FROM PROG TO ANTI-PROG (IN THE WAKE OF KING CRIMSON)

(Being the third part of 'Intensify The Contradictions', my deep dive into Post-Punk, which starts here.)

”There are no mistakes, save one: the failure to learn from a mistake.” 
- Robert Fripp

"I still can’t see why people listen instead of doing it themselves.” 
- Soft Machine,’Thank You Pierre Lunaire’

If Post-Punk was ready to plunder from Dub, it would borrow from many other places too. In fact, Dub’s reductive yet polyglot instincts positively encouraged this! So it stole from everywhere, from Seventies American Punk, from Funk and Disco, from contemporary electro-acoustic composers, from minimalists, from free improvisers and drone merchants and from a then-emerging ‘world’ music. (African tribal drummers was a particular favourite.) But their second biggest musical influence was closer to home.

Punk’s Year Zero rhetoric, highly effective as a sound-bite, was soon being regurgitated as gospel by gormless music journos. To the point where many simply took it as read that early Seventies music just divided into brainless Disco and bodiless Prog.

Yet this standard model omitted much. There was a music for which you could use the catch-all term ‘anti-Prog’. It wasn’t bombastic, technocratic and obsessed with proficiency, or with stuffing itself with quotations from Classical music. Instead it was left-field, askew and omniverously creative, more idiosyncratic than ostentatious. So eclectic was it that it was hard to see it as a distinct music scene, leaving it hidden in plain sight. Yet as we shall see it had something of a regular cast, everyone within at least one degree of separation from everyone else.

King Crimson had been one of Prog’s founders. Yet, contrary to the core, once others rose in their wake they turned again. Their line-up rejigged, with only guitarist Robert Fripp remaining from the originating group, they went on to make a trilogy quite different in sound - ‘Lark’s Tongues in Aspic’ (1973), ‘Starless and Bible Black’ and ’Red’ (both 1974). Fripp was soon calling prog a “prison”, a King-turned-republican whose stance effectively pre-echoed Lydon by leaving the scene he’d done so much to spawn.

As a sign of changed priorities, on the track ’Trio’, drummer Bill Bruford figured there was nothing for him to add - so didn’t. For which he was credited for “admirable restraint”, not a phrase oft-heard in Prog circles. Musically, these albums influenced Metal’s frontiers more than Post-Punk. But their effect, at least for here, lay in their no longer sounding Prog. The seemingly automatic link between progressive music and Prog music was broken. And then…

Fripp went on to play on another slightly later trilogy, Eno’s first solo albums - ‘Here Come The Warm Jets’, ‘Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)’ (both ’74) and ‘Another Green World’ the next year. Despite that ‘solo’ tag they became a nexus point for this nameless scene, as well as Fripp bringing in members of Roxy Music, Hawkwind, the Pink Fairies, plus Robert Wyatt and John Cale. (Plus Phil Collins. Nothing is ever perfect.)

In almost linear opposition to Prog’s cult of the virtuoso, Eno himself was keen to establish his status as a non-musician, proudly downplaying his own musical role on the sleeves. He was a classic case of the person whose Art School background precisely qualified him for a career in music. He’d played in the Portsmouth Symphonia, an orchestra anyone could join provided they had no proficiency in their chosen instrument. (They guested on one track.)

Sessions went ahead quite spontaneously, with Eno really only arranging encounters, which he’d afterwards treat to the point they’d became unrecognisable to the players. And often the results, on a track like ’Third Uncle’ sounds like Post-Punk arriving four years early. The albums became influential enough in Post-Punk circles for A Certain Ratio to take their name from a lyric.

Similarly another member of Eno’s musical pool, Robert Wyatt, had started out in Soft Machine. Who were in many way the missing link from the Sixties Underground to Prog. (Perhaps more so than Pink Floyd.) But his solo albums ‘Rock Bottom’ (1974) and 'Ruth is Stranger Than Richard’ (1975) were clear-cut anti-prog, perhaps above all through their playful attitude, somehow free-form and singalong simultaneously.

Against Prog’s fancifully airbrushed covers, these came with naive-art paintings by Wyatt’s wife Alfreda. The songs, often seemingly written from a child perspective, with Ivor Cutler bobbing up at unexpected moments, can feel like the soundtrack to a very, very strange children’s TV show. Eno inevitably appeared on the second, playing “direct inject anti-jazz ray gun.”

Meanwhile, across the water, the German music scene notoriously dubbed Krautrock by us gauche Brits was equally influential. It may be best summed up by this quote from Faust’s Jean-Herve Peron: ”We were trying to put aside everything we had heard in rock 'n' roll, the three-chord pattern, the lyrics. We had the urge of saying something completely different.” (For some speculation on how such a scene could arise there and then, this time taking David Stubbs as my spirit guide, see here.) Crucially for Post-Punk, it’s way of making music new was stripping it back down to its roots.

Bands like Can and Faust took to touring Britain frequently, finding the reception better than back home. Seeds were being sewn. Bowie’s influential Berlin trilogy (of course featuring Fripp and Eno) further cemented Anglo-German relations in alternative music circles. Robert Lloyd once said the break-up of the Prefects came from half the band wanting to be the Sex Pistols, and the other half Faust. And that was doubtless true of many a Punk band, save the Pistols themselves where part of the band wanted to be Can. (John Lydon’s original post-Pistols plan, prior to forming PIL, had been to become their singer.)

Yet the twist was all this was really over by the time Punk had arrived. King Crimson disbanded in ’74, Roxy in ’76. (In their case they later reunited, but as quite a different outfit who fall outside the scope of this tale.) Robert Wyatt’s last original-run album came in 1975, the same year Eno turned to ambient. So Post-Punk had the best of both worlds; pioneers to pick up from, yet at the same time a clear stage to straddle.

And yet by turn Post-Punk came to back-influence both anti-Prog and Krautrock, until the dividing lines often seemed dissolved. From 1979 Recommended Records started to re-release Faust, feeding but also reflecting a developing interest. In 1981 a recently reformed King Crimson released ’Discipline’, which sounded little like either their Prog or anti-Prog incarnations, but quite a lot like Post-Punk. Wyatt returned to release a series of singles from the late Seventies on, where the long free-form numbers became stripped-down songs, virtually miniatures, not just minimal but seemingly casually thrown-up. (Later collected on ‘Nothing Can Stop Us’, 1972.) He was no longer on Prog’s haven Virgin but the epicentre of indie - Rough Trade. And if Lydon never sang with Can, Jah Wobble got to record with ex-members, as Eno did with Cluster.

Up next! Mistakes...