! It just carried on like that and the lyrical themes that he came up with all fitted what I had imagined really well, even though I hadn’t said anything to him.” One of the most immediately…

Nightwish and Tarot bassist and vocalist Marko Hietala is set to release the English version of his solo album, Pyre Of The Black Heart, on January 24 via Nuclear Blast. Hietala released the Finnish version of the album in May under the name Mustan Sydämen Rovio. Together with his friends and “long-term collaborators”, Tuomas Wäinölä (guitar) and Vili Ollila (keyboards), the trio wrote 10 eclectic tracks that may surprise fans who were expecting something more along the lines of Nightwish’s symphonic grandeur. Described by Hietala as “hard prog”, the new album spans myriad genres from metal and stoner rock, to traditional Finnish folk and 60s/70s-inspired rock. “The album wouldn’t have been done like this if it wasn’t for the guys,” says Marko of his bandmates. “They brought in a lot…

“I used to be the sort of guy who thought cooking was a chore, but recently I’ve started to get quite into it. About three or four years ago, I went on a health binge and started picking up recipe books by the likes of Jamie Oliver, Nigel Slater and Nigella Lawson. Now I make a lot of pies and stews; I’m not really into salads or quinoa, I like old-fashioned food. I’m fond of bolognaise and lasagne – anything that’s heavy on fat, carbs and starch! Although I don’t sound like it, I’m Scottish in origin, and this recipe is a traditional Burn’s Night supper. The secret is to pour a dram of single-malt scotch over it. It’s something I learned from my grandfather, who was a Glasgow ship…

We take you now to a nuclear fallout shelter beneath the headquarters of the Union Bank Of Switzerland in Zürich. This is where instrumental trio Holm have been refining their intoxicating mash-up of post-rock, shoegaze and sound experimentation for the past three years. “Every building in Switzerland had a bomb shelter, because of the Cold War,” says the band’s bassist James Varghese. Varghese met Holm guitarist Dimitri Käch and drummer Alessandro Giannelli more than a decade ago when they were studying music at Zürich’s University Of The Arts. Together they conjured sophisticated sounds, but subsequently took separate musical paths. “We wanted to get back to the three of us experimenting,” says Varghese, “so we went to our cellar and jammed like we did at university. The music didn’t have to…

“Big Big Train were the first band to send me a cassette,” recalls Kev Rowland. “Final Conflict were the first to send me a CD, and Vertical Alignment were the first band to send me a download…” When talking to this veteran music writer, anecdotes about obscure bands – Milky Way Gas Station, Different Trains, Mice On Stilts, Mastermind – whiz overhead. Back in 1990, the self-professed music addict was pulling shifts as a night manager at Sainsbury’s in Cobham, and by day writing Feedback, a specialist rock music newsletter, on his electric typewriter. His thick contacts list and prolific reviewing and interviewing made Feedback an invaluable resource for prog fans in the pre-Google, pre-Prog, age. “If someone had told me back then that there was going to be a…

JORJA CHALMERS LEADS a double life. For the past 12 years she’s toured the world playing sax and keyboards in Bryan Ferry’s band. But away from the spotlight, and in a succession of hotel rooms while on the road, she’s been composing dark, electronic-based songs that speak of both the loneliness of being away from family, and a desire to escape into a different imaginative world. Originally from Australia, Chalmers moved to London in 2004 and joined new wave band Hotel Motel. One night at a gig in east London, Ferry’s personal assistant happened to be in the audience, “and suddenly I got a MySpace message: ‘Do you want to come and audition?’ Oh my God!” Before long she was on stage performing the Roxy Music songs that her father…

After Roger Waters left Pink Floyd, David Gilmour and Nick Mason had wondered which direction to take the band. As we now know, they found a way, and it’s compiled and documented in the hefty new box set The Later Years 1987-2019. When Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, co-founder of Hipgnosis with the late Storm Thorgerson, was looking through old files as he designed the artwork for it, he came across a photograph he’d taken in Iceland in the 70s, of two men in silhouette, studying a map. Eventually it was used as the cover image on a ‘sampler’ version of the box set. “It was originally an idea related to Animals,” Powell says of the photo, “but was never used, though I had always loved it. It had lain dormant ever…

“Sons Of Apollo is definitely a five-headed beast,” Mike Portnoy declares dramatically, in reference to the band’s lengthy 2018 tour. “Each and every one of us, each night on stage, regardless of how small the place was or how many people were there, delivered as if we were the heavyweight champions of the world. It was a five-ringed circus of musical muscle, and I think the crowds at each gig reacted to that.” The musical muscle that Portnoy describes is not merely optimistic hyperbole. As well as Portnoy’s drum credentials with Dream Theater, Transatlantic and a raft of other side-projects, the talents of Derek Sherinian (keyboards, ex-Dream Theater), guitarist Ron ‘Bumblefoot’ Thal (Guns N’ Roses], Mr Big bassist Billy Sheehan and singer Jeff Scott Soto [Yngwie Malmsteen, Journey] are a…

For a casual rock fan, the best-known fact about Mark Mangold is that he was once part of a group (Touch) whose bass player, Doug Howard, swallowed a bee while performing at the inaugural Monsters Of Rock Festival at Donington Park in 1980. But there’s far, far more to this Floridaborn keyboard maestro than just pubquiz trivia. A professional musician since the age of 13, Mangold has had his songs performed by a variety of A-listers including Cher, Michael Bolton, and Paul Rodgers and Kenney Jones with their short-lived 90s band The Law. And yes, he was very much raised on progressive music. Not only did the young Mangold appreciate the early work of keyboard players Rick Wakeman, Tony Banks, Keith Emerson and Deep Purple’s Jon Lord, he also considers…

Prog caught up with Kaprekar’s Constant bassist/lyricist Nick Jefferson and guitarist/principal composer Al Nicholson on Friday September 20. While the timing was entirely by chance, it turned out to be an auspicious day to be having our conversation, as it coincided with the official release date of the band’s second album, Depth Of Field. At a time when physical sales have been declining, to embark on the not inconsiderable challenge of writing material, corralling a team of busy musicians to record the music, and then release the results on CD into an uncertain and chronically overcrowded marketplace could be seen either as an act of heroic endeavour or hubristic folly. Jefferson and Nicholson, who’ve been friends and colleagues since the early 1970s, accept that in truth it’s probably a bit…

Dave Kerzner’s interstellar epic comes to a terrific conclusion It has been less than a year since ex-Sound Of Contact keysmeister Dave Kerzner dropped his remarkable Acceleration Theory: Part One: AlienA. Its tale of interstellar love between earthling Kai (voiced by Bad Dreams’ Gabriel Agudo) and AlienA (sung by Letitia Wolf) was, by turns, exhilarating and beautiful. Kerzner’s debut space opera was also boosted by stand-out guest slots from the likes of Steve Hackett, Steve Rothery, ‘Uncle Tom Progley and all’. “This makes Olias Of Sunhillow sound earthbound.” Part Two of Acceleration Theory – in which AlienA is abducted by her species for giving Kai the means to save the human race from annihilation – is both less starry and more focused than Part One. Yes, there are guest appearances,…

Studio, demos and live recordings, plus a DVD of prime Cow. This career-spanning set includes all the remastered studio albums and more from one of the most exploratory groups of the 70s. The story starts here with early demos, including songs of a rather whimsical bent like Rapt In A Blanket “from an unmarked tape” circa 1971-3. Then came their dazzling 1973 debut Legend with its Canterbury affinities, through to the autumnal landscapes of Unrest and culminating in the concise, chamber ensemble feel of the group’s final album, 1979’s Western Culture. “The studio albums don’t tell the whole story…” Drummer Chris Cutler’s early influences include Keith Moon, whereas guitarist Fred Frith is a fan of Zappa, Jeff Beck and of Roger Waters’ bass playing. But extrapolate those influences and then…

VENUE EVENTIM APOLLO, LONDON DATE 29/11/2019 Steve Hackett has really stumbled upon something with the Genesis Revisited shows. Each year he capitalises on another birthday – two years ago it was the 40th anniversary of Wind & Wuthering, in 2020 it’s the same for Seconds Out – and by 2021 he’ll be able to start on the half-centennials, with Nursery Cryme celebrating its big 5-0. By 2024 he’ll presumably be trooping The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway up and down the nation. Somehow, the man whose original tenure in the band lasted less than seven years has become the most convincing torchbearer for the entire Genesis franchise. Phil Collins is a diminished proposition, Peter Gabriel is building apps, Sergeant Major Banks is polishing his classical music CV, and Mike Rutherford…

VENUE UNION TRANSFER, PHILADELPHIA, PA SUPPORT RANDY MCSTINE DATE 22/11/2019 No one ever expected art rock quartet The Pineapple Thief to come to the US, so the fact that they’re here tonight is itself a triumph. Luckily, their first trek across the pond is delightful, with plenty of focus on the Dissolution LP alongside more recent gems and even a few past highlights. Aided by touring guitarist George Marios – and enjoyably preceded by opener Randy McStine – the group give their American audience nothing but the best for nearly two hours. It’s clear why McStine is the perfect person to warm up fans. Accompanied by only an acoustic guitar and some effects pedals, he immediately impresses with his vocal tenor and resourceful textural manipulations. Unsurprisingly, he prioritises tracks from…