CELEBRATING THE SHIRE
While speeding through A New Day Yesterday – Mike Barnes’ enjoyably encyclopaedic, exhaustively researched and beautifully written history of 70s prog – I’ve been struck by several things, but the one that has exercised me the most is prog’s relationship with Tolkien.
Barnes, perhaps coloured by his obvious antipathy toward Marillion, goes out of his way to demonstrate that there’s no discernible Tolkien in prog. Two points worth making here. First, prog’s lyricists were trying to break away from the strictures of post-war conformity, so psychoanalysis, psychedelia, mysticism, surrealism, absurdism, myth, fantasy, and, yes, Tolkien, were all fertile areas for immersion, exploration and creating a new narrative.
Second, there is indeed a significant amount of Tolkien in 70s prog. To namecheck a few – some of which
Barnes even mentions himself – the Middle Earth hippie club, Argent’s Lothlorien, Barclay James Harvest’s
Galadriel, the “river daughters” in Floyd’s Cirrus Minor, Camel’s Nimrodel, Rush’s Rivendell and Mike Oldfield’s custom effects unit, the Glorfindel box. Also, when it comes to the haters, Floyd’s The Gnome, Gong’s Pot Head Pixies, the artwork for In The Land Of Grey And Pink and Wakeman’s capes might as well have been full-bore Tolkien. So there’s really no need either to pretend that 70s prog creatives weren’t influenced by The Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit.
It’s perversely weird, then, that 70s purists like Barnes so confidently dismiss the second-wave 80s prog bands whose lyrics range far wider than those of their 70s antecedents – engaging with politics, society and love (all mostly absent from 70s prog) in a much more immediate, focussed and multifaceted way. In hindsight, though, Marillion probably should have changed their name completely before releasing Script…
would have saved all us Gen X prog nerds a lot of grief.
Nic Ransome, London