Rhythm and cruise!
Frank Barrett joins a shipful of ageing pop bands and their fans for a voyage where rocking the boat is compulsory...
AT THE cruise terminal in Tampa, the crowd waiting to board had that slightly frazzled look of a band of refugees fleeing Middle Earth: all around were men of a certain age sporting ponytails, flowing, shoulder-length hair, and assorted beards.
America can’t have seen this much studied hirsuteness, mixed with faded denim and pairs of John Lennon rimless spectacles, since peace and love reigned in the muddy fields of Woodstock.
We had come to board Cruise To The Edge, the latest in a relatively new travel phenomenon: the music cruise. This mixes bands and fans in a four-day seagoing festival (‘Glastonbury but with better toilets’ was how one performer explained it).
Larry Morand, of On The Blue, which has been running music cruises for five years, said: ‘In the early days we had to work hard to persuade top bands that a rock cruise would be a good idea – now they’re asking to join in.’
Entertainers in recent times include Crosby, Stills and Nash, Def Leppard and James Taylor. ‘Being on a cruise ship with your musical hero is like having the best backstage pass ever,’ says Larry.
Cruise To The Edge, a fournight trip from Tampa to Cozumel in Mexico and back again, took place on Royal Caribbean’s 2,000passenger Brilliance of the Seas.
On any normal cruise, there is a preponderance to the older end of the spectrum – but this crowd’s average age was even higher, probably about 70.
In case you missed the reference, the title of the cruise is a play on words of the title of a 1970s Yes album, Close To The Edge, reckoned to be one of prog rock’s seminal works. Progressive rock was a movement in music in the 1960s which championed the shift away from the rigid structure of the three-minute pop song. Prog rockers didn’t just want to make longer tracks, they wanted to create a bigger sound using synthesised strings, flutes, electric violins and celestial choruses – this was the dawn of stereo, remember (not forgetting the influence of mind enhancing drugs).
Prog rockers also trod a different path by being prepared to dress up and indulge in elaborate staging. Genesis-era Peter Gabriel, for example, would happily take to the stage dressed as a flower.
Once on board ship, it rapidly became clear that music would be an all-encompassing part of cruise life. The main swimming pool had been drained to accommodate a massive stage and gantry with lighting.
Everywhere you went, the progrock music was inescapable (wasn’t this how US troops famously forced Panama’s President Noriega to surrender?). It was certainly strange going up to the cafeteria to get a cup of tea in the dead of night and hearing the far-from-dulcet tones of Keith Emerson and his sobbing Moog synthesiser. From the programme of events we were handed at check-in, it was clear there was never going to be a dull moment. There would be performances by Yes, John Lodge of the Moody Blues, and the Neal Morse Band.
Yes were the first band on, walking on stage within a couple of hours of us setting sail. Long-established groups tend to bear little relation to their original incarnation. The current line-up of Yes contains none of the original members.
John Lodge, a jovial, down-toearth bloke who paid his teenage dues in the 1960s playing clubs, challenged me when I said the endless band civil wars was much like Spinal Tap: ‘That’s just stories – it ain’t really like that,’ he said. John now spends his winters in Barbados and at other times resides in splendour in England – his life supported by
touring. ‘There’s no money in records now – the real income is from live gigs,’ he said. ‘I love performing. I couldn’t retire – I’d be bored to death.’
At the on-board Yes concert, the man sitting next to me knew every song the band played and blissfully sang along with gusto. What made the concert so charming – and this lay at the heart of the success of the cruise – is that all the bands knew they were preaching to the converted. Each Yes song was greeted by a standing ovation from extremely excited fans.
Throughout the day, Q&A sessions with the bands were held, usually in the main atrium of the ship, a vast space ten decks high.
Walking up and down the stairs adjacent to the atrium, it was impossible not to hear various band members pontificating. Given the gravity of their replies, you might have assumed that they had spent their careers labouring on finding a cure for cancer rather than on exhausting themselves finding a rhyme for ‘wizard’ or wondering what was wrong with the Mellotron (rock music’s first major electronic celestial string sounds keyboard that launched a thousand tracks).
The questions in these Q&A sessions were the sort that Donald Trump thinks journalists should be asking him: massively sycophantic. ‘When you were recording Memories Of Jupiter, did you know straight away that it was a game-changer?’
‘Good question! It may seem incredible now but it really came together just like any other track on the album…’
When we paused at the island of Cozumel, the mid-point of our journey, few bothered to get off to join the tours to Mayan ruins or scuba-diving sites. Some see thousands of older prog-rock fans taking a slightly daft self-indulgent trip and ask: Why? But I saw older people enjoying themselves and asked: Why not? Let’s rock!