There was a video not that long ago on YouTube of a school band doing a Yes track with Jon Anderson (I think) singing with them. I don’t have the link, and I don’t recall where I saw the video (either via Making Light or the Whatever), but it was a little piece of genius. As one commentator put it, the pomposity of prog meant it was never able to engage with the one thing it lacked; the enthusiasm of a group of teenagers thumping away at their instruments. That was probably why I ended up revisiting the world of unfeasably long album tracks.

That’s the thing that always comes up about prog. The overblown campness of it all. In the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD war of rock, punk came out on top and that was the end of that. And I can’t help feeling a little sad at that, not least because punk has long outlived its usefulness, its iconography dug up, reanimated and repackaged as just about the least offensive musical opiate ever conceived.

Regardless of the merits or otherwise of the movement they came from, Pink Floyd are inarguably a legendary band. Wish You Were Here has been on the car for ages, and it’s one of the classics. There’s a reason it always turns up in those annual Bestest Ever charts.

It’s Have A Cigar I wanted to bring up. It starts off a straightforward rock track, with a funky bass line and Dave Gilmour doing a bluesier thing than on the rest of the album. It’s not obvious from the kind of thing Pink Floyd are remembered for, but Gilmour’s a hell of a blues player, even if it is the white boy 60s English blues thing of Keith Richards, Clapton and Peter Green (probably shouldn’t lump Green in there, actually, because if BB King says he’s the real thing then that’s good enough for me).

And then we hit 0:25 with a synthy SPOING and it all gets a bit odd.

I imagine that small bit is the musical equivalent of finding out Watchmen isn’t really a formulaic murder investigation. You’re pootering along as normal and suddenly WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT FUCKING SQUID THING. Maybe Watchmen would have been better without the psychic mollusc. Maybe the Floyd track would have been better without the psychadelic assault. But I don’t think so.

Have A Cigar sums up prog to me, and a lot of rock music in a way. The SPOING of the synths is going to turn a lot of people off as being, well, silly at best. And it is deeply, deeply silly. Even so, I can’t help think that when the band first put it together, they thought it was the most edgy, sophisticated thing they could have done. Rugged, fearless experimentation that can’t have the same effect on us after the 80s showed how commonplace electronica would become. That day in the studio, I bet they were as excited as fuck.

Maybe the only people who can really appreciate it are the kids like those teenagers covering Yes, who haven’t got to the point where they only way they can enjoy something like that is in an ironic fashion. Even the irony isn’t a problem, though. Even if the only way you can enjoy it is by rolling your eyes at your dad as he warbles along to something he loved when he was young, and accepting the silliness of those crazy old hippies, than it’s all good. It doesn’t matter what path you have to take before you like something, it only matters that you’re having fun.

Because you know who else lives in that SPOING? Jack Kirby. The guy was an extraordinary talent, an artistic visionary, and deeply silly all at the same time. Something like the original OMAC is, in most ways, fucking stupid, but exactly as fucking stupid as Pink Floyd. Just about everything you could use to defend the King you could use to defend prog, via childlike enthusiasm or ironic detachment, though I suspect the most effect argument is always a matter of craft. You’d have to be an idiot to argue that Kirby didn’t have an incredible technical talent, or that the guys who wrote Shine On You Crazy Diamond weren’t exceptional musicians.

Jack Kirby Lives In The SPOING. Tell me you don’t want that on a t-shirt.

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