THIS IS OUR CHANCE TO BUILD BACK BETTER

Prog’s News Editor says the pandemic presents a rare opportunity.

Even with the Covid-19 vaccines being rolled out and light appearing at the end of the tunnel, we still have no clue as to when light will return to our stages. There’s a long road back to any kind of normality at live shows, and when we get there many of our favourite old faces won’t be seen any more. The pandemic has been a disaster for live music, which has always existed in a precarious balance between corporate and artistic interests.

Only a fool would try to take a crystal ball to that side of things. But while stages remain dark, I’ve been delighted to see light bulbs going off in prog artists’ heads. It’s one of the perks of this job to have one-on-one conversations with a wide range of musicians and to sometimes see a collective general message.

Before this it was a bit downbeat. Right across the prog spectrum, artists would hint that the inspiration behind their latest work was that something was terribly wrong and needed to be addressed. But what came with it was a sense that the warnings would go unheeded, because they often had before.

By early last year a lot of people I interviewed expressed a desire to do something, but less conviction over what. Then came the toes-in-the-water moments – shows from home, recordings by remote tracking, collaborations that live schedules would previously have made impossible – as everyone learned about the prison our planet had come to feel like.

In recent months, as new album announcements have begun to pile up, many musicians have reported that they’d finally found time to explore an aspect of their art that they’d never got round to before. As we all find the courage to look forward, I’m beginning to detect a new sense of conviction in many quarters. Through the constant daily drag, many of us forgot what mattered to us. With the threat of losing it, we remembered its value.

As prog fans, we all know that uncomfortable feeling of sharing our passion for audio art with music scenes that are more about entertainment. I think that may have changed: I think that, because we’ve all needed something to look forward to as well as up to, many have silently reconsidered what music means to them, and been reminded of how much it really does.

So, yes, it’s going to take a while for us to rejoin the massive crowds we miss, but when we do, we’ll appreciate it more than ever. Then, perhaps, we can rebuild the business-art balance better than it was before the lockdowns.

If we take that opportunity seriously, the new normal can be better for everyone. Change is inevitable, and hiding from it doesn’t work, so let’s own it. That wouldn’t just be a happy ending to one of the most challenging chapters in most of our lives – it would be the ending we all deserve.

MARTIN KIELTY

Got an opinion on the matter that you’d like to share? Please email us at: prog@futurenet.com. Opinions expressed in this column aren’t necessarily those of the magazine.