Welcome back my friends...
Welcome back my friends…
With the best progressive rock albums, you were on pretty safe ground judging the book (actually the record) by its cover. As you’d probably hope, with someone behind so many such covers, the artist Roger Dean has a very good take on how the whole progressive rock album package – the music, the logo, the futuristic icescape on the sleeve – all fitted together.
In a field so often criticised for excess, Roger sees the offering more in terms of generosity. “What we were doing was making an integrated and holistic gift,” he told me in 2019. “The LP cover was a fantastic gift to give and receive. If an album came with a plastic toy it was seen as an important icon.”
In this boom time for the music business, the package, and the music within it expanded – and this is where our latest Ultimate Record Collection takes its place. The 200 Greatest Progressive Rock Albums…Ranked! is filled with new innovations, and widened horizons. Finding themselves lacking the charisma and traditional beauty and showmanship of a Mick Jagger, a progressive musician might more comfortably retreat behind his futuristic artwork, logo, or banks of keyboards, the better to concentrate on developing the music.
This music now accommodated a huge new range of influences beyond rock’s traditional base in rhythm and blues. Literary inspirations. Classical motifs. Conceits like the Genesis double The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. While a listener’s mind wandered into the fantastic landscape of a Hipgnosis or Roger Dean sleeve (bonus Roger fact: he was at art college with the Hipgnosis guys and shared a flat with Syd Barrett), musicians stretched themselves into strange new shapes beyond the map of traditional songs. You engage with a progressive album less like a record and more like a book: prepared for a journey and expecting the unexpected. No wonder it was a genre that thrived on the university circuit.
“It was nearly always brilliant fun,” Roger went on to tell me, still enjoying his recollections of this expansive period for music. “There hadn’t been a theatrical stage before. There were a lot of firsts.”
Enjoy the magazine. It’s in shops now. Or you can get yours from us here.
John Robinson, Editor
