Progressive or 'prog' rock was a largely British development of the late 1960's and '70's psychedelic rock scene, in which bands such as The Moody Blues, The Nice and King Crimson began breaking down and extending the traditional song structure in favour of a more symphonic style, with the various sections of individual albums often held together by a theme or concept.

The first true concept album of the modern era is usually taken to be The Beatles' SGT.PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND from 1967, although The Beach Boys' LITTLE DEUCE COUP of 1963 and The Kinks' 1966 album FACE TO FACE were both strongly themed. Purists might claim that Woody Guthrie's 1940 DUST BOWL BALLADS is the very first themed album, while others cite Frank Sinatra's sequencing of song order to produce a lyrical flow on albums as early as 1946 as evidence that he was its true inventor. Whoever was the first, the idea had been around a while before it was picked up and carried forward by Pink Floyd, Genesis and Yes - a band often regarded as the ultimate prog rockers - and by the multi-talented Mike Oldfield in his ground-breaking 1974 epic TUBULAR BELLS.

The length of individual tracks and the experimental nature of the music made this genre far more suited to the LP market, which it dominated in the mid-1970's, than to the singles charts. Many prog rockers have nonetheless written songs now regarded as classics of their type, for example Justin Hayward - Nights In White Satin, Syd Barrett - Arnold Layne and See Emily Play, Roger Waters - Money and Another Brick In The Wall and Peter Gabriel - Solsbury Hill. Even Robert Wyatt, a leading light with avant-garde jazz rockers Soft Machine has revealed an idiosyncratic songwriting talent since the band broke up in 1976, a description that could also be applied to another ex-Canterbury scene figure, Kevin Ayers.

Despite it's occasional digressions into the popular mainstream, by the late 1970's progressive rock as a genre was widely despised as indulgent and pretentious, and was blown away by the explosion of punk. The 1980's nevertheless saw a revival led by latecomers Marillion, and the genre had echoes in the experimental approach of ex-britpop outfit Radiohead.
Today, with the British prog rock scene all but dead, the tradition clings on as a strand of progressive metal and alternative rock more likely to originate in the USA and Scandinavia than the UK.

{back}      {next}      {modern rock & pop}