VARIOUS ARTISTS

Steven Wilson Presents Intrigue: Progressive Sounds In UK Alternative Music 1979-89 EDSEL/DEMON

AN IMPORTANT COLLECTION – OR ONE HELL OF A MIX TAPE.

A dive into the hidden history of 80s prog.

There’s a still persistent narrative in rock history that has punk killing off the lumbering dinosaurs of prog and clearing the way for a more ‘real’ and direct style of music without unnecessary pretensions. This is, of course, nonsense, as a basic perusal of what was actually in the album charts in 1977-78 will show. If anything, we should perhaps view punk as an interregnum, a necessary palate-cleanser before the next wave of “progressive” bands, because as Steven Wilson writes in his sleeve notes for this excellent compilation, “post-punk artists could be just as lofty in their ambitions as any of the now unfashionable 70s bands.” Year zero wasn’t the end of history, but a chance to start again.

Here, Wilson grasps the nettle and essentially poses the question: is “progressive” a mindset or a genre? For Wilson, it’s clearly the former, which Intrigue seeks to establish. His definition of “progressive” is broad, and sometimes stretched to breaking point – but what he’s essentially talking about is music that was forward-facing and embraced innovation and experimentation, whether in instrumentation, playing style or arrangement. Tellingly, the 80s neo-prog bands don’t fit with Wilson’s thesis, because he feels they were explicitly backward-looking – the only one to feature here is the new wave-influenced Twelfth Night.

Split over four CDs or seven LPs, Intrigue… is an absolute treasure trove of boundary-pushing music. From the off, Wire’s I Should Have Known Better establishes the tone for much of what’s to follow, being fraught with tension and a steely futurity rather than the frilliness of most traditional prog. On saying that, some of the more well known post-punk bands conjured a decidedly ‘proggy’ vibe – listen to the peeling synths and dramatic chords of Magazine’s Back To Nature or beautiful piano and looming drones of Joy Division’s The Eternal. There’s also room for those members of the old guard who continued to channel the modern – Bill Nelson on the snarlingly energetic A Better Home In The Phantom Zone

and Peter Hammill on the starkly paranoid Patient.

But it’s those artists that broke open genre conventions and created a new musical language that continue to startle: the space age industrial dub of Public Image Ltd’s Careering;

the rhythm-heavy secret ceremony of 23 Skidoo’s The Gospel Comes To New Guinea; the sampladelic storytelling of Kate Bush’s Waking The Witch; the ecstatic post-psychedelia of Dif Juz’s No Motion. Whether you subscribe to Wilson’s vision of progressive music or not, this is an important collection – or at the very least, one hell of a mix tape.