Review: 'A New Day Yesterday: UK Progressive Rock & the 1970s'

Prog rock was never exactly cool, but you can’t say no one liked it. Contemporary critics tended to mock it and sighed sighs of relief when punk blew in at the end of the seventies, but punk did not sell like prog did. Even my square-as-a-chessboard dad bought a copy of Aqualung because that’s what everyone else was doing in 1971.

Decades removed from questions of “what the hell was with Topographic Oceans?”, its now generally okay to just like what you like, especially if it’s pretty geeky. Though prog was never really all about Tolkien and complex mathematical theorems as the naysayers would have you believe, it was still pretty geeky.

What I’m trying to say in my confused, convoluted, proggy way is that the time is now right for a deep plunge into prog to both determine what it is and celebrate it. That’s what Mike Barnes does with his new book A New Day Yesterday: UK Progressive Rock & the 1970s. The UK designation in that title is fairly pointless since prog is such a distinctly British phenomenon (Rush being one exception, as well as a band that does not get so much as a single name-drop in this book. The author does cede precisely 1% of his book to a discussion of German prog bands, though).

Review: 'The Rolling Stones’ Rock & Roll Circus' Limited Deluxe Edition

1968 was a transitional year in which psychedelia gave way to the British Blues Boom, pop stars metamorphosed into rock stars, the sharp style of Swinging London frumped into patchwork hippie fashions, and the vitality and optimism of the sixties began slumping toward the seventies’ rude awakening. There is no better visual document of this brief yet pungent turning point than The Rolling Stones’ Rock & Roll Circus. To celebrate the release of Beggars Banquet, which critics love to paint as a big comeback album following a “misguided” foray into psychedelia, The Rolling Stones put together a rag-tag big-top show for the small screen featuring buddies such as Marianne Faithfull, Taj Mahal, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Jethro Tull, and The Who, as well as a couple of circus acts.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 72

The Date: December 11

The Movie: The Rolling Stones Rock & Roll Circus (1968)

What Is It?: Divine unaired TV special finds the Stones hosting Taj Mahal, Jethro Tull, Marianne Faithfull, a John Lennon supergroup, and—brace yourselves—The Who in a circus environment. The story goes that the special didn’t air during its time because The Who blew the Stones out of the ring. That’s true, but the Stones are still fabulous. Jagger never looked so beautifully panther-like.

Why Today?: On this day in 1968,  all those great bands got together to shoot this great concert film.

Psychobabble’s Rock & Roll Tour of London…

Regular Psychobabble readers may have noticed that new posts were particularly slow during the week of May 5 through the 13th. That’s because Psychobabble was “doing” Europe, or to put it in terms less reminiscent of 1970s pornography, my wife Elise and I were visiting London and Paris. As a Rock & Roll geek in London, I could hardly take two stepswithout looking down at a map, up at a street sign, or over at a bush without being reminded of some incredible old song by one of the city’s great chroniclers: The Kinks and The Clash, Donovan and Elvis Costello, The Smiths and Morrissey. Had I broader musical knowledge and a real zeal for nauseating tedium, I might be able to map the entire city with classic British pop songs. Whether it’s because of a basic sense of civic pride or the simple love of saying words like Goodge and Piccadilly, Londoners love to sing about London. With the possible exception of New York, no other city has been so moved to sing about its streets, rivers, and train stations.

From the moment we set down at Heathrow Airport (where I did the “Heathrow Shuffle”, or some exhausted facsimile thereof) to our arrival at our flat in Tottenham Hale (which convolutedly reminded me of The Kinks’ “Denmark Street” because that song name-checks Tottenham Court Road, which is actually nowhere near Tottenham Hale) great songs were never far from my thoughts even when sitting quietly on a bus or hearing an able-fingered yet deeply, deeply misguided harpist plucking out that vile “Titanic” song in a tube station.

So, maybe you can call the following article a useful guide the next time you find yourself wandering around London looking for songs to hum. But no matter what you call it, call it Psychobabble’s Rock & Roll Tour of London!

May 5

Our journey begins as it always will—or would if not for the Bank Holiday service disruptions on Sunday and Monday: on the Victoria Station tube line. The line was named in tribute to the lead-off track from The Kinks’ 1969 Rock opera Arthur: Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire. The song also inspired Kinks-freak Alexandrina Victoria to embark on the lifelong campaign of kindly Imperialism and genital-based prudery for which she is still revered in the U.K. today. You can second guess or “fact check” these facts if you must, but I can assure you there is absolutely no way they are anything less than 68% historically accurate, and that is a strong percentage by any standard.

Though severely jet lagged, Elise and I were determined to venture down to the South Bank to check out the Bermondsey Street Market. I could already tell this would be a music-rich area, and not just because the London Bridge Tube Station brings to mind an annoyingly beloved children’s song. This is the site of the Tower of London and London Dungeon tourist attractions, where children of all ages can delight to the ruling class’s history of peasant oppression (the former) or the murders of Jack the Ripper (the latter). The Tower of London has been eulogized by both XTC (who tossed it into a song along with some other towers) and The Damned. In their “Lovely Money”, which has to be the single greatest non-L.P. single of the 1980s, The Damned tear into the commercialization of a site of great historical misery with some unforgettable help from Viv Stanshall of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. 

The Misfits were even less enthused about their chosen South Bank landmark. Following a miserable trip to Blighty in late 1979, they wrote “London Dungeon”. Although the title dungeon actually refers to Brixton Jail, where they spent a night during their ill-fated trip, the lyric “Don’t wanna be here in your London Dungeon” could probably just as easily apply to the queue outside the attraction, which was very, very long.

Elise and I eschewed such tourist attractions in favor of the Bermondsey Street Market, which as far as I know, has yet to inspire a song. Elise purchased a giant meringue there just as the market was shutting down, so at least she was happy. I was pretty knackered (that’s English for “tired”) and could barely finish my fish and chips and Guinness at a local pub before passing out in my mushy peas. So we headed back to Tottenham Hale. After a refreshing jet lag nap, we watched a channel 5 program called “Sex: How to Do Everything” (apparently, “everything” is achieving orgasm by electrocuting your eyeballs and getting blown by a guy in a crocodile costume. Great show!) and a retrospective about New York Rock, which featured performances by Patti Smith, The Ramones, Lou Reed, Blondie and others of their ilk from old episodes of “The Old Grey Whistle Test”. Perhaps not the cultural-immersion I was looking for when we left the U.S. East Coast, but certainly not a bad way to spend a late night either. Not bad at all.

May 6