During the years following the breakup of the Beatles in 1970 to the rise of punk in 1976, the British singles charts were full of songs that pop history has often characterised as trite and simplistic (or just plain bad). This was, after all, the heyday of glam rockers such as Slade and Gary Glitter, 1950s nostalgia acts like Mud and Showaddywaddy, teenybop groups such as the Bay City Rollers and the Osmonds, and even one-off novelty acts like the Wombles. At the same time, or so the story usually goes, ‘serious’ pop and rock musicians in the 1970s were focusing their energies on making albums and not singles. British progressive rock enjoyed its creative zenith during this period, with groups like Genesis, Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd and Yes releasing full-blown concept albums (think Thick as a Brick and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway) that sold millions of copies on both sides of the Atlantic, despite their lack of hit singles and appearances on Top of the Pops. There were, however, certain artists who managed to successfully straddle the albums and singles markets during this remarkably eclectic period in British chart history, and such is the focus of Andy Bennett's new book, British Progressive Pop 1970–1980.
Notwithstanding Jon Stratton's claim in his back-cover blurb, ‘progressive pop’ is hardly a genre label of Bennett's invention. The UK release of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds in May 1966, for example, was accompanied by full-page ads in the British music periodicals touting the record as ‘The Most Progressive Pop Album Ever!’, while Chris Welch, for his end-of-year retrospective in Melody Maker that December, penned an article entitled ‘Progressive Pop’ in which he surveyed the explosion of experimental releases in 1966 from artists such as the Beatles, Cream, Donovan, the Small Faces and Soft Machine. Nevertheless, progressive pop does seem an appropriate label for the six artists that Bennett has chosen to focus on for his study – David Bowie, the Electric Light Orchestra (ELO), Roxy Music, 10cc, Queen and Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel. As Bennett puts it, ‘[i]n the context of the early 1970s, none of these artists could have been truly defined as either rock or pop as their musical output extended beyond the sonic boundaries commonly applied to each of these categories’ (p. 28).
The book is organised into six chapters. Chapter one, ‘Progressive pop in context’, examines that crucial transitional period in British pop and rock history from the late 1960s into the early 1970s, the spotlight being the Beatles and the enormous influence they had on this emerging crop of younger artists. Indeed, the Beatles’ influence – particularly with respect to their innovations in the recording studio – is a subject that looms large throughout the book, and rightly so. Chapter two, ‘New sounds for a new decade’, addresses the major differences in the consumption of pop and rock music in the UK and the US during this period, where in the latter case there were far greater opportunities for audiences to hear extended album tracks played over the radio on so-called ‘Album Oriented Rock’ (‘AOR’) stations that simply did not exist in the UK. The notable exception on British national television was The Old Grey Whistle Test, which began airing on BBC2 in September 1971 and focused on albums, rather than the hit singles featured weekly on BBC1's Top of the Pops, and thus ‘created an important space for the emergence of artists, and particularly British artists, whose music crossed the divide between AOR and chart music in Britain at the time’ (p. 47).
Much of Chapter three, ‘Progressives in the world of pop’, is devoted to 1973, which Bennett describes as ‘a very progressive year’ (p. 58). This was the year that saw the release of such multi-platinum albums as Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon and Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, along with self-titled debut albums from 10cc and Queen. David Bowie enjoyed no less than four UK top-10 hits in 1973, while his album Aladdin Sane spent five weeks at number one between May and June. ELO and Roxy Music also each had UK top-10 singles that year, while 10cc's ‘Rubber Bullets’ reached number one for one week that summer. Notably absent from Bennett's discussion of 1973 in this chapter, however, are two important releases from ex-Beatles – Paul McCartney and Wings's Band on the Run, and Ringo Starr's own eponymous album Ringo (perhaps the closest thing we ever got to a Beatles reunion in the 1970s, featuring performances and/or songwriting contributions by all three of Ringo's former bandmates). McCartney's output with Wings, especially, was stylistically eclectic and often epic, i.e. ‘progressive’ (the ‘multisong’ title track ‘Band on the Run’, for example), while at the same time garnering huge success on the singles charts, and therefore certainly belongs in a book on 1970s British progressive pop.
In Chapter four, ‘Big songs and generational soundtracks’, we get the book's only close readings of individual tracks, namely 10cc's ‘I'm Not in Love’ (pp. 94–6) and Queen's ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ (pp. 96–9). That Bennett has chosen these two songs in particular for closer scrutiny is no surprise: both were huge UK number one hits in 1975, despite exceeding the usual length of a radio-friendly single (each clocking in at around 6 minutes), and both represent extraordinary feats of analogue recording wizardry, especially in the way the background vocals were multi-tracked to create the sound of virtual choirs. (Bennett's discussion on the making of ‘I'm Not in Love’ benefitted not only from the 2015 BBC4 documentary but also his own personal interview with 10cc founding member Graham Gouldman.) While Bennett's account of how each of these iconic songs was recorded is rich in detail, and that alone is valuable, there is little here in the way of actual musical analysis, and this brings me to the main criticism I have with the book as a whole. What made artists like 10cc and Queen so ‘progressive’ to their listeners and fans (myself included) has as much to do with their predilection for melodic, harmonic and formal complexities in their songs as anything else. To talk about ‘I'm Not in Love’ without mentioning its beautiful – and decidedly Beatlesque – harmonic twists and turns, for instance, is missing out on a big part of why the song had and continues to have such wide appeal. To be fair, Bennett is a cultural sociologist and not a musicologist, and as such British Progressive Rock 1970–1980 should be read as a document of an underexplored piece of British cultural history written by a skilled scholar who is clearly a massive fan himself with an encyclopaedic knowledge of 1970s British pop and rock music (see also Bennett Reference Bennett, Bennett and Stratton2010). However, for those readers seeking a more in-depth musical analysis of this repertoire, I would suggest they start with my own work on the Electric Light Orchestra (Spicer Reference Spicer, Burns and Lacasse2018) and Nick Braae's excellent work on Queen (Braae Reference Braae2015 and 2016).
In Chapter five, ‘Small “p” Politics’, Bennett provides ample evidence to discredit the commonly accepted notion that British pop music in the 1970s (at least, pre-punk) avoided a political agenda: ‘there was … a critical quality in progressive pop, with many artists using their music, and in many cases their image too, to question social values and conventions as these began to unravel during the early 1970s’ (p. 120). Finally, in Chapter six, ‘The end of an era’, Bennett focuses on the turn of the 1980s and the rise of new wave and synthpop. The 1980s eventually saw the decline of classic 1970s progressive pop acts like 10cc and ELO, but those who were able to adapt to the new styles emerging around them – Queen and David Bowie, for example, as well as younger stars like Kate Bush – would continue to enjoy great success in the 1980s. Even progressive rock acts who previously had not had much success on the singles charts found themselves ‘evolving to survive’ (p. 140) and retooling their sound to become more pop-oriented. The most successful of these progressive rock-turned-pop acts was undoubtedly Genesis, who, along with solo releases from their former and current lead singers, Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins, dominated the albums and singles charts on both sides of the Atlantic through much of the 1980s. (Genesis's 1986 album, Invisible Touch, yielded no fewer than five top-five singles on the Billboard Hot 100; the lead single and title track, ‘Invisible Touch’, reached number one for one week in July of that year, only to be displaced in the top spot, ironically enough, by Peter Gabriel's ‘Sledgehammer’.)
The book could have benefitted from a much more careful copyedit before going to press, as there are several repeated words and other small typographical anomalies peppered throughout. Most distracting are those instances where proper names are misspelled: e.g. ‘Maddison Square Garden’ (p. 61; should be Madison), ‘Copeland’ (p. 139; should be Copland), ‘Salisbury Hill’ (p. 141; should be Solsbury), and, most egregiously, the band Procol Harum is spelled ‘Procul Harem’ on its every mention throughout the book, including the index (p. 159). Also, I must say that even for a compact book of 162 pages, I find it odd that some artists who really should qualify as 1970s British progressive pop are entirely absent. There is no mention at all, for example, of Supertramp, formed in London in 1969, who were initially more of a progressive rock group, but beginning with their third album, Crime of the Century (1974), which included the UK top-20 single ‘Dreamer’, refashioned their sound to appeal to a more mainstream pop audience; Supertramp's commercial peak was their 1979 worldwide number one album Breakfast in America, which yielded four top-20 singles (although curiously, the album reached only as high as number three in the UK).
Yet putting these quibbles aside, there is much to admire about Bennett's book, not the least of which is that it sheds new light on a slice of British pop history that has been sorely undervalued. One can only hope that British Progressive Pop 1970–1980 has set the stage for others now to tackle this remarkable and varied repertory with the degree of close musical analysis it richly deserves.
