We’re not getting any younger, none of us are… (Brad Birzer-Happy Birthday!)

I’m now rather depressingly at the stage where I find myself saying out loud,
“In my day things were better than they are now…” or “When I was a young lad we played outside every day, walked two miles to school in shorts in six feet of snow and tortured frogs for fun.
When it comes to Prog though it’s not the case, things are better now than they were, even with its relative obscurity and damn near financial bankruptcy.
What are you mad Eric? The Prog scene is better now than it was forty years ago?
Sure, some of the best loved and most successful albums of the Progressive rock genre belong to the seventies, sales were in the millions and concerts were gigantic spectacles and the artists were larger than life characters. But that was short lived and the years that followed were lean and as one clever Yorkshire man summed it up it was a time that the ‘Music died alone.’ It was tough, I remember it well and yet the one thing that saved me was the beginnings of the revolution we now use twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

The Lamb dies down…
I was a late entry to University in ’89 and consequently I didn’t quite fit in. I was too old for the fresh-out-of-school-club, and too young for the mature student category. Combine that with the most unpopular and uncool taste in music and my first year a Uni was a lonely time.
It peaked one evening when I got lucky and walked a girl back to my room in the halls after a few drinks in the student bar. She told me with a shout over the noise of a rather poor student rock band, that she was a fan of Genesis. My spirits soared and I couldn’t believe my luck. She was gorgeous, truly sensational and so far out of my league that I didn’t stand a chance, but none of that mattered, she liked my favourite group. I was going to get married and planned out the rest of my life with her before I got back to my room.
Sadly it was rather short lived. Moments after she settled back into a beanbag on the floor I nervously slid out my vinyl copy of ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ and turned round to face her as the tinkling piano of Tony Banks began to build in intensity.
“What’s this you’re playing?” she inquired.
I will never forget the baffled look on her face when I told her that she was listening to Genesis. It turns out she though Genesis was Phil Collins and Phil Collins was Genesis and wondered what it was I was playing, it wasn’t  ‘Another day in Paradise’ (for her or for me…) and when Peter sang “The lamb seems right out of place,” it seemed that there was never a truer word spoken.
She didn’t stay and made an determined effort to avoid me whenever she saw me around and about.
I got rather down about Prog, I mean, how could someone instantly lose their attraction for a person because of their musical taste? After that and for a short while I didn’t play much and dabbled with the Stone Roses and some of the early punk- grunge from Seattle.

Dialing back to my roots…

Going back to my point, it was the revolution in technology that brought me back from the wilderness and helped me to rediscover my love of Prog and it’s the same technology now that makes it a strong, independent force today, underpinning  a passionate fan-base, and it’s the technology that’s the future for the music, not any one band.

Before HTTP and web browsers there was Usenet, the newsgroups and bulletins through the College network. These were a lifeline to me at University in 1990. Basic text discussions with people in America about YES and Pink Floyd was suddenly a reality. And email too! I used to print off the discussions to read in my room in my own time. Stacks and stacks of stripy paper from the dot matrix filled with a love of Progressive Rock.
Naturally the first browsers followed and dial up with 14440 BPS which was stupidly expensive but it gave me home access to the newsgroups.
It’s no coincidence that Prog’s third wave began soon after in the mid-nineties and has gathered pace ever since. Andy Tillison with his first MP3 upload, Marillion and their cottage industry rebirth after EMI and of course digital mail order (1998 and an early web purchase of ‘Stardust we are’) with the rest of the world all ensured its survival and its future.

I might have recently said that Hyperbole on the social networks was the work of the horned beast and that it was the fault of the internet in general. It’s still true and I stand by that but I need to clarify that despite all that, I think we need it for Prog to avoid being lost in the wilderness again. Ironically I realise it makes me look like I’m caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Actually no I’m not, anything but.

Viva la revolution, long live Prog, and long live the internet!