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Prog at the Proms

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I didn’t go to this as I generally avoid gigs but I was intrigued to check it out via BBC Sounds and I must admit that it all sounded rather awful. I adore Peter Hammill and it’s wonderful to hear him do his thing (even if it is the rather predictable ‘Refugees’) but, sadly, to the uninitiated it’s hardly likely to win many converts as his delivery was rather weak and shouty. Gruff Rhys, who I also admire greatly and is a thoroughly decent sort, was also way off-key on his rather ‘phone it in’ version of Tull’s ‘Living In the Past’ (another unimaginative choice from their huge repertoire- and are they/were they really ever ‘prog’ anyway??). I’d be interested to know if, among the prog fans here, anybody listened in and had a more positive opinion of it. I mean, it’s obviously nice to see prog being recognized and celebrated but my gripe was with the rather obvious choice of material and the weaknesses of the vocal performances. The orchestra was great throughout however. Apparently it’s televised on the 24th.

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  1. I haven’t listened in – but I am planning to watch it. My expectations were fairly low before your review, mainly regarding the predictability of the repertoire likely to be covered.
    But I’ll watch it anyway!

  2. Unfortunately the Radio 3 listing doesn’t say who performed or sang on what piece. I suppose they went for the obvious pieces as yer average man in the Royal Albert Hall would possibly/probably have heard of them.

    I’ll download it and I’ll probably skim through the vocal performances. What possibly would have been good if one of the vocal pieces had been performed on the theremin.

    One review I’d read gave it a real pasting but I can’t remember where I saw it here’s another instead which certainly seemed to enjoy it.
    https://ukjazznews.com/bbc-proms-2026-prog-rock-a-fanfare-for-the-common-man/

    I see Andy Findon plays sopranino sax on the Soft Machine track so I shall certainly watch that. A misreading of mine though Fiona Bruce had done some of the orchestration.

  3. There’s a basic listing of who sang which song on the BBC Sounds page for the concert.
    Guy Garvey, Jane Weaver, Gruff Rhys, Peter Hammill, The Staves and Vanessa Haynes were the featured vocalists. Carl Palmer played drums on Fanfare For The Common Man and Great Gates Of Kiev.

    Gruff Rhys wasn’t terrible on Living In The Past.
    I thought Jane Weaver was a disappointing female vocal soloist, particularly on “Northern Lights” which really showed her voice’s limitations, but also on her rather mediocre rendition of “Nights In White Satin”.
    Guy Garvey was OK on “I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe).
    The Staves did a pretty good job on “And You And I”.
    Never have cared for Peter Hamill’s voice and bombast. Unsurprisingly his rendition of “Refugees” didn’t change my opinion in the slightest.

    When the interval came, I decided not to bother listening to the second half of the concert. It all seemed a bit half-assed to me. A disappointment.

    • Repertoire is chosen so as not to scare the horses, so they are all going to be unimaginative choices.
      I would never have predicted any VdGG in a concert like this – but an early ballad makes sense, not too noisy, not too scary.

    • Agreed. Jane Weaver’s performance was awful; she appeared to have little confidence in what she was performing and seemed under-rehearsed. She lacked the top end to deliver ‘Northern Lights’ and she basically murdered ‘Nights in White Satin’ . One of the best performances for me was ‘Crime of the Century’. It really worked well. I also thought the orchestral Gentle Giant number worked really well. Their music is begging for an orchestral album! The Prog at the Proms initiative was welcome though. They missed a few tricks. There is already an album of Jethro Tull’s music for string quartet where Ian Anderson plays flute. That would have worked at the Proms. Close to the Edge has already been performed live by Yes accompanied by orchestra – all they needed to make that work was the voice of Jon Anderson, on tour currently with his Band Geeks.

  5. There’s something about the Proms – prog night, northern soul night, glam night – doesn’t really matter which genre. They have this ghastly “look at us, we’re being dead radical!” attitude which rubs me up the wrong way.
    Benevolently condescending toward the chosen music? Can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s very irritating.

    • Exactly. I’m all for 20th century classical music, but the “best of” Classic FM type material/ style, and the assumption it is morally and culturally superior to other music really sticks in my craw. I’ve listened to the Prog Proms concert and some things work better than others. Some sounds not especially progressive when made tasteful and respectable. Other things worked quite well. The song choice was problematic; some of it seemed a bit “will this do?”, like those third-rate CDs of various folks playing prog classics with other friends and they get the orchestra in. I think when the PP was more progressive, it worked better, and when it was “classical crossover” (a genre, and you are right to blanch at) it was dull.

      • ‘the assumption it is morally and culturally superior to other music’ is not something anyone here has ever believed about their personal chosen music, oh no.

    • Trouble is, if they keep it all “highbrow” then they get accused of elitism. Shades of “Ordinary people pay their TV license too!”
      There are 80-odd concerts in the Proms program each year. The BBC broadcasts ALL of them on Radio 3 and a lot on TV too. A few throwaway People Pleasers in amongst all of that isn’t the end of civilization.

      • Every year I buy the Proms guide and every year I go through the programme in advance and single out the performances I want to hear the rest I ignore. They are not for me but I’m sure someone, somewhere will enjoy them and that’s just fine.

      • Just my opinion, Mike, nothing to do with the End of Civilisation.

        I’m never comfortable with the elitism argument applied to classical music. Both my parents were working class, brought up in post-war Glasgow – they both like(d) classical music and I’m not sure they’d have considered themselves elitist.

        I’m also an “ordinary” person and I pay my licence fee – and, left up to me, I’d bin all the “People Pleaser” proms, as you put it, and revert to 100% classical. Again, just my view and never going to happen – after all, it’s only leisure time, isn’t it?

        • I’m sure the thinking is “lure them in with some lowbrow proms and maybe they’ll enjoy some of the others”. Educate and inform etc. etc. It’s not that bad an idea.

          There are a very large number of “ordinary” people who like classical music when they hear it, without knowing all that much about it and never setting foot in a concert hall.

  11. I listened to fair old slab of it which was in the main bland, bland,bland. I was kind of expecting that but was disappointed all the same. Two exceptions were the Out Bloody Rageous piece which was done with real conviction and Refugees which was the absolute highlight for me – not a big Hammill fan but always loved this song. I found it quite emotional, touching and sensitively arranged which is more than I can say for the rest of the programme.

    • Just fast/slow/fast forwarded thru it. By and large pretty insipid fare. Like Feedback, I thought Peter Hamill did himself most credit, and I thought the orchestration worked well. By and large, however, the orchestra seemed bolted on, à la those awful hooked on classics fiascos. Even the conductor had a vile Louis Clark haircut, at least as out of date as the most the music played. When the musicians played electric instruments their competence versus attitude showed, with soulless note perfect offerings: the bass in the intro to Tubular Bells and guitar in Great Gig in the Sky two overt examples. When the orchestra did orchestral they were superb, rendering Carl Palmer’s clattering around the kit for Mussorgsky especially grievous. (And I love ELP’s Pictures.) I didn’t tally much for the KC or Yes pieces, as they showed off how naff orchestrated attempts to rock generally are. The Stave girl did sound very Anderson-ic, mind. She’d better be careful or she’ll find herself in the band.
      If I say it was better than expected, that is only as I expected the bar to be subterranean. I dare say it made more sense in the room, with the volume of the orchestra blowing the roof off. Oh, and wasn’t Mark Radcliffe awful!!!

  12. Apparently Gruff Rhys was edited put of the TV version due to adverse reactions. Have to say it wasn’t his finest moment and it was probably for the best. It really did sound as if he’d never heard Living in the Past before.

  15. From today’s Sunday Times……

    “Jeremy Clarkson: The tech bros should really be funding prog rock
    If we don’t give the next musical genius enough money to create their 23-minute epic, we’ll be forever stuck with Adele

    We all have hobbies. Some of us fish, some play with toy trains and others wear aprons and do freemasonry. Me? I listen to prog rock. I like it. I like it so much that last weekend, I drove all the way to the Albert Hall in London to listen to the BBC Proms orchestra perform a selection of prog classics.

    Or were they? I met with like-minded friends before kick-off and there was some debate about the upcoming setlist. Nights in White Satin? We weren’t sure that counted as prog. In the same way we were absolutely certain that I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe) definitely did. Pretentious title, meaningless lyrics, complicated, and so long, that there was a very real risk that some people in the audience would die before it was over.

    Length is a critical component in this genre. Three minutes is what you need for a pop song, but progressive rock demands something that goes on till November. And it must have towering keyboard solos that last for a weekend. The whole first side of ELP’s Works album is one track. Supper’s Ready by Genesis goes on for 23 minutes. And I love that. Which is why I went all the way to London.

    It was a fantastic gig. It opened with Fanfare for the Common Man, gave us side one of Tubular Bells and even featured Crime of the Century by Supertramp which, in my mind, is public school rock, rather than prog. But we’ll let that one go.

    In much the same way that the whole world decided, in the late Seventies, to let prog rock go. It was too difficult. You had to be an accomplished musician to play it, and something of a scholar to write it. Just listen to the time signature on Solsbury Hill to see what I mean. 4/4 disco was easier; anyone could do it. And so was punk. That was so easy that when I had a go, as a lead singer in the short-lived band Bacon Sandwich, not a single person in the audience noticed that I’d sung the lyrics to one song while the band played something else. Even I didn’t notice until they finished before I did.

    Disco and punk were cheaper too. In 1977, Emerson, Lake & Palmer toured America with a full 70-piece orchestra. That was so ruinously expensive that halfway through the tour, the whole orchestra was sent home, and they carried on as a trio. Today, they wouldn’t even be able to do that.

    Very often today, there are no bands at all in the UK top 40. It’s full of solo artists or kids who’ve made some noises on a computer in their bedroom. This is because it’s cheaper to tour when there’s just you, and also, you don’t have to spend all day wiping the sick off your guitarist or paying for the damage caused when your drummer put some dynamite in the hotel’s lavatories.

    And all of this brings me on to Mozart. It’s inconceivable to think that a modern-day version of this genius isn’t out there somewhere. Today, we have engineers and artists and business people who are a match for their swashbuckling bewigged forebears. But there’s no equivalent today of Mozart, or Beethoven or Bach.

    Naturally, the internet says there is and pointed me in the direction of a young Icelandic girl called Anna Thorvaldsdottir who’s written a classical piece called Aeriality. Apparently, it’s about the sense of absolute freedom you’d get from being able to fly, tinged with a slight unease. Pomp and Circumstance, it is not. To me it sounded like a persistent wasp had clattered into some wind chimes while a man scraped at his enormous upended drum with a timpani mallet, and someone who can’t play the piano played the piano.

    I like complicated. I can handle any of Yes’s forays into madness but this was just bonkers; tree hugging nonsense. I suspect most modern classical music is the same. If you read up on it, they talk about how the composer is “exploring post-minimalist soundscapes”. It’s Liberal Democratish twaddle and none of the people who write it will be remembered a hundred years from now, like Beethoven, Bach and Mozart are. And like Peter Hammill from Van der Graaf Generator will be. His set at the Proms was magnificent.

    So how do we get the musical superstars back? How do we once again inject our lives with sounds created by people with a gift? Well I’m afraid that the problem is money. Mozart was commissioned to write his stuff. Rich people would pay him to compose a concerto or an opera and then he would earn more cash from ticket sales when the composition was played live. And that’s what we need now; benefactors who will pay a band to write another Journey to the Centre of the Earth. Or another Selling England.

    George Harrison did this very thing when he gave Monty Python the money they needed to make Life of Brian. None of the usual companies would touch it. It was too risky. But he came along and as a result of his largesse, the world now has something to treasure.

    So come on Musk and Gates and Jeff. The next Mozart is out there. So’s the next Keith Emerson. But to create what they could create and then perform it needs the sort of cash only you have. And unless you cough up, we’ll be stuck with Taylor Swift and Adele. They’re very talented pop singers of course, but mostly, they are cheap. On the road, one woman with a microphone is profitable. A six-piece band with a full range of keyboards, five thousand lasers and a drum kit the size of Harrogate isn’t.

    And we can’t let governments near the funding because they will always insist the lyrics are about social mobility in the community. Whereas what we need is: “Battleships confide in me and tell me where you are, shining, flying, purple wolfhound, show me where you are, lost in summer, morning, winter, travel very far, lost in losing circumstances, that’s just where you are.” Utterly magnificent, towering gibberish.”

    • As ever, Clarkson confounds. How such an unlikeable man can write so well; having me wanting always more, and to buy his newspaper from time to time appals me. The content here, however, is, as he says himself, in the last 4 words of the article.

    • I Know What I Like is pop really. Catchy and not difficult. Also I think Taylor Swift has a larger crew than any prog act. Musicians, dancers, guest artists, effects technicians and so on. Life Of Brian doesn’t stand up today and disappoints compared to one’s memory of it. Clarkson really is a sad little boy blubbering over how things aren’t what they used to be and never were. Living In The Past indeed. An effective troll though I guess.

    • He’s right about all of this, except that today Mozart would definitely not be doing prog. He’d be in front of the forefront of some music you’ve never even thought about.

  16. If other Genesis news, they have announced a 4CD / Blu Ray edition of their first album “From Genesis to Revelation”….

    I don’t think I have listened to this album for many many years, but from what I recall, it doesn’t seem one that would elicit 4 CD’s worth of material.

  17. I don’t think these pop proms ever really work: I would prefer a “straight” baroque/classical/modern season as it what the musicians do best. Not sure that I missed that much by the sound of it, but a shame no one tried Procol Harum’s “A Salty Dog.”

    • Further upthread, I was saying precisely this. However, when I watched it (and tried to leave my cynicism at the door) I found that I enjoyed most of it, more than I expected.

      Agree about A Salty Dog, though – a missed opportunity…

  18. My monthly playlist features the original recordings of the music featured at Prog at the Proms, plus a few more pieces that might have made the cut had they thought of them. Here’s the link for those who might wish to explore this.

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