Punk vs. prog

The cover of the issue devoted to 1977 of "The History Of Rock – A Monthly Trip Through Music's Golden Years" is dominated by Clash, tough and combative. The magazine, published in July 2016, is an encyclopedic collection of selected articles that appeared in the two most revered British music publications in the history of pop: New Musical Express and Melody Maker. Among the other names in the spotlight we find: David Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, Peter Gabriel, Led Zeppelin, Iggy Pop, Ac/Dc. And then, of course, the main course: Sex Pistols, Jam, Television, Ramones, Buzzcocks… pretty much what you'd expect, right?

And yet, '77 was also the year that saw the release of "Animals" by Pink Floyd and "Going For The One" by Yes, records of enormous impact and importance. Flipping through the magazine: on Pink Floyd there's a brief announcement, which sardonically notes that the new pharaonic album is running late on its scheduled release date. On Yes, nothing. Nor, for that matter, on any other artist today associated or associable with progressive rock.

After all, it's '77. The year of punk, of the revolt against the "dinosaurs" of progressive rock, the year that swept away endless solos, concept albums, goblins and deluded literary pretensions.

So the myth would have it: 1977 marked the most important rupture in the history of rock. The moment when a new generation of musicians said, once and for all, enough to the artistic pretensions of a fringe of pop music by then lost amid tortuous suites and sci-fi flights of fancy. Year zero of the indie and alternative imagination was marked by a purifying crime: the deliberate killing of prog by its sworn enemy, that punk whose vital energy sprang from a hatred of the bombastic musicality of bands in which the keyboardist got more stage time than the singer.

Like every myth, this clear and easily told narrative has a kernel of truth, but above all it presupposes a number of distortions and crude reconstructions that find no correspondence in the accounts and data of the time — and that implicate, among the guilty parties, the very two magazines at the heart of "The History Of Rock" special.

In 1977, both NME and Melody Maker reviewed the new releases by Yes and Pink Floyd, and did so, moreover, in tones of praise. Over the years, however, this appreciation faded into the background, and the narrative that other pages of those same magazines were pushing at the very same time won out: the one according to which the bands of the "new wave" supposedly appeared out of nowhere, already lethal and armed like Athena, ready to destroy everything because they had no affective ties whatsoever to what had come before them. A simplification of excellent PR value, but one that was already shaky at the time, and is even more so today, now that — by consulting a range of historical sources that back then were hardly all accessible together — it's possible to trace the threads of that complex phase of transformation.

The "punk vs prog" reading of rock history is a journalistic construction that has little to do with the actual leanings of the musicians of the era. The process that led the music press, mainly British, to identify suites, tempo changes and sci-fi settings as the musical "enemy" that punk's champions were fighting against corresponds to a shift in values rooted in the early Seventies, one that only took a shape close to today's once the Eighties had begun. In between lie ten years of a fraught journalistic relationship with what we now call "prog rock" — which back then, as we'll see, represented a far less defined context than it does today; a heterogeneous territory that went by many names, among which "progressive rock" was not always the main one.

Among the other shifts that marked the musical discourse of the era, particularly significant was the growing sense that rock — up until the end of the Seventies a byword for rupture and youthful emancipation — was becoming an integral part of bourgeois society, and that the world-famous artists who had emerged around the turn of the decade were enjoying financial fortunes now in direct contrast with the waning creativity of their musical ideas.

Part 1: myth

Chronicles from "Year Zero"

Before diving into flashbacks and fast-forwards, it's worth fully immersing ourselves in the climate of that pivotal moment, the 1976-1977 biennium that shuffled the deck of the British music industry. Rifling through old fanzines and period interviews, and combing the Rock's Back Pages database of English-language music press (covering both British and American periodicals), it's possible to piece together a remarkably rich picture of how the period was perceived at the time. So what emerges?

One important surprise: the punk scene didn't actually have it in for prog. Scrolling through hundreds of pages, tirades from punk artists against sprawling, marathon-length compositions and odd time signatures are essentially nowhere to be found, and accusations aimed specifically at prog musicians are an absolute rarity. Does that mean the likes of Johnny Rotten, Joe Strummer and Captain Sensible were gentlemen, dutifully respectful towards their progressive forebears? Not at all. The iconoclastic fury of these figures was unmatched, but it was aimed at a far broader target: everything. Or rather, everything connected to the hippies and their aesthetic and musical values.

The first interview with the Clash in the legendary British fanzine Sniffin' Glue (issue 6, 1976) is downright blunt: all previous music is "total crap", with only the Ramones and (who knows why, of all people) Mott The Hoople spared. The following year the band would sing: "No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones in 1977".

Among the other favourite whipping boys of the scene's representatives we find Eric Clapton ("I'd rather see the four worst musicians in this place up on stage", Captain Sensible, Fanzine, 1977), the Eagles, Led Zeppelin, Rod Stewart, Elton John and the Who. Yes, even Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and yes, that fateful "I hate Pink Floyd" t-shirt frequently worn by Johnny Rotten is still remembered by many. But a recurring pattern should be clear from the names mentioned: the issue was never how closely an artist adhered to the dictates of symphonic rock — the issue was stardom.

Mark P, founder of Sniffin' Glue and later leader of Alternative TV, sums up the party line particularly well in the fanzine's final issue (no. 12, 1977):

Music is a perfect medium for flipping the establishment the finger. Once it becomes respectable, it loses all its power. That's exactly what happened throughout the Seventies. All the aggression drained away, and rock stars started to seem more interested in fleeing to tax havens or attending Royal Family parties than in looking after the fans to whom they owed their entire privileged position.

And again, in "Chainsaw" (issue 2, 1977):

The trouble with the music business is that it makes too much money. A band starts out, people like them, people go and see them. They make an LP and a single. Everyone buys it. They play in bigger and bigger venues. Up to that point, it's all fine. But then they start getting lazy. They'll put out one single and one album a year and barely ever play live. And they'll keep raking in hundreds of thousands of pounds. They get very rich, so rich they don't know what to do with their money — which ends up being spent on Rolls-Royces, cocaine, scams and villas in Corfu. If they truly cared about their music and their fans, they'd make more albums and play free live shows instead of hiking up ticket prices. I'm talking about bands like Led Zep, who put out an album every 12-18 months, play about two gigs a year, and are still top of the New Musical Express chart.

Bloated, wealthy hippies, by now fully absorbed into the very system they'd sworn to fight, were the real musical target of punk's venom. The confusion between this category and "prog" stems from a short-sighted reading of what the actual fault lines of the era were — lines drawn far more along audience segments and venues than along stylistic groupings crystallised only in hindsight.

If today Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer on one side, and Soft Machine and Van Der Graaf Generator on the other, can easily be filed under the same prog-rock heading, back then fans saw a glaring difference between them: the former were artists of enormous mainstream success, on a par with the Eagles and Wings, while the latter belonged squarely to the alternative scene.

Confessions and Contradictions

In the months immediately following the punk big bang, magazines like Melody Maker and (especially) NME kept fanning the iconoclastic flames of the "new wave", eventually falling in line with the tabloids by inventing further far-fetched rivalries. The most famous is "punks vs. teds", said to pit nihilistic gangs of Sex Pistols and Clash fans against more conservative rockabilly followers in bouts of street violence. At the same time, the fanzine circuit began to crack the veneer of absolute presentism initially championed by punk musicians, letting old teenage loves and heroes resurface.

The lifeboat of the "redeemable", once reserved solely for the Ramones, gradually filled up, turning into a much richer pantheon. Room was found for David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Iggy Pop, the Velvet Underground and everything that flowed from them, MC5, the early Who, but also AC/DC, Blue Öyster Cult (sometimes flatly labelled "punk"!), Cheap Trick, and a whole host of underground names now often filed as out-and-out prog: Hawkwind, the Deviants and the Pink Fairies, Peter Hammill, Magma, Soft Machine, East Of Eden, Third Ear Band, Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers and Gong!

The most compromising confessions, however, would take longer to surface. The Stranglers were among the boldest, admitting to NME as early as 1977 that their keyboardist Dave Greenfield was a diehard Yes fan. Keith Levene's (Clash, later Public Image Ltd) love of Steve Howe would become known at least by 1985, while that of the Clash's Mick Jones ("before 'Tales From Topographic Oceans'") would only emerge much later, in the 2012 interview collection "Punk Rock: An Oral History", edited by John Robb — itself full, for anyone curious, of other delicious revelations.

In 2013, the auctioning of a collection of 97 records once owned by Joey Ramone revealed the presence of "Close To The Edge" alongside albums by Genesis, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Led Zeppelin, Elton John and Doors.

If, as was only to be expected, the formidable agent provocateur John Lydon would eventually confess his devotion to Pink Floyd, good old Mark P of Sniffin' Glue had already gone public with his love for Emerson, Lake & Palmer even before punk arrived: his was a 1973 letter to Melody Maker hailing the band as the "eighth wonder of the world"!

But if the musical target of punk's hostility wasn't progressive rock as a genre but rather the rock'n'roll star system, what made it so hard to admit a familiarity with prog's biggest names? After all, the glam faces of David Bowie, Marc Bolan and Lou Reed — soon to be hailed by punk figures as patron saints — were hardly penniless unknowns.

To understand why, we need to step back from the thick of the action and return to the musical discourse of a few years earlier, straddling the turn of the decade between the Sixties and Seventies. What we'll find is that: a) the concept of "progressive" as a genre was anything but settled; b) after an initial honeymoon period, the attitude of the major British music papers towards prog artists had already begun to sour well before punk exploded onto the scene.

Of genres and adjectives

The phrase "progressive rock" has belonged to the vocabulary of music journalism since the late Sixties. That shouldn't lead us to assume, however, that its meaning has stayed the same across the fifty-odd years since it first appeared.

The term was initially borrowed from jazz jargon: "progressive jazz" had long referred to styles akin to those of pianist and composer Stan Kenton, influenced by European classical music and modernism in particular. At the height of the psychedelic era, the phrase was used to describe the music of those artists most keenly trying to push rock'n'roll into new territory, exploring its emerging blues-rock strains (Yardbirds, Cream, Ten Years After, John Mayall), its country and folk leanings (Byrds, Willie Nelson), or its kinship with the baroque pop of Beatles and Beach Boys vintage.

In the years that immediately followed — now often seen as the high-water mark of progressive rock — the term was in fact used rather infrequently, and its scope remained extremely broad. It stayed that way through the punk era too (so even if punk artists of the period had it in for "progressive rock" — which they didn't — it would be misleading to read that as an attack aimed at Genesis and Gentle Giant), and it was only around the mid-Eighties that its meaning settled into something close to what we understand today.

To avoid confusion between the historical and contemporary meanings, this article uses relatively recent coinages such as "prog rock" and "prog" (attested in Britain from the late Eighties onward) to refer to the genre as it's widely understood today, while using "progressive" and "progressive rock" (unless otherwise specified) to refer to period usage.

Looking more closely at the fortunes of the term "progressive" in the English-language press, a search of the Rock's Back Pages database shows the phrase was used sparingly throughout the first half of the Seventies. When it did appear, it turned up alongside a wide range of other terms: "progressive music", "progressive pop", "progressive blues", "progressive soul", "progressive country". Even when paired with "rock", "progressive" was often set off in quotation marks, evidence that it was understood as an adjective that could attach itself to different nouns as needed, denoting not a specific genre but an attitude — a musical zeitgeist cutting across several different strands.

The list of artists to whom the label was attached also confirms how far removed this was from today's usage: in the 1968-1970 stretch that marks the term's peak, the names cited most often were Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Small Faces, Jimi Hendrix, Rolling Stones, Doors, as well as Yes, Nice and Jethro Tull. The tone of these pieces was, almost without exception, enthusiastic: "progressive" was the buzzword of the moment, and discussions of a record's "progressiveness" were a staple of interviews at the time.

The paper "The Absent Presence Of Progressive Rock In The British Music Press, 1968-1974" by musicologists Chris Anderton and Chris Atton (2020) helps clarify things further, pointing out that after the boom of the late Sixties, use of the term "progressive" declined sharply in the very early Seventies. Already by 1972, some journalists were referring to the "progressive" fad as a thing of the past.

In the early Seventies, many of the bands now associated with prog were labelled — often interchangeably — as "heavy", "underground" and "head" (as in "head music"), though the roster of nicknames also included flights of fancy like "epic rock", "techno-rock" and even "rocko-phonic" or "technoflash".

Across the 255 densely packed pages of the 1976 edition of NME's "Encyclopedia Of Rock", the term "progressive" turns up just fourteen times, and rarely in connection with bands we'd now call prog.

The chart above shows how often the term "progressive" appears in articles from the Rock's Back Pages database. Besides the decline seen in the early Seventies, there's a moderate resurgence of the adjective starting in 1973, and by 1975 it's paired with the noun "rock" as a fixed phrase more often than ever before. This resurgence stems from several factors, among them its adoption by the non-specialist press and its modest foothold in the United States (chiefly in reference to a new radio format, "progressive", which would later morph into the "album-oriented" format discussed further on).

The biggest contribution, however, is tied to the arrival of a new player in the world of British rock criticism: the magazine Sounds, which brought about a significant realignment of the two papers that had until then divided up the market between them, Melody Maker and Nme. From enthusiastic heralds of the "progressive" gospel, the two publications became (gradually, and with plenty of second-guessing and contradiction) increasingly sceptical of the very scene they had helped to fuel.

When the Wind Changed

Launched in 1970, "Sounds" championed the dismantling of genre categories and maintained, throughout the Seventies, a strong focus on the key bands of British prog. Compared to its rival publications, it had from the outset a more intellectual, mature slant, aimed at a less teenage readership, drawn largely from university-age youth.

Its aversion to categorisation limited the use of the label "progressive", especially in its early years; increasingly, however, through the middle part of the decade its pages began using the term "progressive rock" in a sense ever closer to that of an actual genre ("Genesis are undoubtedly the best 'progressive' rock'n'roll band around", 18/12/1976), albeit one covering a far broader set of bands than it does today.

Sounds' circulation was limited, but its impact was amplified by the rival papers' decision to steer their own editorial lines in the opposite direction. Although Nme initially tried to follow Sounds' lead, styling itself an "intelligent weekly" and embracing the tearing-down of genre and audience barriers, by the middle of the decade both Nme and Melody Maker had made explicit their distancing from the success of Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Genesis.

The aforementioned Nme encyclopaedic volume, published in 1976, describes the "flash rock" school of Yes and Elp as "pompous and excessive", and "Brain Salad Surgery" as the work of "ego-inflated dinosaurs" (whereas the 1973 edition had praised the same album's "unsurpassed musical qualities"). Another study by Anderton, published this year in the journal "Media Narratives in Popular Music", shows how Melody Maker shifted its outlook even earlier: as far back as 1973 it detected a risk of tedium in the previously untouchable Pink Floyd, branded "Thick As A Brick" "unimaginative", and declared that for Elp it was now "too late to develop a sense of taste".

In "Policing the Boundaries of Art and Entertainment" (2016), musicologist Derek B. Scott reads the mid-Seventies as the moment when a kind of "pop police" took hold within criticism, driven by a desire to outlaw the supposed "pretentious and elitist betrayal of the values of popular music", so as to keep rock music on tracks more in line with their own outlook — one shaped in particular by the University of Birmingham's Centre For Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Many of the artists critics adopted as models of rock authenticity boasted solid "alternative" credentials on the American scene: Velvet Underground, Mc5, Stooges, John Cale, Captain Beefheart and Lou Reed. On this side of the Atlantic, by contrast, the names held in high regard were mostly those associated with glam, such as David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Brian Eno and Roxy Music. By the time punk exploded, the new cosmogony of rock was, in effect, already in place: all it needed was prophets with the right charisma to spread the word.

Sinking the Titanic

In July 1976, Nme had barely registered the existence of the Sex Pistols, yet, lending space to the underground credibility of Deviants frontman Mick Farren, it published "The Titanic Sails At Dawn". A brilliant j'accuse against the rock'n'roll jet set which, drawing on an analysis of readers' letters to the magazine, urged them to abandon their devotion to past glories and start their own band, however ramshackle and ill-equipped. Its resonance with the critical mood of the years to come makes the appeal read today as almost prophetic:

The only figure, or nearly so, who seems to have any interest in the social progress of rock'n'roll is David Bowie, with his skeletal, occult Übermensch persona. Everyone else is waltzing round the ballroom, or playing musical chairs at the captain's table [...] Letter after letter says the same thing. You all seem to have it in for the Who and Liz Taylor, Rod and the Queen, Jagger and Princess Margaret, [...] in the name of modern Seventies-style super-rock. [...] The salvation of rock'n'roll won't be putting the Beatles back together. Four kids playing for their peers in the basement of some club might just be it. And that, dear reader, is where you come in.

Before long, the record-industry boom around punk would make Farren's vision concrete. Britain's leading music papers reacted differently to the phenomenon: some welcomed the new wave and its fiery pronouncements with interest, while still refusing to disown their long-standing loves, while others seized on the upheaval stirred up by Rotten, McLaren and Vicious to complete their own anti-progressive turn.

Paradoxically, of the three main papers, it was the most pro-prog one, Sounds, that first dug into the punk phenomenon in depth, through John Ingham's articles. His pieces are a good example of the ambivalent stance with which his paper greeted the "new wave". While relaying the bands' rhetoric with the kind of engaged style typical of the era, Ingham refers to artists from previous years as "old farts" who "should have been carted off for euthanasia years ago" (09/10/1976). At other times, though, he took a more detached view, stressing the links with historic acts (on the Clash: "No kid has seen such explosive energy since the Who or the Quo in a stadium", 13/09/1976). A wavering stance, but one that stayed focused on the "young guns" versus "old has-beens" opposition, and never took the shape of a direct attack specifically aimed at prog.

The tone was different in the pieces Caroline Coon wrote for Melody Maker — a Swinging London veteran who quickly became one of the most fervent champions of an "anti-progressive" reading of punk. Her key article, "Rock Revolution", published in late July 1976, was perhaps the first to push openly for a clash with prog rock:

Rock was meant, first and foremost, to be fun. The impossibility of seeing your stars up close, or of playing their music, is making an entire generation of fans feel hopelessly inadequate. [...] Psychedelic bands like Jeffeson Airplane, Grateful Dead, Soft Machine, Pink Floyd were musically important until they disintegrated along with the underground, or vanished into their own insularity. Essentially middle class, or tied to well-off, university milieus, they laid the groundwork for outfits like Genesis, Jethro Tull, Elp, Yes, Rick Wakeman, Roxy Music and Queen, whose 'progressive rock' makes use of an ever-growing amount of technical equipment, has pushed further and further towards something almost orchestral, and borrows heavily from classical music.

All these bands were critically acclaimed. But one crucial element was missing. These musicians had always been rock's version of gentlemen, and their music could only be played by people with similarly academic temperaments. The music, however inspired, was well beyond anything a generic teenager could reproduce in their bedroom. David Bowie is the only figure this growing wave of third-generation rock fans seems to identify with.

NME's response came in August 1976, with the recruitment of two very young writers specifically tasked with covering the "new wave" (N.B.: the term "new wave" originally referred to the punk explosion as a whole, and everything that would follow from it. Only later did the meaning shift to associate the phrase with the more intellectual and/or well-mannered strand of the scene).

The two new hires, Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, like other young fanzine writers, were more interested in reporting on the scene from the inside than in bashing the rock establishment, and indeed had no qualms about invoking the greats of the past as a positive reference point (02/04/1977: "The original aim of new wave, punk rock or whatever you want to call it [is] to write songs about late-Seventies youth culture with the same accuracy, honesty, perception and genuine anger that Elvis, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones can no longer give").

It was mainly the older journalists, like Nick Kent, who seized on every possible pretext to go after their former idols, especially prog artists ("terms like progressive/art rock have become synonymous with hesitant pretentiousness and crude, slapdash syntheses of opposing forms", 05/02/1977 reviewing Television; "I've spent the last couple of days lazily replaying a stack of Genesis albums — not a particularly rewarding experience", 10/06/1978).

Forty years later, some of those journalists would take a more candid stance. Nick Kent himself would confess to Mike Barnes in "Younger Than Yesterday" that he first met Mick Jones of the Clash at a King Crimson concert in 1969, and that he now has "more sympathy for prog than for punk. Most punk bands talk about their music as art, and frankly it isn't — nor was prog, but at least the prog guys had a certain sense of humour about what they were doing, and there was a sense of musical experimentation and exploration".

By the end of 1977, in short, the three main British music papers agreed on one analysis: a new wave of young rock had arrived to sweep away the bloated music of the old, newly-rich hippies. But the hostility towards the stars of the very recent past, extremely vehement and indiscriminate especially in the early interviews with punk artists, had been "channelled" by the two most widely-read magazines in a direction consistent with their own editorial line, already well established in previous years. The "enemy" that would be swept away by the punk onslaught, according to NME and Melody Maker, was precisely those prog musicians whom the two papers had already begun mocking in the wake of Sounds' arrival.

If we then give credence to Scott's account of the existence of a metaphorical "pop police" active in the music press of those years, the picture becomes complete: although punks and their successors initially had no specific hostility towards prog as a whole, admitting any respect for artists of that stripe risked compromising one's credibility with the specialist critics. So, fine, once the first rounds of scathing interviews were over, it was acceptable to admit one's teenage passion for the Who and the Kinks, but heaven forbid: Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer got nothing but scorn.

Whether the artists themselves believed it or not (judging by their more recent statements, it seems not), the effect on the young people of the time was highly significant. The stigma against prog-rock became further entrenched over the following decade and, at least within indie and alternative circles, still plays a significant role in shaping identity today.

Beyond and Elsewhere

The account we've outlined so far, linear in its own way, shouldn't obscure one fact: the picture was anything but monolithic. The very same issues of Melody Maker and NME that carried anti-hippie, anti-establishment attacks also ran positive takes on the same artists being trashed on other pages.

A certain pluralism of views prevailed. Looking at medium-term trends, however, it's clear that NME and Melody Maker's aversion to the old guard, and to prog in particular, persisted in the following years, even as bylines changed and the focus shifted from the punk wave itself to post-punk and new pop phenomena. Sounds, by contrast, kept paying attention — especially through Phil Sutcliffe's articles — to output that carried on in continuity with the previous era, while also covering in depth both the scene most directly tied to punk and heavy metal sounds.

It was Sounds, in fact, that followed with some curiosity the evolution of the neo-prog scene led by Marillion and Twelfth Night, whose audience, incidentally, overlapped considerably with fans of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal. Worth noting: a peak recorded in 1983 in the use of the word "progressive" corresponds to a usage of the term that already largely overlaps with today's: it refers specifically to symphonic rock bands (Genesis, Yes, ELP, Van Der Graaf Generator etc.), extending to names like Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull, but not to Queen, Roxy Music or Led Zeppelin.

In some way, it seems that the definition of the progressive "canon", and its definitive shift from adjective to genre label, is chronologically tied to the first wave of explicit revival: "progressive rock" became synonymous with that music, ostracised by the press, which the neo-progressive artists were drawing on.

And elsewhere? Every country seems to have had its own dynamics, none as extreme as Britain's.

In the United States, the music press's "honeymoon" with British prog never really happened: writers who became part of rock's collective imagination, like Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau, were fiercely critical of the genre from the start ("A crock of shit surrogate", Christgau on King Crimson's debut, Village Voice 1971; "In the event of an energy crisis, there would be grounds enough to consider ELP war criminals", Lester Bangs in Creem vol. 5 no. 10, 1974).

For the first edition of "The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock'n'Roll" (1976), British progressive rock ("or art rock") is reduced to its most famous names, failing to grasp that "the synthesizer is a much-abused, much-misunderstood instrument. When entrusted to figures like Keith Emerson, Jon Lord (of Deep Purple) or Rick Wakeman, and used like a souped-up electric organ, its sound is bound to come across as artificial and trivial".

The alternative press led by Creem and Rolling Stone, in short, had always leaned toward a line far removed from prog values — on one hand more "rockist", on the other tied to black music and singer-songwriter traditions — and needed no revisionism whatsoever to embrace the protagonists of the "new wave", especially the American ones.

A notable exception to the anti-progressive (and largely anti-British) trend in the United States was Trouser Press, founded in 1974 by Ira Robbins and subtitled "America's only British rock magazine". The fully accessible online pdf archive shows how, from its first issue to its last in 1984, the magazine kept a strong fondness for early-Seventies taste and its later developments, while from 1976-77 onward also paying close attention to the more adventurous strands of new wave, post-punk and then hardcore, new romantic and sophisti-pop. New York's Rock Scene followed a similar line, though lighter in tone and more tied to the poppier fringes of heavy metal, and it too is available to browse online.

Beyond the Anglosphere

Moving away from English-speaking countries, a punk-vs-prog framework proves even less adequate to describe the scene. In Italy, punk had little impact, and it didn't mark any real break in record releases or in the editorial line of magazines like Ciao 2001, which in the early Eighties still happily put Ringo Starr and Jefferson Starship, Genesis and Styx on its cover alongside Madness, Bob Marley, Ultravox, Blondie and Clash.

Things were different on the "alternative" side of Italian music criticism, tied to the extra-parliamentary left and represented by Muzak (founded in 1973) and Gong (born in 1974 out of a split within Muzak's editorial staff).

These magazines soon made a banner of their hostility toward "mainstream" artists like Pink Floyd, Yes or Genesis, favoring instead Soft Machine and Gong, and then, as their music gradually became more "formalized", figures like Tim Buckley, Captain Beefheart and a growing roster of minimalists, radical improvisers, and free and avant jazz musicians.

On the pages of these magazines, Beatles and Bob Dylan were torn apart, and doubts were raised about the formula of the much-revered Area ("What [...] guarantees us that these guys aren't just having a laugh at our expense, having happened to hear a few contemporary music records by chance?", Muzak no. 8, 1974; "Demetrio Stratos keeps chasing hiccups and freedom while weighed down by rigid structures", Gong no. 5, 1975).

Even the arrival of punk failed to win over the historic core of writers. Muzak had already shut down in 1975, but Gong's writers described the Ramones as "Rather poor novelties, but very à la page" and wrote of the scene at large: "Often it's the very socio-ideological premises of punk itself that leave today's young protagonists so short of breath. [...] This is what we've come to, at journey's end: remote-controlled solos, even, and rigid choruses" ("Top Music '77", 1977).

The subtitles of the two magazines were "Monthly of Progressive-Rockfolkjazz music" (Muzak) and "Monthly of progressive music and culture" (Gong), further proof that at the time the meaning of "progressive" was far removed from today's, even in Italy.

The tendency among self-declared "progressive" critics to belittle successful bands persisted in later years too: the booklet "La musica rock-progressiva europea" by Luca Majer and Al Aprile, published in 1980, is relentless in overlooking — and, wherever possible, quietly demolishing — artists like Genesis and King Crimson.

In other countries, the picture is just as nuanced. In France, Rock&Folk kept up a healthy circulation through the turn from the Seventies into the Eighties, peaking in the early Eighties, and continued to follow both the "old wave" (and its contemporary offshoots) and the artists born of punk and new wave. The same goes for Germany's Musik Express, much of which is available to browse online.

Among the smaller outlets, it's worth mentioning fanzines like France's Atem, active between 1975 and 1979, which paid close attention to the grey area between the most uncompromising strains of prog (zeuhl, Rock in Opposition, kraut fringes, but also the Canterbury scene or the paths taken by Robert Fripp and Peter Hammill) and the emerging experiments in post-punk and industrial. Or Japan's Fool's Mate, beautifully designed and able to move seamlessly between avant-prog and Kate Bush, Japan and Lucio Battisti, the mutant sound of This Heat alongside the wildly out-of-step classical crossover of Sky. Fascinating evidence of a middle ground that produced hundreds of bands even during the years when prog had all but vanished from the British press.

The examples given here are just that — examples — but they show how much more layered the press landscape actually was, compared to the flattened image one gets from looking only at the best-remembered Anglo-American magazines.

The punk/prog divide, taken for granted today, loses its centrality and reveals a number of other possible readings of the transformations undergone by European rock in the second half of the Seventies.

On one hand, what emerges - especially in the 1976-77 period - is the prevalence of the punk (or "new wave") vs. everything dichotomy, punk vs. hippie and even (with little credibility but plenty of exposure) punk vs. teds. On the other hand, what's revealed is the importance of other contemporary oppositions, which in some cases appear to be far more decisive in shaping artistic preferences and editorial lines: United States vs. Britain (and Europe in general), Britain vs. Europe, chart-oriented music vs. alternative music.

The ambiguity in the use of the term "progressive", conspicuous at least until the early Eighties, along with the uncertainty over which artists actually make up the "canon" of progressive rock as a genre, gives further reason to question the assumption that punk's musical purpose was to "kill prog".

What emerges instead, more strongly than ever, is the impression that the whole punk killed prog narrative is a journalistic construction, built on the preconceptions of a segment of the music press that had already begun searching for values alternative to those later identified with prog.

Nowadays, however, this reading is overwhelmingly dominant among fans and industry insiders alike. A question naturally arises: looking at the picture with the perspective afforded by today's tools, is it still legitimate to claim that punk wiped out Seventies prog as we understand it today?

Part 2: reality?

The view from the mainstream audience...

To find out whether punk really did wipe the floor with prog, we first need to establish what exactly we're talking about: do we mean that after the punk explosion prog was no longer played, or that it was no longer successful?

It's not a minor distinction: the first case would imply that punk acted as a deterrent against prog among musicians, the second that it changed listeners' tastes to the point of making prog untenable. So was it the producer (the artists) or the consumer (the audience) who turned their back on prog under punk's pressure?

Both, today's critics would probably answer - but in fact, the evidence shows, neither. We need to dismantle the universality of this view: current perception holds that punk swept prog away everywhere, when in reality the relationship between the two varied wildly depending on location, with radical discrepancies not only between English-speaking and non-English-speaking countries, but even just between the United Kingdom and the United States.

What critics champion today is a view that originated in the United Kingdom (the United States arrived at similar conclusions, as we've seen, by a different route) and was only later exported to other countries, whose respective journalistic establishments bought into the received wisdom and helped it spread like wildfire (just think of "Il mucchio selvaggio" in Italy).

It should also be said that decades ago it wasn't easy to realize how one-sided the narrative was, since information was far harder to find and compare. This very article is a direct consequence of being able to access the necessary documentation via the internet, and thirty years ago it simply couldn't have been written.

The analysis will now turn to a look at UK sales trends, both because that's where this misconception originated, and because it's the country that mattered most - far more than the United States - for punk and post-punk: besides the sheer number of homegrown bands, even many American bands found there the visibility their own country denied them (the Ramones, who never reached the top 40 in the United States, hit the top 10 in the UK; Television, who never reached the top 200 in the United States, hit the top 10 in the UK; by the time Blondie became known in the United States, they'd already racked up four hits in the UK; on a smaller scale, Pere Ubu released records on the British label Chrysalis).

So was it the emergence of these names that wiped out prog, at least in the UK?

It's precisely the genre's commercial trajectory that clarifies the picture. The first prog record to top the British charts was "On The Threshold Of A Dream" by the Moody Blues, in May 1969. Later that year came "Stand Up" by Jethro Tull. Just two titles, but that's understandable, given that it was still an embryonic year for the movement (at least by the notion we now have of it).

In 1970, the first season of the golden age, the situation nonetheless failed to improve: "A Question Of Balance", again by the Moody Blues, and "Atom Heart Mother" by Pink Floyd. Moreover, these are two albums by bands that aren't exactly representative of prog (the Moody Blues recorded fairly short songs, and Pink Floyd were technically modest compared to the genre's other leading names).

In 1971 it was the turn of Emerson Lake & Palmer's "Tarkus" and of "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour": once again the Moody Blues (it's interesting to note how a band now regarded as marginal was, at the time, the genre's true flagship act). In the 1972-73 two-year span, now considered the genre's golden age, no album reached number 1.

The drought was broken in January 1974 by Yes's "Tales From The Topographic Oceans", followed within a few months by Rick Wakeman's "Journey To The Centre Of The Earth" and two albums by Mike Oldfield: "Tubular Bells" and "Hergest Ridge". A resurgence that wasn't destined to last: in 1975 only Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" managed the feat (and only for a single week), and in 1976 the count dropped back to zero.

So the three-year span richest in prog's dominance of the British charts turned out to be 1969-71. Even the fortunate conjunction of 1974 is something of an illusion, since although it amounted to four albums, the artists involved were only Oldfield and Yes (of whom the aforementioned Wakeman was a member).

The Sex Pistols first entered the charts in December 1976: which means that by the time the public took notice of them, no prog band had been at number 1 for fourteen months (not since "Wish You Were Here", precisely).

It's clear that prog cannot have stirred punk consciousness to the degree we're led to believe, because although it achieved considerable success, it never dominated the scene.

… and the fans' perspective

It's not just a matter of the relatively few albums that reached number one (often, moreover, not even by the names one would expect today): many bands that now enjoy huge cult status were, at the time, completely irrelevant in the UK.

Van Der Graaf Generator, Gentle Giant and Caravan never entered the British top 40. King Crimson, after the strong showing of their first two albums, essentially vanished from the upper reaches of the chart, managing only a single week in the top 20 with "Larks' Tongues In Aspic" (1973). Jethro Tull, astonishingly, didn't touch the top 10 again after 1972 (until "The Zealot Gene", in January 2022, broke the taboo).

At this point one might try to sidestep the issue by arguing that progressive rock, even if not as omnipresent as it's made out to be, was nonetheless a force that monopolized the space among its fans: after all, niches always have perceptions at odds with reality.

Just as anyone who's listened to alternative music over the last twenty years might perceive Radiohead and Arcade Fire as omnipresent, when in fact the market was dominated not by them but by Eminem, Rihanna and the like, so too, back then, it could well be that within their own circles Emerson Lake & Palmer were perceived as more present than the Carpenters (to name a genuinely dominant act on the British charts of the era).

Indeed, in September 1973 Melody Maker readers were polled on their favourite musicians, and the results were: Yes voted best band (followed by Emerson Lake & Palmer), Carl Palmer best drummer, Chris Squire (Yes) and Greg Lake both on the podium for bassists, Rick Wakeman best keyboardist (followed by Keith Emerson), while among guitarists the winner was Jan Akkerman, of Dutch prog band Focus.

And yet there are clear signs that even this hypothesis doesn't hold up entirely. Those polls in fact produced lists in which, aside from the near-mystical devotion to ELP and Yes, a bit of everything showed up: Led Zeppelin, Mahavishnu Orchestra, Santana, Deep Purple, Roxy Music, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Jeff Beck, former Cream members.

None of the acts just listed falls under what we now consider prog, which shows that even within the niche of devoted fans, its presence was not overwhelming.

Other "victims": the case of glam rock

That's not all: among the genres that dominated the charts before the arrival of punk was glam rock, which was actually quite well regarded within the punk scene, and whose musicians were often cited as examples of the very little pre-1977 music worth saving (as already explained, the fact that it was rejected almost wholesale ends up exonerating prog, which was evidently not a problem in itself).

Glam counted among its ranks David Bowie, T. Rex and Mott The Hoople, musicians the punks respected almost from the very start – at a time when even the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were considered enemies – and whose mission they somehow felt they were carrying forward.

Unlike prog, glam had ridden the charts in a way that was at times overwhelming, and not just the album charts, but the singles charts too, where prog was almost entirely absent.

So how credible is it, really, that towards the end of 1976 a generation of British kids was seething under the weight of prog, when one of the styles they most enjoyed had itself been dominant until just a short time before?

It's also worth noting that glam threw its last punches in 1975 (albeit epochal ones, especially with "Make Me Smile" by Steve Harley), and by 1976 had essentially vanished. Prog, then, wasn't the only genre to decline commercially at that exact moment: another sign that popular music is simply built on cycles, and that back then genres would rise and sink within the space of a few years. Progressive rock actually held up rather well by comparison, lasting from the late Sixties to the mid-Seventies: first-wave punk had a considerably shorter life (two to three years), yet no one ever claimed that some later genre had "wiped it out".

What disproves the idea that the British public turned its back on prog the moment punk arrived isn't just the fact that it had already turned its back regardless, but also two curious last hurrahs that took place in the summer of 1977, by which point the punk phenomenon had fully exploded, with The Stranglers dominating the album charts and the Sex Pistols the singles charts.

ELP and Yes both returned after two long hiatuses (each band had been silent for nearly three years – and it's likely that this simultaneous absence helped deflate the commercial power of the prog scene) and landed some surprising hits: the former with the "Fanfare For The Common Man" single, which climbed to number 2 in July (doubly unusual, given prog's allergy to the singles chart), the latter with the album "Going For The One", which just a month later reached number 1 and became their biggest success at home.

These were two isolated events, which had no lasting effect and did nothing to revive the rest of prog, but they happened right in the middle of the storm and prove there was no direct link between punk's success and prog's failure.

Of extinctions and evolutionary lines

So who killed prog, if not punk? It's a question that actually rests on a logical fallacy, because it assumes that in popular music – though the same could be said of art in general – genres must suppress one another in order to assert themselves. The history of art shows instead that, once the audience is large enough, even diametrically opposed movements can coexist, since they won't necessarily be consumed by the same people.

The view that prog came first and punk then arrived to replace it doesn't hold up, first of all, because it seems to assume that rock only has room for one style at a time, and that progress consists of a parade of antitheses and opposites. Yet we've just seen that prog and glam coexisted, often blurring into one another, and they were certainly not the only approaches to rock around at the time: the early Seventies also saw plenty of hard rock, folk rock and blues rock, to name just a few of the most widespread strands in the UK.

Rock, in other words, develops along multiple evolutionary lines at once. That's not to say the distance between them must always remain unbridgeable: even punk and prog ended up converging in the work of certain bands, but broadly speaking they remained two distinct branches of the rock tree.

Progressive rock was born as a mutation of baroque pop and psychedelia, reached its commercial peak in the form of what we now call symphonic prog, moved along the border with other genres and hybridized with them (progressive folk, jazz-rock, heavy psych), and spawned a series of more forbidding experimental undercurrents, effectively destined for the underground (Rock in Opposition, the Canterbury scene).

Then, in the mid-Seventies, came the commercial decline, due partly to physiological factors and partly to circumstantial ones. Among the former is simply the passage of time: back then, far more than today, audiences would lose interest in hearing similar sounds rehashed for several years running, and it happened that even genres with a constant chart presence would fade away from sheer fatigue, with no revolution required.

Among the latter are coincidences (the aforementioned three-year hiatus of ELP and Yes), unpredictable events, and complex developments spanning the entire socio-cultural spectrum: consider, for instance, the loss of commercial clout that hit much of rock on the British market around 1976. Without digging into the reasons, which would require a separate study altogether, suffice it to say that several strands of rock found themselves struggling at a local level during that period.

The drop in sales naturally brought about a drop in listeners (not just for prog and glam rock, but also for folk rock, blues rock and hard rock), and this, in turn, meant fewer people attempting to make that kind of music. Those who kept at it regardless found themselves relegated to the underground, with no chance left of breaking through.

The late Seventies in the UK are usually regarded as a sort of desert crossing for progressive rock, a period of critical and public indifference before neo-prog arrived and rekindled listeners' interest.

And yet, between pre-punk prog and neo-prog there wasn't just a string of bands who, however underground, doggedly kept that path alive (to name a few: the symphonic Grace and After The Fire, the more experimental Art Bears and National Health) - the surrounding musical landscape, even without a visible prog scene of its own, also proved it hadn't forgotten the genre.

First of all through the emerging new wave - think of names like Stranglers and Magazine - and secondly through some of the very same major prog names, who streamlined their music to the point of losing, at least in part, the traits that had made them identifiable as such. They took on new ones instead, which pushed them partly toward new wave (think of Peter Gabriel's solo work, or King Crimson with Adrian Belew), partly toward American arena rock (the late-Seventies Supertramp), and partly halfway between the two schools (the trio-era Genesis), without ever fully severing the link to their roots.

While it's true that neither the Stranglers' music nor that of the new Genesis could be mistaken for early-Seventies prog, it was nonetheless obvious that both had listened to it and played it: because of this, a kind of background radiation remained perceptible across much of new wave and the new chart-friendly rock, which probably did a fair amount to spark neo-prog's commercial revival.

Furthermore, even though it was a far less visible phenomenon than the ones just mentioned, many veteran prog names would go on to contribute substantially to the birth of the new age movement (among the most significant contributions were those of Mike Oldfield, Vangelis, Jade Warrior, and Yes's Jon Anderson as a solo artist).

Prog, then, was not killed off: its old glories found other paths, while the rest sank underground, left to germinate for a few years, waiting for a more favorable moment to return to the market.

Where the dinosaurs became birds: the States and Aor

As proof that rock history is anything but a monolith, shifting the focus of the discussion to the United States reveals just how much the perspective can change.

The prog phenomenon followed a completely different trajectory there than in its home country. If critics today describe the genre as deeply British and essentially foreign to American culture, it's partly because no real scene ever developed on local soil.

There were plenty of bands close to the sound of British prog, especially the symphonic strain, but they stayed in the underbrush, often barely setting foot outside their own garages and unaware that others like them even existed: no small shortcoming, since mutual awareness among its members is one of the necessary ingredients for something to be called a "scene". Very few groups landed a major-label deal, and among those only Pavlov's Dog achieved even minimal recognition (with "Pampered Menial" reaching number 181 on the charts).

Even so, prog's impact in the United States was considerable, starting with the results racked up by British bands: the Moody Blues placed four albums in the top three between 1970 and 1972, Jethro Tull did the same between 1972 and 1974, and Yes and Elp repeatedly cracked the top 10. Some bands even found success there before they did at home, such as Renaissance, or found it only there (Gentle Giant, who in '75 snuck into the top 50 with "Free Hand": no small feat given the complexity of their music).

It is, however, the Aor phenomenon that truly shows how much prog mattered over there, and, paradoxically, also why prog never spawned a genuine local scene. Although it's an acronym, the term can carry two different meanings: album-oriented rock and adult-oriented rock. The first emerged in the Seventies and denoted a radio format (an evolution of the previously mentioned "progressive" format), driven by stations devoted to hard rock, prog, and the more refined side of soft rock (sometimes blended with funk, jazz, and West Coast sounds). The name came from the fact that stations often played album tracks as well, not just 45s: needless to say, British prog bands benefited enormously from this kind of treatment.

The second meaning, which emerged in the Eighties, refers to a musical genre born with Styx and Reo Speedwagon around the mid-Seventies. The reuse of the same acronym has ended up causing no small amount of confusion: many today believe that, since adult-oriented acts were so heavily featured on album-oriented playlists, the musical genre must encompass every artist ever aired by that type of radio station.

To avoid any misunderstanding, the Aor referred to in this article is exclusively the adult-oriented rock descended from the two bands mentioned above, often also called arena rock, and essentially born as a mutation of progressive rock: think of landmark records such as Styx's "The Grand Illusion" and Kansas's "Leftoverture".

Theirs was a style that, while still keeping one foot in prog, also brought something new to the table. Prog was the starting template, but its rhythmic and harmonic intricacies were partly filtered out, suites were abandoned altogether, and hard rock guitars were injected into the formula, lightened by a glossy production and vocal harmonies with an epic sweep. The fact that these records didn't fully align with prog in its classic sense is shown by the fact that, despite their huge impact, critics still consider the genre to have been extinct even before they were released.

AOR was a genre of immense commercial success in the United States, even greater than that of the style which spawned it, and this effectively sealed off any possible development of an American prog scene: why keep pushing in a direction that had consistently proven unprofitable for local bands, when this new, smoothed-out version offered exponentially greater chances of a career?

The appeal of AOR was so great that even British bands fell under its spell: it's true that in the UK it never triggered the same hysteria it did back home, but the old guard had always kept a close eye on the American market and quickly spotted the opportunities that new horizon offered. Far more than the pro-punk leanings of the British press, it was the desire to strengthen their standing in America that pushed many key British prog bands toward a more pop-oriented style: Genesis, Yes and the Moody Blues all produced songs – or even entire albums – in an AOR vein, while other scene veterans, temporarily without a band, banded together specifically to form AOR projects such as Asia and GTR.

This is why prog eventually faded out in the United States too: not punk sweeping it away, but a natural evolution into something else.

The narrative of punk as the great demolisher would in any case sit particularly awkwardly with the US market, where the Ramones – as already noted – never broke into the mainstream: on one hand, they had no chance to dent the reputation of Jethro Tull or Yes, who were selling millions of records, and on the other, they had no reason to go after their fellow American prog bands, who were largely unknown to the public at large (almost certainly even to the punks themselves).

American punk, despite being driven by a nihilistic spirit, still had a less destructive approach than its British counterpart: it wasn't the movement's aim to annihilate the music that came before it, because it was born more as an act of love than of war. It emerged looking back at Fifties rockabilly, Sixties garage rock, and Seventies power pop and glam, and it was those styles it went on to replace or reshape, not prog.

Not that punks only cared for those models. Cream, Traffic, Yes or Santana were surely among the records many of them listened to, but they demanded too high a level of technical skill. Not everyone was willing to spend entire days hunched over a guitar to master what it took to play those songs, when they could instead play something far simpler, like the Stooges and the Velvet Underground. Often, that alone was enough to steer American musicians toward punk.

It was only once the movement landed in the UK that it took on the antagonistic tones we've already explored at length. Even there, though, the real appeal wasn't attacking some pre-existing musical movement (at most, that was a good marketing device), but rather the chance to play one's own music without excessive sacrifice. This is made clear by the recollections of the aforementioned Mark P. and of Peter Hook, bassist of Joy Division and New Order:

Rock music wasn't shit at all before punk, but I'd always had this feeling that there was a gap between us and them, the bands, that we could never close. It was like a special club whose founders were the Beatles and the Stones, and the only way to become a member was to sit alone in your bedroom for years learning how to play guitar.

(Mark P, citato in “Sniffin’ Glue: The Essential Punk Accesory”, 2000)

Then the Sex Pistols came along and they sounded terrible and basically told everyone to go fuck themselves. Our reaction was: 'Oh my god! I could probably do that; I could play just as badly and tell everyone to fuck off too. That, I could actually do!'

It was a revelation, because before that the image of a musician was Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones, Santana – completely untouchable, you couldn't even imagine being in the same room as them at a gig, let alone trying to make music like theirs! With the Sex Pistols and punk, suddenly it felt like you could do it too. Barney [Bernard Sumner] and I formed a band the moment we walked out that door. [...] That's the effect it had on you. It made me start a band, something I'd never even considered before!

(Peter Hook, citato in “The Light Pours Out Of Me: The Authorised Biography Of John McGeoch”, 2022)

Wherever You Go, a Sunset Awaits

When disco exploded, and a generational shift took hold, everything that came before it was swept away. Overnight, we found ourselves with no bookings and no audience.

(Aldo Tagliapietra of Le Orme, interview for OndaRock)

An entirely instrumental album for rock band and symphony orchestra, right as disco music was taking over.

(Vittorio Nocenzi of Banco, on the album "...di terra", interview for Il Manifesto)

There was nowhere left to play, because of the rise of disco music…

(Franco Mussida of Premiata Forneria Marconi, interview published on the Aess website) 

These three quotes bring us to one last point worth discussing: Italian prog bands felt they'd been undermined by disco music, and today none of their members ever mentions punk as the force that finished them off.

The reason is simple: punk never really took hold in Italy. Almost no one was playing it by the time Italian prog was fading away, between 1977 and 1978: the only acts to get a record deal were Skiantos, who released records on Gianni Sassi's Cramps label, and Decibel, fronted by Enrico Ruggeri — the only ones to chart at all (though never higher than the top 20). Just two bands, one of them on a label firmly geared towards prog. And yet, even without punk, Italian prog outlasted its British counterpart's decline by a year or so.

Naturally, the interpretation offered by these Italian musicians is itself debatable: in Italy, disco music exploded in 1975 with Barry White, meaning it coexisted in the charts with prog for roughly two or three seasons. Besides, it's unclear why prog alone should have taken the hit: plenty of singer-songwriters from that period, without ever giving in to disco, suffered no commercial fallout whatsoever. Some of them, in fact, turned to Premiata Forneria Marconi to arrange their own records (from Alberto Fortis to Fabrizio De André).

Here too, the decline of one genre coinciding with the rise of another created the impression of a direct link that in fact never existed — one not even suspected by the rest of the music industry at the time. The idea that prog listeners converted en masse, and exclusively, to disco music is rather hard to swallow, or at least there's no reliable data to back it up.

Italy was not the only country where prog's decline went unlinked to punk even in retrospect: the further you move away from the Anglosphere, the more glaring that missing connection becomes.

Poland, for instance, was home to a thriving prog scene. Records in that style were still coming out as late as the early Eighties (SBB's "Memento z banalnym tryptykiem", Exodus's "Supernova"), with a sound already strikingly close to British neo-prog. In other words, there was no commercial gap at all between the classic era and the revival era, which are consequently viewed as a single continuous strand.

At a certain point, though, prog declined there too (no chart successes are recorded from 1983 onward), and this happened without the country ever developing a punk scene. What it did develop was a new wave scene, which broke out in 1981 with the debut albums by Maanam and Izabela Trojanowska.

As it happens, many musicians on the local new wave scene came not from punk but from prog: Maanam's guitarist, Marek Jackowski, had been a member of Anawa, just as Trojanowska's songs were written and played by Budka Suflera. Even the new wave bands with no prior background in the record industry often showed clear ties to prog: take Republika, with their flute solos, odd-time rhythms, and guitar and keyboard virtuosity.

This game could be extended in all sorts of directions, since prog was geographically far more widespread than punk during the Seventies, meaning there are plenty of scenes around the world where prog eventually declined with punk having nothing to do with it, either because it emerged much later or never emerged at all: from Japan (where prog, despite thriving underground, never made it onto the charts) to Spain, not to mention Argentina (another case where the new wave scene arose without any punk phase, counting among its ranks giants of the local scene such as Luis Alberto Spinetta and Charly García, both of them prog veterans).

Conclusion

The death of prog — assuming it ever really died, and setting aside its many resurrections — was therefore not a murder, but a natural unraveling, sometimes gradual, sometimes more sudden, and different from one context to the next. The fact that its demise can be "provincialized" depending on your vantage point speaks volumes about how minor punk's role in the process really was. And yet the genre lost its centrality both in Britain and elsewhere, regardless of whether it enjoyed good or bad press, or the approval or scorn of other artists.

With these unlikely (if much-hyped) culprits cleared out of the way, other factors gain credibility as contributing causes behind prog's declining appeal.

One crucial issue was the difficulty of broadening its vocabulary and range while still remaining recognizable. The genre was built on stylistic hybridization and gave particular weight, in its recipe, to a handful of specific languages: baroque pop, psychedelic rock, jazz, folk, European classical music. Beyond these established strands, it also had deep ties to other fields that were themselves booming at the time: fusion, heavy rock (with which prog was often lumped together in the press), and the nascent world of electronic music.

Some of these styles, like fusion and baroque pop, were already inherently hybrid in nature; others struggled to renew themselves and reclaim their popularity. On the other hand, heavy and electronic sounds were undergoing strong development, but their adoption led to offshoots with their own aesthetic and audience, no longer fully identifiable with prog.

Many artists experimented with assimilating new languages (reggae and disco are just two possible examples), but even when they achieved convincing results, they failed to open up horizons for the genre capable of attracting large numbers of new converts. In short, at a certain point, for many listeners and musicians prog had explored almost all of its recombinatory possibilities, and had settled into a series of static languages (the symphonic one, the Canterbury sound, etc.) for which there seemed to be little room for development.

The high technical standards associated with the genre also deterred new creative minds from entering the field: the apparent "unreachability" of virtuosos who had had years to hone their skills combined with the dazzling productions that had become the industry standard, creating the sense that it was now unthinkable for new musicians to make a name for themselves in the field.

In short, it was the exhaustion of the low hanging fruits (the more easily attainable ones, so to speak) that halted the spread of prog in its best-known form, pushing both established artists and newcomers toward new sounds. The fact that these developments were not perceived as a direct continuation of progressive rock is partly due to the stigma that, as we have seen, the press placed on the genre and the term as early as the first half of the Seventies, and partly due to the increasingly rigid codification of what could or could not be considered "progressive".

Although the term was still associated with a broader range of meanings than it has today, compared to its late-Sixties origins its use had become increasingly tied to the most prominent exponents of the symphonic strand, so that any alternative model was perceived as something else entirely. This is a paradoxical situation in itself, given that what largely drove artists toward new horizons was precisely that taste for the frontier inherent in the word "progressive" from its very linguistic root.

As further proof of the link between progressive rock and the hybridization of musical languages, it should finally be noted that the adjective has resurfaced cyclically in subsequent decades, in association with the most multifaceted offshoots of different genres such as metal, house music and hardcore punk.

One could even go so far as to say that the emergence of a prog fringe is the inevitable outcome of any movement that develops long enough to lead artists and audiences to seek out more complex forms and cross-pollination with other styles. Between the late Sixties and early Seventies this happened to beat, folk rock and psychedelia, but the same fate has befallen and continues to befall a wide range of musical movements. Punk, the main suspect in a murder that never actually happened, is in fact far more credible as the first, chronologically speaking, among the genres that became "progressivized" after the supposed death of the genre.

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