As ever, my memory has blinded me to the exceptions, even if they do “prove the rule”, as dictated by 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 Keith Emerson’s multiple organs, into which he enjoyed thrusting knives for some reason I never understood, not everything they did is like that.

 

Most of it is, that’s true, especially the dreaded Pictures At An Exhibition, which even Mussorgsky would probably have hated. But I was watching a TV programme or film not all that long ago and 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 which 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. 

 

ELP were unfathomably popular among my fellow pupils at school, along with their fellow prog travellers Yes, Genesis and King Crimson, and it is my guiltiest secret that, in the sort of trading that goes on in prisons and public schools, I once swapped my collection of the first three or four Roxy Music LPs for an entire set of ELP albums, mostly because there were many more of theirs, and at least one of them was a double or triple affair, so I felt I was getting a bargain.

 

I was so blinded by the thought of the great ‘deal’ I’d got in numerical terms that I forgot to take into consideration the fact that I never liked their bloody music, and that I always loved Roxy – and still do. Bad mistake. But still. This isn’t bad at all. The rest of the album is probably terrible; it has songs with titles like ‘The Endless Enigma (Part 1)’. My friend Gags will almost certainly disagree.