British Progressive Pop 1970-1980

Andy Bennett

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501336645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica della musica

Positioned between the psychedelic and counter-cultural music of the late 1960s and the punk and new wave styles of the late 1970s, early 1970s British popular music is often overlooked in pop music studies of the late 20th century, but it was, in fact, highly diverse with many artists displaying an eclecticism and flair for musical experimentation. 'Progressive pop' artists such as Roxy Music, David Bowie, the early Queen, the Electric Light Orchestra, 10cc and Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel successfully straddled the album and singles markets, producing music that often drew on a variety of different musical styles and traditions. Similarly, such artists often set new benchmarks for songwriting and production, utilizing the full potential of the rapidly expanding studio technology of the era to produce albums of highly diverse material featuring, in some cases, special studio-crafted effects and soundscapes that remain unique to this day. This book considers the significance of British progressive pop in the early 1970s as a period during which the boundaries between pop and rock were periodically relaxed, providing a platform for musical creativity less confined by genre and branding.

1

Progressive pop in context

The progressive pop era of early 1970s Britain, like other popular music eras before it and since, is inextricably bound up with the cultural, socio-economic and technological factors that surrounded its emergence. Britain was still, at the very beginning of the 1970s, a country buoyed up by the optimism of the 1960s. Although this confidence would begin to falter early in the new decade due to a slowing of the economy, on a popular culture footing, the nation’s music, sports and film icons provided Britain with an aura of kudos that rivalled that of the United States. In that respect at least, Britain in the early 1970s imbibed the spirit of the ‘long sixties’ even as a wariness concerning some aspects of the 1960s was evident. With the failed promises of the late 1960s counter-culture still a recent memory, popular music and its audience in Britain were looking to express themselves in different ways. The music described in this book as progressive pop retained an aesthetic of ‘seriousness’ borrowed from the rock world of the late 1960s, but its creative ethos was grounded less in the revolutionary fervour of the 1960s rock ethic and erred more towards the new creative pathways suggested by the Beatles and others as the 1960s drew to a close. Riding a wave of rapid development and expansion of recording studio technology, progressive pop artists were thus beneficiaries of a ‘best of both worlds’ moment in the history of British popular music, when ‘rock’ credentials could still earn an artist artistic capital while a seemingly endless supply of new technological aids assisted artists in realizing their creative ambitions in ways that allowed for increasing levels of complexity and accomplishment that enjoyed a broad appeal across different segments of the British music-buying public. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the early roots of 1970s British progressive pop through considering the musical and technological transitions that took place between the mid-1960s and the early 1970s.

Reconstructing a popular music past

Grossberg (1994) has suggested that particular generations are often transfixed around the music and associated popular culture of their own youth so as to become in many cases dismissive in a wholesale sense of subsequent generational eras and epochs, which they consider as culturally vacuous. In offering this observation, Grossberg focuses on the baby boomer generation of the 1960s, but his ‘warning’ seems equally pertinent in the case of other post-war generations who are now actively revisiting and re-evaluating their musical and cultural pasts. To the extent that this book is an academic exploration of what the author identifies as an era of progressive pop in the early 1970s, it is also a book written on the basis of much personal knowledge, together with lived memories, of that particular period of British popular cultural history. This is displayed, for example, through references to more obscure British music television programmes of the early 1970s such as Lift Off with Ayshea and Shang-a-Lang (see also Chapter 2), references such as these being familiar to music fans and television viewers who grew up in Britain during the 1970s but often far less meaningful in an immediate sense to anyone else.

Since the beginning of the new millennium, a fascination with the British popular culture of the 1970s has rapidly come to rival the 1960s as an in-vogue decade for retrospective scrutiny in the British media. This began in earnest with the BBC television mini-series, I Love the ’70s, which premiered in July 2000, with each of the ten episodes focusing on a consecutive year of the 1970s decade. Although the series was not exclusively focused on music, perhaps inevitably musical references were a signature part of the appeal of the series, reconnecting a significant cross section of the audience with the music and pop icons of their youth. Although not all of the featured artists were British, a significant proportion of them were. There is a direct correlation between this trend in media production and consumption and the identification of a phenomenon referred to as cultural memory (Assmann, 2011). This refers to a process whereby individual reflections on the recent past are seen to converge as collective remembering clustered around particular representations, including those produced by the media and cultural industries (see also Bennett and Rogers, 2016). Cultural memory can also be, and indeed typically is, a nationally or locally inscribed form of remembering. More recently, the public appetite in the UK for music retrospectives specifically focusing on British artists has led to a veritable rush of documentaries. Largely produced by the BBC, these include Mr Blue Sky – The Story of Jeff Lynne and ELO (2012), I’m Not in Love: The Story of 10cc (2015) and Queen: Rock the World (2017). Similarly, a slightly earlier BBC documentary The Old Grey Whistle Test Story (2007) relates the history of the iconic BBC2 music programme which, during the first half of the 1970s, offered British music fans their only option for a regular television viewing of AOR (album-orientated-rock) artists (Fryer, 1997; Mills, 2010; see also Chapter 2). On the surface, this trend for music and pop culture retrospectives is patently a representation of the British seventies generation coming of (middle) age and beginning to engage in a collective re-evaluation of their youth and its sociocultural context. It is also illustrative of the fact that some members of that same generation, now invested with power to make creative decisions at a mainstream media level, are harnessing that power to re-present the seventies era and its popular music icons back to those for whom the musical output of this era signified the soundtrack of their youth (Bennett, 2013). Viewed through the conceptual lens of cultural memory, it can be seen how the producers and consumers of these products are connected through common patterns of taste in music and associated cultural trends of the popular past. As such, resources such as music documentaries with a historical focus can be seen to serve to form a kind of memory feedback loop, whereby a shared and mutually preferred version of the past is continually reproduced in the present (Bal et al., 1999).

It is an inevitable admission that aspects of these same visual and material culture resources have been drawn upon in the writing of this book. At the same time, however, it is not the intention of the author to simply re-map what are already well-defined contours of media-framed cultural memories and thus create yet another object of memory or nostalgia. Rather, a key objective of this book is to critically investigate a period of British popular music which, despite its obvious cultural resonance at a generational level, constitutes a missing moment academically speaking in the history and heritage of contemporary British popular music. Indeed, when embarking on the study of popular music in Britain during the 1970s, and particularly the music that featured during the first half of the decade, what becomes quickly apparent is the overall lack of attention that has been given to this period of British popular music in academic scholarship in a wholesale sense. There are, of course, some exceptions here, notably work on the British glam rock era (see Auslander, 2006) and British progressive rock bands such as Yes, Genesis and Pink Floyd (Macan, 1997; Martin, 1998). Similarly, rock group Led Zeppelin have received a significant level of academic attention over the years (see, for example, Waksman, 1996; Fast, 2001; Brackett, 2008). However, and as will be further considered in Chapter 2, even with these genres, the picture painted of their specific significance in a British context is far from complete, particularly in relation to those glam rock and progressive rock artists, whose fan base and appeal were primarily localized, that is to say British (and with an occasionally smaller footprint in continental Europe) rather than ‘trans-Atlantic’. Moreover, in the case of almost all other British popular music artists, the years spanning 1970 to 1976 barely register, if at all, in academic scholarship (with only slightly better representation in the trade press it must be said). Only with the advent of punk, and to a lesser degree reggae (see, for example, Hebdige, 1979; Jones, 1988; Laing, 1985), does popular music in Britain during the 1970s begin to garner more sustained attention in academic work (see Bennett, 2007). In essence then, from an academic perspective, British popular music during the early 1970s has been glossed over in a broader sense.

Getting to grips with why this proves to be the case is difficult to say the least. One salient clue, however, appears in some of the early academic work on popular music, now more commonly positioned under the broad banner of popular music studies. While popular music studies, in Britain and elsewhere, was gaining momentum during the late 1970s and the early 1980s, much of the scholarship at this time appeared to be focused on popular music prior to 1970s or, as noted above, on musical developments later in the decade such as punk and reggae (see, for example, Frith, 1983; Middleton, 1990). Driven by a critical agenda embedded in the cultural Marxism underpinning much popular music studies output, and indeed other aspects of the humanities, arts and social sciences in Britain at this time, the post-1960s/pre-punk era of British popular music seemed perhaps unworthy of serious academic scrutiny due to its ostensibly non-political and more overtly ‘commercial’ nature. Certainly, and as discussed in detail in Chapter 5, there was a notable turn in British popular music of the early 1970s away from music with a more hard-edged political message. As this book illustrates, however, this is by no means the whole story. Another clue is evident in the links present during the 1970s between academic studies of popular music and music journalism, where similar critical lenses were being applied to provide a definition of ‘worthy’ popular music (see, for example, Laing, 1994). In that sense, a dismissive discourse is often evident in academically attuned journalistic accounts of some new British popular music artists of the early 1970s, notably Queen, whose work was often portrayed in the British music press as naïve, self-indulgent, derivative and lacking in the artistic integrity of British artists who rose to prominence during 1960s, notably the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and the Who (see Jones, 2018). However, even artists such as David Bowie and Roxy Music, who escaped the scathing criticism directed at some other early 1970s artists, also failed to attract more sustained academic attention until much later in the evolution of popular music studies (see, for example, Frith and Horne, 1987). Furthermore, while many popular music scholars have become more focused on the history and heritage of rock and pop since the 1950s (see, for example, Cohen et al., 2015), the lack of attention given to British popular music in a broader sense during the early 1970s has continued. In this and the following chapter, the intention is to re-focus attention on this period and the contribution of specific artists whose music characterized what is in many ways a unique era of British popular music – one in which genre distinctions were often less clear-cut and a trend for musical experimentation was tolerated by the music industry and music audiences alike.

The long musical sixties

The ultimate aim of this book, then, is to bring more fully into relief an era of British popular music that is essentially overlooked in existing academic scholarship. This, however, cannot be effectively achieved without first considering events and developments in the world of British popular music that preceded the early 1970s, thus providing the background context for the evolution of progressive pop. In that sense, the impact of what many have referred to as the ‘long sixties’ is a highly pertinent point of reference. While this term is more readily used with reference to the longevity of the cultural politics and protest that emerged during the 1960s under the broad banner of the counter-culture (see, for example, Marwick, 2005; Whiteley and Sklower, 2014), musically too it can be argued that the 1960s, and particularly the mid to late 1960s, continued to have a significant influence on the popular music of the decade that followed. In Britain this is evidenced by the fact that many musicians who (re)emerged in the early 1970s as progressive pop artists had served important musical apprenticeships during the 1960s (as detailed in the Introduction to this book).

A further point of commonality between many of these new British popular music artists and their sixties peers was the prevalence of an art school education. The British art school tradition, which began to flourish as a breeding ground for future rock and pop artists during the 1950s and early 1960s (see Frith and Horne, 1987), had served an important role in shaping the creative talents of many prominent British musicians, among them John Lennon, Keith Richards and Pete Townshend. This trend continued in the late 1960s and early 1970s with a new generation of aspiring rock musicians being introduced to experimental and provocative expressions of creativity via an art school education. These included Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno and Andy McKay of Roxy Music and Kevin Godley and Lol Creme of 10cc. Similarly, Freddie Mercury of Queen and David Bowie also benefited from an art school education and the added scope this afforded them in the development of the creative skills necessary to their future success as songwriters and performers (see Hodkinson, 1995; Trynka, 2011). Frith and Horne (1987) suggest that the influence of the British art school has been key to the international impact of British popular musicians since the Beatles. While there is certainly merit in Frith and Horne’s observation, it seems equally the case that art schools have been responsible for the highly diverse range of music and artists to have emerged from Britain since the 1960s, supplying a desire for experimentation and the testing of musical boundaries.

Such trends in British popular music deepened during the early 1970s as the creative opportunities for musicians expanded drastically due to the improving music technology at their disposal. In particular, the advances made in studio recording during mid-late 1960s and the continuation of such advances in the early 1970s had a critical bearing on the kind of music made by many British music artists during this period. Indeed, and as will be examined in more depth in subsequent chapters, the importance of the recording studio was pivotal in the ability of several bands, notably 10cc and Queen, to create defining songs of the early 1970s era – songs that were instantly recognizable to audiences due to their literally ‘big’ sound (an effect achieved in large part with the aid of studio multi-tracking, which had moved on considerably in the few short years since the pioneering four-track recordings of artists such as the Beatles and the Beach Boys during the mid-1960s). Similarly, the license enjoyed by these and other artists to draw eclectically on a range of musical styles and influences, producing albums where each song was distinctive from the next, owes much to the creative freedom afforded to recording artists in the wake of the commercial success enjoyed by the Beatles. Although ultimately short-lived, the fact that this music industry ethos spanned the late 1960s and early 1970s created the conditions whereby a number of post-Beatles popular music artists were also given scope to take creative ownership of their music and its production (see Harron, 1990). Indeed, in an overall sense the legacy of the Beatles, including the band’s break-up in April 1970 while still at their creative peak, had a significant influence on many of the new British bands that began to emerge soon thereafter. While the Beatles’ 1967 release Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is still regarded as the band’s seminal creative masterpiece (see Martin, 1979) or, to use current parlance, their ‘classic album’ (see Bennett, 2009), the combined output of the Beatles from 1965’s Rubber Soul through to Abbey Road, the Beatles’ last official studio album, in 1969 sowed the seeds of much home-grown musical innovation in Britain that would come to be a trademark of British progressive pop in the early 1970s. Indeed, Spicer has gone as far as to suggest that:

[T]he Beatles sheer fluency and innovation as songwriters and performers, along with their constant pushing of the boundaries of what could be achieved technically in the recording studio, set the bar so high that all subsequent pop and rock musicians striving for originality have had to navigate the huge creative space that they carved within the landscape of popular music. (2018: 107)

There are obvious caveats in Spicer’s account, not least of all punk whose musical aesthetic, if not dismissive of the Beatles legacy in a wholesale sense, took a consciously back-to-basics approach in direct response to the more ‘ambitious’ musical styles and genres inspired in whole or in part by the Beatles’ later output. In the pre-punk 1970s, however, Spicer’s observations do indeed carry critical weight, particularly in relation to the evolution of progressive pop. And in that context, the clearest connection to be made in terms of a Beatles’ influence with much of the British popular music that immediately followed the band’s demise is the emphasis placed on the recording studio as a ‘creative’ tool. Indeed, as Théberge, observes:

Whereas, in the early 1960s, a band would not ordinarily enter a studio without having a selection of material rehearsed and ready to record, less than a decade later it was normal for bands to compose in the studio, spending weeks and months experimenting with various creative possibilities inherent in the multitrack process. (2001: 11)

As seminally inspirational artists in the creative appropriation of the recording studio, the Beatles had begun to hone this craft early in their recording career. Paul McCartney’s song ‘Yesterday’, released as a non-album single in the United States in September 1965 (and as part of an EP release in the UK the following year), had tested the waters with its incorporation of strings in a studio-produced version of the song which at that stage was beyond the reach of live performance. The album Rubber Soul released at the end of 1965 saw the Beatles exploring more fully the capacity of the recording studio, using the available technology to create music that surpassed the limitations of live performance. In this respect, Rubber Soul established the pattern of what was to follow in subsequent Beatles’ releases and would eventually see the band abandoning live performance to focus exclusively on making studio recordings. According to many commentators, the Rubber Soul album marked the first recording by a rock band not only to focus wider attention on the creative possibilities of the recording studio but to redefine the album format as a ‘creative work’ rather than merely a collection of songs of varying quality and often including filler tracks (see Howard, 2004). Thus, as O’Grady observes:

most of the songs contained on [Rubber Soul] are unified in their demonstration of a new approach to rock and roll – an approach that focuses on musical detail rather than on the massive, ear catching sound gestures of the [Beatles’] earlier pop-rock songs. (1979: 93)

The musical eclecticism of Rubber Soul, combining blues, soul and folk styles while at the same time introducing new and, at the time, novel sounds into the world of pop – as heard for example in George Harrison’s use of a sitar on the track ‘Norwegian Wood’, was also a highly influential point of departure. The following Beatles’ albums Revolver, released in 1966, and Sgt. Pepper, released the year after, followed this pattern of musical innovation and diversity in songwriting that made increasing demands on the technological capacity of the recording studio. Indeed, according to Beatles’ producer George Martin, such was the ambitious nature of the music written for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that it pushed the limits of the at that time state-of-the-art four-track recording technology, necessitating that many tracks were bounced¹ once completed to make way for the addition of new tracks (Martin, 1979).

Apart from the musical achievements and influence of the Beatles themselves, particularly during the mid- to late 1960s, it is important to understand the broader musical milieu inspired by the band. In that context, new sensibilities of popular music as a quasi high-brow form of art and cultural expression rapidly emerged and were absorbed by many other popular music artists of the time. Indeed, the musical possibilities being explored by the Beatles on their later albums, together with their demonstration of how special effects and studio overdubs could be used to create recordings comprising ‘ideal not real events’ (Frith, 1988: 21–2)...