Prog Nosis MARCO ROSSI climbs aboard his steam-driven time machine, bound for early ’70s Europe and all things prog.


Right, it must surely be time for another travelogue – or “travelprogue”, if you will, which you almost certainly won’t. Let’s start with Italy, for no better reason than the fact that I also started with Italy, if one traces my lineage


back to those gondola-joyriding forebears. With all due respect to the awe-inspiring Goblin, my initial route into Italian prog was via ELP’s similarly acronymical protégés PFM, who are the subject of a largely spiffing new 2-CD compilation called River Of Life: The Manticore Years Anthology 1973-1977 (Manticore). PFM stands for Premiata Forneria Marconi, which I


think translates as ‘top bakery’. (Be thankful they weren’t British: they’d have been called “Greggs”.) I actually bought their ‘The World Became The World’ single when it came out in ’74 – which negates, in one fell swoop, any cool points I may have accidentally accrued since then. I still stand by that decision, though. I expect I bought it out of bitter solidarity with my Italian brethren, given that I started secondary school at St. Psychotic’s in Scotland that year and consequently “took one for the team” every single fucking day on behalf of Italy, its slapstick war record, its lachrymose footballers, its suspicion-arousing farinaceous cuisine and its rust-recycling car industry. ‘The World Became The World’ is a pretty fair indicator


of the early PFM’s preferred mode of expression – a combination of formally arpeggiated acoustic guitars àla Mike Rutherford and Steve Hackett, the pathological tempo tinkering of Yes and the dusty Mellotron and sense of drooling, wall-eyed wonderment of the Moodies. As they progressed, PFM developed a profound taste for neurosurgical intricacy in the Gentle Giant vein (‘Chocolate Kings’, ‘Jet Lag’). However, the ’76 track ‘Harlequin’ – not to be confused with ‘Harlequin’ by Genesis – sounds exactly like, ah, Genesis. I trust that clears everything up. Admittedly, one somewhat rues the day that PFM’s


otherwise excellent keyboardist Flavio Premoli bought one of those squiggly monophonic Moogs favoured by Keith Emerson, and sprayed it all over the 16-minute live track ‘Is My Face On Straight’ like radioactive graffiti – but in general, River Of Life is a cheerfully busy, boisterous and/or ruminative reminder of prog’s hirsute heyday, when men were men and women wouldn’t be seen dead at any of the gigs.


I wish I’d known about AREA back then. Where PFM couldn’t go four bars without changing time signatures and textures, their fellow Italian prog progenitors Area couldn’t go four bars without chucking everything full-force at


the wall then gibbering and cackling as the resultant mess slid down on to the carpet. Their seven albums from ’73’s feral debut Arbeit Macht Frei to ’79’s live nightmare Event ’76 have just been reissued, and the cumulative effect is a bit like stepping in front of seven runaway trains. They are, in short, my current heroes. Bassist Patrick Djivas provides a link between Area and


PFM – defecting from the former to join the latter – but the two bands were essentially as different as chalk and Semtex. Area were edgy, unruly and wilfully unpredictable provocateurs, matching an intimidating jazz-based collective musical expertise to an incendiary and anarchic mindset. Their vocalist, the late Demetrio Stratos, is the patron saint of one-offs. To find a suitable comparison, you


68 PFM


have to look beyond rock and think of Ron Perlman’s growling, snuffling and baying portrayal of Salvatore in The Name Of The Rose – then double it, sprinkle it with soldier ants, throw lit matches at it and hurl it off of a tall cliff at Halloween. Stratos’s lycanthrope ululations are Area’s most defining characteristic – but even without him, you’d still spot their fearless avant-jazz-prog with sexy Arabic leanings a mile off. Caution Radiation Area (Cramps) from ’74 is arguably their most berserk achievement, but the compilation


Anto/Logicamente (Cramps) makes for an uproariously unforgiving starting point. You’ll know if they’re for you or not by about one minute and 10 seconds into


‘L’abbattimento Dello Zeppelin’, if you haven’t started projectile vomiting and praying for deliverance by then.


Next stop Sweden, and the not-unreasonably- monikered trio MADE IN SWEDEN. Support slots and consequent friendship with the wallahs from Colosseum led them to record their fourth album in Olympic Studios in London with Tony Reeves at the


faders – hence Made In England (Esoteric), originally sneaked out on the Sonet label in ’70. What do you know, they turn out to have been superb, blessed with a tumbling lightness of touch borne of a shared grounding in “the filthy jazz”. Check out the subtly sparkling ‘Roundabout’ by way of example: it sounds like The Nazz – hence no complaints from the jury – and features a corking nylon-string guitar solo from the supernaturally adept Georg Wadenuis. Georg was


Area


summarily poached by Blood, Sweat & Tears, but we would have quite understood if, instead, he had accepted an offer from God to sit at his right hand. Georg played piano and organ rather brilliantly as well as guitar, the swine.


On to Belgium, then: and before you start stammering excuses and knocking pensioners aside in your haste to run away, let me make doilies of your preconceptions. I love Belgium, and I love WATERLOO, whose


smartly-handled flute and Hammond riffs outgrow an inevitable Tull influence on ’70’s First Battle (Guerssen). ‘Why Don’t You Follow Me’ and ‘Guy In The Wrong Neighbourhood’ build upon the Stand Up template most agreeably, while the earnestly clunky social commentary of ‘Black Born Children’ is nevertheless planted in an excitingly groovy rhythm bed, ideal for naked “idiot dancing” if you have understanding neighbours with a keen sense of the absurd. Fantastically, Waterloo’s flautist/vocalist was called Dirk Bogaert. Bonus track ‘Smile’ is Antony & The Johnsons three decades early.


Finally, we fetch up in Holland with my beloved SWEET OKAY SUPERSISTER – basically Supersister, in other words, reverting to their long-form original name for ’74’s admirably certifiable swansong Spiral Staircase


(Esoteric). Essentially an indecipherable if-you-say-so concept album, it eschews the straight-faced jazz rock of ’73’s Iskander and returns the band to what they do best, i.e. flexing their subversive funny bone and musical shadow puppetry in the service of some bracingly unusual compositions (‘Retroschizive’, ‘Sylvers Song’). Imagine The Mothers Of Invention fronted by The Northettes and The Smurfs and you’re getting there. Single ‘Coconut Woman’, dripping with amused insincerity, takes the piss out of commercial viability to a positively heroic degree.


www.cherryred.co.uk www.cramps.it www.guerssen.com www.esotericrecordings.com


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