Ed’s Letter

Hello, and welcome to the new issue of Prog. A new Marillion album is always cause for celebration, especially when it’s as good as An Hour Before It’s Dark. The general consensus from the Prog team is that once again the band have surpassed themselves. Dave Everley goes deep into the making of the album for our cover feature on page 28. We also bring you an exclusive extract from Mark Kelly’s new autobiography (page 36) that looks at how he and the band devised their crowdfunding approach to releasing music, the system that also helped the band hit the road at the end of last year amid continued Covid confusion.

I hope you enjoy the 20-track earMUSIC digital sampler (see page 7), which also features our cover stars along with a splendid selection of prog and progressively minded music on the label. We’re hoping these label samplers will become a constant as we transition from no longer featuring a physical CD.

Talking of which, thank you to everyone who has thus far emailed in about the CD. Not everyone was happy, and we knew that would be the case, but for the most part, your letters were fair and polite and people raised some interesting ideas, all of which we are currently looking into. By next issue we should have a plan in place to continue to highlight the grass roots of prog bands as well. Also, we’ve long been creating a playlist to cover the bands in the new issue, which is featured on our social media channels. As of this issue we’re including the link on this page too, so hopefully more of you can enjoy that.

At the end of the day we are, and always have been, a magazine, dedicated to bringing you the very best coverage of the entire progressive music spectrum. That is what we’ve always strived to do and what we always will do.

So please enjoy issue 127 of Prog. Take care of yourselves, and we’ll see you with issue 128 on March 11. Prog on…