The punk bands Ian Anderson thinks “owed more to progressive rock”
Back in the mid-1970s, when the pioneering abrasive, sneering sounds of punk rock revolution first crept over the airwaves, the scene immediately identified progressive rock as being its enemy of choice, but prog hero Ian Anderson reckons that some rebellious young punk upstarts owed more to the oft-maligned genre than they originally let on.
Progressive rock was, in many ways, the natural development of the psychedelic experimentation that dominated the counterculture era of the previous decade, but as prog stretched on it seemed to become more and more complex, diffuse, and self-aggrandising. With its half-hour keyboard solos and otherworldly narrative arcs stretching across entire albums, it represented the antithesis of punk’s DIY manifesto, and its determination to take rock and roll back to its rebellious roots.
After all, it was more or less unthinkable that somebody with no musical experience could pick up a keyboard and become the next Rick Wakeman, but anybody who could steal a guitar and learn three barre chords could give Steve Jones or Joe Strummer a run for their money. Thus, the two musical movements were pitched as natural enemies.
In hindsight, though, the battle between prog and punk wasn’t always so binary. A lot of the safety-pinned revolutionaries populating the stage of The Roxy Club, after all, had grown up listening to the likes of Yes, King Crimson, and, of course, Jethro Tull. “It was a movement that lasted only a little while,” Tull’s Ian Anderson later said of the punk era. “It evolved very quickly.”
A core part of that evolution, at least in the eyes of Anderson, was the eventual adoption of some elements of prog rock into the punk repertoire. Sure, the fantasy narratives and keyboard solos were hardly going to shoehorn themselves into ‘White Riot’ or Nevermind The Bollocks, but some of the groups that arrived towards the latter stages of punk’s relevancy did bear the lineage of prog within their sound.
“You had bands like the Police and the Stranglers,” Anderson told Magnet Magazine in 2018. “And they owed more to progressive rock, though they took on some of punk’s trappings because that was their entry into making a living in music at the time.”
Seemingly, they weren’t the only ones, either. “On more than one occasion, Johnny Rotten has cited that Aqualung was a huge influence on him as a young wannabe musician,” the songwriter added.
On initial glance, it might seem strange to group The Stranglers with Sting’s outfit, given the very clear disparities in their sound and sensibilities. However, both groups were indeed essential in taking the core spirit of punk, with its DIY ethos and youthful rebellion, and thrusting it into the mainstream consciousness by blending the scene with more palatable influences.
Anderson didn’t see fit to expand upon exactly which bits of The Police’s discography – or The Stranglers’, for that matter – owed itself to progressive rock, but both groups seemed to adopt increasingly complex song structures as they went on, incorporating a wealth of different musical influences as they went.
So, in the end, perhaps progressive rock wasn’t the ultimate enemy of punk at all, it just took punks a little while to fully appreciate the appeal of the prog scene.
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