Emerson, Lake & Palmer were unfathomably popular among my fellow pupils at school, along with their fellow prog travellers Yes, Genesis and King Crimson.
It is my guiltiest secret that, in the sort of bartering that goes on in prisons and public schools, I once swapped my prized collection of the first three or four Roxy Music LPs for an entire set of albums by ELP.
Bad mistake, and one I regret to this day, though I did it for logical reasons: there were many more albums by ELP, and at least one of them was a double or triple affair (although obviously when you listened to them, they all felt longer than War And Peace), so I felt I was getting a bargain. Which was the purpose of the transaction.
I was so blinded by the thought of the great ‘deal’ I’d got that I forgot to take into consideration the fact that I never liked their bloody music. Or that I always loved Roxy – and still regret not having their LPs on vinyl any more.
Words cannot express how much I loathe the music of ELP, both then and now, and all points in between. And not just because of my terrible business sense as a schoolboy. There are, however, exceptions that “prove the rule” (according to that most nonsensical of aphorisms).
For example, while I associate them almost entirely with progtastically long-winded neo-classical and pseudo-classical extravaganzas, heavily featuring the bombastic noodlings of Keith Emerson’s multiple organs, with titles like ‘The Endless Enigma (Part 1)’ – and, if you could get that far, Part 2 – that’s not the full picture (at an exhibition).
Most of it is, that’s true; especially the dreaded Pictures At An Exhibition, which even Mussorgsky would probably have hated. And I will never understand why Emerson liked stabbing his organ with large knives. But while watching a TV programme or film not all that long ago, it ended with a poignant song that set my synapses twitching as it triggered some sort of distant musical memory.
Eventually I got there, probably with the help of Shazam, and it was a delightfully sweet song called Lucky Man. That was, as I subsequently thought I recalled, the one song in ELP’s entire repertoire that wasn’t like the above, apart from Greg Lake’s lovely Christmas song, which is surely one of the least annoying of all those festive ‘favourites’.
But here’s another. It’s taken from their 1972 album Trilogy. This isn’t bad at all: the rest probably is. My friend Gags will almost certainly disagree.