Table of contents for Issue 118 in Prog

Arena and Pendragon keyboard wizard Clive Nolan has taken inspiration from classic tale Beowulf for his new album, Song Of The Wildlands, which is released on May 14 via Crime Records. The ambitious concept album straddles folk, symphonic rock and classical music while channelling Viking influence too, and it includes a vast guestlist including a 200-voice choir singing in Anglo-Saxon. “There’s some elements in there if you like rock music, if you like musicals, if you like folk music,” Nolan says. “I think it has quite a wide appeal – I hope so, anyway.” He also hopes the release will prove to be an “experience.” He explains: “Probably most people will have heard of Beowulf, even if they don’t know the full story. Marillion fans will know the bit about…

The creator of the annual RoSfest prog event revealed that its future has been secured after a new board of organisers was appointed. George Roldan, who established the US festival in 2004, had previously said it would not return due to the coronavirus pandemic. Revealing the six-person board, which includes musician Lisa Wetton and co-ordination veterans Octavia Brown and Nick Katona, Roldan says: “The Rites Of Spring Festival has been a treasure in the progressive rock world for the last 17 years and it has been my pride and privilege to create, produce, host and share the experience. I feel honoured to be able to pass the torch to such a dedicated group of musical masters.” Incoming boss John Blangero, a scientist and prog musician, says: “The board represents a…

FOR ANY CREATIVE person, the diversity of a fresh challenge can work wonders for stimulating the mind and satisfying the soul. Spires frontman and guitarist Paul Sadler has proven just that with his debut solo album, Soon To Be Absorbed. After releasing A Parting Gift with Spires in 2018, Sadler decided to put the progressive metal band on hold to venture into unknown lands; a decision that saw an idea that had been lurking in the back of his mind for several years brought to the fore. “If you just do the same projects all the time, no matter how much you love them, it can get a bit tiresome,” says Sadler. “I had tracks that didn’t fit so much with the Spires mould. So, this album was an excuse…

DON’T YOU JUST love it when a plan comes together? In 2010 Sheffield-based instrumentalist Martin Archer and a few mates wanted to create some brand new sounds. Coming from diverse musical backgrounds, including jazz, folk, rock, and electronic music, the collective pooled all of their talents and interests into something deliberately large-scale and ambitious. Orchestra Of The Upper Atmosphere, or the OUA, as they refer to it, released their self-titled double CD set in 2012 (sometimes referred to as Theta One), fulfilling their original brief with a cosmic mix that included a string quartet, a 25-piece choir and a horn section. “It took about two years to make that album,” admits Archer, describing their painstaking approach. “I wanted something where the scale of it was an integral part of it,…

“Yes bore no resemblance to anything else that was about at the time and I thought, ‘Shit, this is going to be a great band.’”Rick Wakeman On the morning that Prog speaks to Rick Wakeman, the veteran keyboard player is in a very good mood and about as far removed from his ‘Grumpy Old Rick’ Twitter handle as is possible to imagine. The reason? “I’m going to get my [Covid vaccine] jab this morning,” he says with some enthusiasm. It’s also possible another reason the 71-year-old is so chipper is that he’s talking about the events of 1971, a year that saw his career coincidentally given a massive shot in the arm after joining Yes. In February 1971, The Yes Album was released and, nine months later, Fragile: two remarkable…

British rock festivals have always been slaves to bad weather. Bickershaw, Deeply Vale and the Glastonbury mudbath of 2005 immediately spring to mind. But by far the worst casualty was 1970’s Krumlin Festival, a three-day event held on a hillside above Halifax. Torrential storms devastated the site, tearing down stone walls and electricity cables, with only the stage left upright. The final day was cancelled altogether. Hundreds of people were treated for exposure, having huddled for warmth in orange plastic bags. One promoter was supposedly found days later, wandering the moors in a semi-catatonic state. The ill-fated festival feeds directly into Orange Synthetic, the title track from Cobalt Chapel’s latest album. It also serves as an end-of-days metaphor for uncertain times. “It’s that thing about starting out with a dream…

“I think everybody feels really isolated at the moment, and especially with music, it’s such a social thing. It’s so much about human connection. It’s nice to be able to share with people what we’ve made.” Like many bands that have defined a genre, over time Mogwai have come to transcend it. Their widescreen, wall-of-sound anthems defined the second wave of post-rock, and, more than any other band became the template for what was to follow. The innovation that led them to be so influential didn’t stop in the late 90s, however, and they’ve continued to push themselves since. They’ve been prolific in recent years, releasing two soundtracks – Kin and ZeroZeroZero – since the release of their last studio album, Every Country’s Sun in 2017. Their new record, As…

Three weeks before the release of Impulse Voices, Plini’s phone blew up with angry messages from his fans. During the MTV EMAs, American singer and rapper Doja Cat had surprised viewers with a version of her hit Say So and people were quick to notice similarities to the song’s newly added guitar solo and the title track from Plini’s 2016 album, Handmade Cities. “I was sent the video by a bunch of different fans,” the Sydney-based guitarist Plini Roessler-Holgate recalls. “Some of them were outraged and some were curious. I watched it and I thought, ‘Hey, that is similar’ Then I watched it again and I was like, ‘Hey, that’s really similar.’” Agreeing with his fans, he sought more information. “I tried to find out who the band was but…

Where’s home? Crowborough in Sussex. I’ve been here about two and half years. Earliest prog memory? Listening to my elder brother Steve playing records by Genesis, Yes and Be-Bop Deluxe in the room next to mine. I was about nine and remember thinking, “I don’t know what that hippie shit is, but I like it!” First prog album purchased? Peter Gabriel III [Melt] in 1980, because I loved the single Games Without Frontiers. No Self Control’s on there, Intruder, Family Snapshot – it’s brilliant. And the last? The Claypool Lennon Delirium’s South Of Reality. That and the first one, Monolith Of Phobos – I love it. Sean Lennon, what a guitarist! First prog gig? My very first gig was Toyah, then King Crimson at Hammersmith Palais in 1982, on their…

Twelve years after its original release, pastoral proggers Big Big Train are reissuing their breakthrough album The Underfall Yard in an expanded format. The new version will be available on April 9 as a double CD via English Electric and triple LP in a trifold cover via Plane Groovy. A limited-edition cherry cola vinyl version matching the artwork will also be on offer. “We just missed the revived interest in vinyl, which started in about 2011, and we were always a bit miffed that it had never been released in this format,” explains Greg Spawton, co-founder, composer and bassist. “A lot of people have been asking us about a vinyl release since then. We thought we would make something more of it, making it available on vinyl as well as…

Lifesigns’ newly released third album, Altitude, is a deliberate attempt to aim high in more ways than one, vocalist and keyboardist John Young says. It’s the melodic proggers’ first record with drummer Zoltán Csörsz, who replaced Martin ‘Frosty’ Beadle last year. And although the latest line-up haven’t physically met yet, the musical connection was instant and seamless. “I sent tracks out to a few drummers and most of them said they’d get back to me in a few weeks,” Young says. “Zoltán sent his back in three hours. He said, ‘You know you’re the band I’ve been looking for?’ I said the gig was his.” While Csörsz, bassist Jon Poole and guitarist Dave Bainbridge got to laying down their tracks, Young and sound engineer Steve Rispin spent “months on the…

VOC-25 Swedish designer Love Hultén hits the back of the net once again, with this voice synthesiser that comprises a keyboard, discreet knobs and 25 sets of chattering plastic teeth. Ahhh, oohs and mmms emanate from the disembodied mouths, each of them accompanied by a satisfying clack as they open and snap shut. Once you’ve got over the slightly nightmarish vision, it’s a truly marvellous thing to behold. Of course, it satisfies no practical purpose whatsoever, but somehow that only makes it more wonderful. www.lovehulten.com FENDER MUSTANG MICRO Back in the day, amplifiers were things that took up way too much cupboard space and were unusable in domestic environments because of the fear of being served with a noise abatement order. That’s all changed. In the steps of similar tiny…

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…

Since leaving King Crimson in 2003, Trey Gunn has worked in a variety of diverse settings including The Security Project interpreting music from Peter Gabriel’s first four albums and the fusion-orientated crossover ensemble, Deep Energy Orchestra. A keen practitioner of the martial arts, during lockdown Gunn has also been running a series of successful music coaching courses over the internet and has just released two new albums which, he tells Prog, he never intended to make. Punkt 1 andFirmawere each recorded on two separate nights March 2020. What’s the story behind them? It’s funny. I never intended to make these records. They happened while I was meant to be doing another thing. In lockdown, I moved my guitar playing from my studio in the basement of my house to upstairs,…

At the time I was working a lot on Friends Magazine with the late Jon Goodchild, who’d come over from the States from Rolling Stone. He was their art director at the time. Out of the blue, he asked me to do some stuff for this upcoming Yes album, which they were recording at the time. “He, being a designer, had this idea of getting the band against a white backdrop. He’d got some Marshall stacks sent to him in this photographic studio and we had the band’s name stencilled on the back and the plan was that we’d stand the band around them and we’d start from there. “We got set up and waited for ages. We checked our setup and checked it all again for something to do.…

There’s definitely magic and chemistry with this group of guys, that’s undeniable,” says Jordan Rudess. “Even the first day when we started to jam, oh yeah, we’re back.” The group of guys in question is Rudess, guitar monster John Petrucci, master of the bass and Chapman Stick Tony Levin, and prog’s reigning drum champ Mike Portnoy, known together as Liquid Tension Experiment. The last time this quartet released an album Bill Clinton was in the White House, the euro had just debuted as an international currency, and The Matrix was in cinemas. It’s taken a long time to get the band back together, a situation no doubt complicated by Portnoy’s departure from Dream Theater back in 2010, but then last year the drummer played on Petrucci’s solo album, Terminal Velocity.…

“We’re really onto something with Rain,” drummer Andy Edwards enthuses via Zoom. “I hope we’ll give prog a bit of a shot in the arm.” That’s a bold statement, but Edwards is far from a naïve newcomer to the progressive rock scene. His musical CV documents stints drumming for prog stalwarts IQ and Frost* and, less proggy but most prominently, Robert Plant. And bassist John Jowitt is a bona fide prog veteran, who cut his progressive teeth way back in May 1975, seeing Gryphon support Yes at Stoke City football club. This millennium has seen Edwards and Jowitt intersect in IQ (for Frequency) and Frost* (for Milliontown and Experiments In Mass Appeal). However, they had subsequently ploughed disparate creative furrows. Their reunion came in 2019 when Quill – the enduring…

It’s a winter evening and two members of prog metal outfit Soen should be regaling Prog with anecdotes from their very first Latin America tour, but instead drummer Martín López is questioning his life choices. I’ve been a musician for 25 years and I realised that in one day it can all disappear and there’s nothing to fall back on,” he ponders. Like everyone else, the ex-Opeth sticksman didn’t have the best 2020. Last March Soen managed to squeeze in a few gigs in Mexico City before Covid-19 was declared a pandemic and the rest of their tour, which was meant to extend across South America, got canned. As the virus tore through continents leaving fatalities and job losses in its dust, suddenly artists were feeling the brunt of this…

“I remember I had brown corduroy dungarees on and I was playing a Bontempi organ in front of the TV, trying to play along with Tubeway Army!” If our lord and saviour Steven Wilson has taught us anything in recent times, it’s that pop music is nothing to be scared of. The history of pop is liberally strewn with artists who pursued a progressive path, whether overt or otherwise. Similarly, progressive rock has always had room for a catchy melody. Despite an increasingly impressive catalogue that proclaims a devotion to everything from wistful, acoustic folk to skull-rattling space rock, Jane Weaver is also a huge fan of pop. It’s a fact that her latest album, Flock, screams from the rooftops, albeit accompanied by plenty of the psychedelic songwriter’s trademark rushes…

prog.reviews@futurenet.com The rebirth of all-instrumental prog rock supergroup Liquid Tension Experiment feels like an unexpected visit from an old friend – and it comes as a welcome surprise. Last seen on a 10th anniversary tour in 2008, much has happened in the interim years, chiefly founder Mike Portnoy’s exit from his main band Dream Theater in 2010 (something that made the prospect of a reunion with fellow DT members John Petrucci and Jordan Rudess under the LTE banner unlikely). Liquid Tension Experiment’s history is inextricably entwined with that of the prog metal giants. Formed in 1997 by Portnoy, the two albums LTE released at the end of that decade, LTE1 and LTE2, featured Petrucci and Rudess alongside bassist and Chapman Stick maestro Tony Levin. The chemistry generated by the quartet…

Follow us on twitter.com/progmagazineUK KAVUS TORABI @Knifeworld My beautiful Persian santoor is back in play as work continues on the follow up to Hip To The Jag. An altogether more upbeat affair MIKE PORTNOY @MikePortnoy Oh no!!!! So sad to hear of the passing of @ChickCorea One of the pioneers of jazz/fusion keyboards. Return To Forever was one of the first real supergroups and such a huge influence. #RIPChickCorea DAVE KILMINSTER @DaveKilminster 9 years ago Keith Emerson took me out & gave me an early birthday present… a Clanger!! It was an inside joke, as we both loved the children’s TV series, & used to make ‘Clanger’ noises at each other during our onstage musical ‘duels’… I miss his wacky sense of humour J. WILLGOOSE, ESQ. @JWillgoose_Esq Belatedly realising that…

Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson has announced details of a 40th anniversary edition of the band’s 1980 album A, retitled A (A La Mode), saying: “If I could rewrite history, it would have been an Ian Anderson solo album.” Arriving on April 16 via Rhino, the triple CD/triple DVD set is remixed and remastered by Steven Wilson, and it’s accompanied by unreleased studio tracks plus a full live recording from 1980. The more electronic direction of A was due to it originally being devised as a solo record in collaboration with former Roxy Music man Eddie Jobson. The label persuaded Anderson to release it under the Tull name. “It just would have been better if I stuck to my guns,” he says, explaining the move is the reason that long-time colleagues…

Norwegian prog masterminds Motorpsycho aren’t sure how to describe their new album, Kingdom Of Oblivion, which is released on April 16 via Stickman Records. “This is mostly relatively concise stuff for us, but some songs do go on for a bit,” says co-founder Bent Sæther. “At one point we thought this would finally be our heavy metal album – and we’d be the first to admit to worshipping at the altar of Tony Iommi – but it kinda mutated and took a left turn somewhere in there, and I don’t know quite what to call this!” The band rehearsed and demoed the music in their hometown of Trondheim, before heading to Black Box Studio in the French countryside, where they’d recorded 2020’s The All Is One. “Sonically it’s probably more…

VOLA say they’ve created something of a different flavour from their previous work on their new album Witness, which arrives on May 21 via Mascot. The LP, which follows 2018’s Applause From A Distant Crowd, marks the first time the Swedish-Danish outfit have worked with a producer to mix and master a record. “We thought it was time for something different,” says Asger Mygind about working with producer and engineer Jacob Hansen. “We like what he’s done before – he has this very big hi-fi sound.” The singer describes the new album as being a departure from the “organic, lively” sound of their previous album and a move towards something “sleek” and “produced sounding”. He adds: “It wouldn’t feel inspiring to create something too similar to Applause Of A Distant…

If all you know of Chick Corea is his work with Return To Forever, you’re missing out on a remarkably rich, deeply fulfilling back catalogue. In the aftermath of Chick Corea’s untimely death – he died of what was officially described as a rare form of cancer on February 9 – many fans struggled to process the loss. One reason for this was that Corea had continued to be vital and active right up until the end. Some artists slow down, kick back, retreat from public performance. Not Corea. A creative dynamo with a prodigious output that runs into hundreds of releases, Corea didn’t seem to get the memo that players on the cusp of being an octogenarian should be taking things easy. Corea was genuinely inquisitive and had an…

“Phil Carson, the then-boss of Atlantic Records in England, introduced me to the band at Advision Studios. I went there with my massively decorated copy of Parsifal illustrated by Willy Pogany. The illustrations, decorations and the text were very intense. I said to the band it would be fantastic to have this magical story in this sort of form. Of course, we couldn’t put out an album that was like an old book but there’s a little attempt at that in printing on the brown paper on the inside and having that booklet within it. So it was the faintest of faintest shadows of how it might have been. “The gatefold cover I saw as a story, a fantasy. It wasn’t symbolic of anything. It was part of a story…

For Catherine Anne Davies, the writing and recording of her new album presented a distinct challenge: how much of herself to reveal. “I’ve always been an incredibly private person,” the singer and multi-instrumentalist tells Prog. “I never would’ve chosen to share any of these details publicly or even to write songs about them, so it’s strange to me that I’ve made a record about it all. But when things accumulate to such a level, it becomes impossible for it not to spill out.” The Art Of Losing, her second album as The Anchoress, is a richly intense work, rooted in Davies’ personal experience of grief, trauma and loss. It’s also often extraordinarily beautiful. Her lyrical eloquence and raw emotive power are measured in vivid arrangements that shift between whispers and…

Andy Bell answered a knock on his door the other day. There stood Pink Floyd’s manager, who gifted him a copy of the Record Store Day 2020 single, Arnold Layne Live 2007. Not only was it a wholly unexpected surprise, but it also brought back vivid memories of a treasured moment in Bell’s career. In May 2007, a host of big names gathered at London’s Barbican Hall for The Madcap’s Last Laugh, a tribute gig in honour of Syd Barrett, who’d passed away the previous year. The surviving members of Pink Floyd were there, as were special turns Kevin Ayers, John Paul Jones, Robyn Hitchcock, Damon Albarn, Chrissie Hynde and Captain Sensible. To close proceedings, Pink Floyd reunited (minus Roger Waters) to play Arnold Layne, the single that sent the…

The life of a professional musician can seem pretty rosy from the outside. When the musician in question is Anneke van Giersbergen – voice of an angel, smile that would light up a windowless tomb – one could assume that the Dutch singer has been having the time of her life for more than two decades. With numerous solo albums and collaborative projects to her name, not least an enduring creative partnership with Devin Townsend, she’s become a much-loved and respected figure in the prog, alt-rock and metal worlds. Unfortunately, real life has a tendency to interfere with just about everything, and van Giersbergen’s new album, The Darkest Skies Are The Brightest tells the rather more complicated and heartrending story of perhaps the toughest period in her career to date.…

“I think it’s a reasonable discussion to have: how do you advance society in a way that progresses towards equality and other values that people care about?” James Lascelles is discussing his band Wheel’s new second album, Resident Human, that examines modern humanity and calls for change. Lascelles himself knows about the positivity that change can bring, given the fact that he left his home country of the UK to move to Finland on a whim 10 years ago, and played on pop music reality shows before forming Wheel in 2015. “I was playing in a prog band in the UK but was going broke and thinking about quitting music,” Lascelles recalls. “A friend had moved to Finland and won the Idols competition [the Finnish version of Pop Idol], and…

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