Prog Steady

The BBC Concert Orchestra - Tubular Bells (excerpts) - Mike Oldfield

For the first time in a long time, I took a month off from this bootleg buffoonery, using moving to the Oregon Coast -- into a house that sits atop a mountain, surrounded by rivers and forests and an ocean -- as an excuse to dial it down into Summer Vacation mode for a spell. Believe me, if you could see this place, you'd be ready to go offline forever too.

So now we're more or less settled in, my Soulseek ports are forwarded, and it's time to resume soundtracking the endless summer.

And what better way to unpause than a much-anticipated concert from just two weeks ago! I don't have to wait for an anniversary if it's something hot off the presses such as this little Prog-umentary, do I?

So yeah! It's BBC Proms season across the proverbial pond, with shows going from July to September as they do every summer, and as always featuring a must-see performance or three.

Perhaps the most talked-about one this year was this program they called Fanfare for the Common Man, essentially a 2 1/2 hour love letter to the once-maligned (but now, in this post-categorization era, seemingly redeemed) Progressive Rock genre.

Prog Rock. Maybe the most misunderstood, misnamed and misjudged area of all the music of our lifetimes.

I say misnamed because I find myself in full agreement with Brian Eno -- someone who ought to know -- when he says that Prog, with its gestures and structures often drawn as they are from 19th Century Classical music, isn't Progressive at all a lot of the time. And instead often faces backwards to Romantic sentiment, and not ahead to future progress unknown.

Of course there are tremendous exceptions. But you often find that the bands and artists (for example: King Crimson, Henry Cow, or more recently, Radiohead) that seem most forward-facing -- and therefore Progressive in the dictionary sense of the term -- reject the term outright, and can react with visceral derision when branded thusly in the media.

Of course these designations -- in the 21st Century, where the desktop computer contains whole recording studios that would have cost $200/hour to rent back when Prog was born at the turn of the 1960s to the 1970s -- mean less than nothing.

The creative energy that informed those times -- and led people to construct triple concept albums about blind pinball wizards and sidelong epics about the psychological disintegration of lighthouse keepers -- is just a regular, anything-goes aspect of things today, and no one bats an eye at music once deemed Not Rock And Roll Enough by the tastemaker cogniscenti the kids now call "influencers".

I've heard Rick Wakeman (who'd also know) say that Progressive Rock came about primarily as a function of the then-current hyper-evolution of recording technology, where musicians who in 1968 were dealing with, at best, four track gear found themselves twiddling dreamily at the faders of 16- and 24-track mixing desks just a couple of years later. What painter could resist going whole-hog into the redefinition of the canvas itself, you know? In the case of Prog's leading lights like Yes and ELP, some would say voyaging completely up their own, pretentious, 19th Century-aping asses, but to each his own. There's room in our world for both The Sex Pistols and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, isn't there?

Me? I'm just a lawn mower. And you can tell me by the way I've loved Progressive Rock since I was 15 years old, and a friend brought over some records one summer day that catapulted me, in 15/4 time, into the cosmic and colossal world of Prog. That day I was introduced to the irreproduceably distinctive, theatrical environments invented by Peter Gabriel-era Genesis. And to the cavernous, car-crash compositions of King Crimson, perhaps the most influential group of all time, after The Beatles, on other musicians of all stripes. And it didn't take long to get to the darkly creviced, scream-sung psychodramas of Peter Hammill's Van der Graaf Generator, or the grandeur of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells, so beloved as the main theme to The Exorcist, either.

It's a genre of the music of our age that forms a substantial segment of who I am, and likely will always be a journey that never ends for me until the last crescendo of the last Mellotron chord fades away into the last, ferocious 21/8 coda. And Supper is Ready for this High Vibration to go on.

So, yes. Or Yes. Let's Promenade us up some Prog, shall we?

Various Artists

The BBC Concert Orchestra

Prog Rock: A Fanfare for the Common Man

BBC Proms

Royal Albert Hall

London, UK

7.18.2026

01 BBC introduction by Elizabeth Alker

02 Fanfare for the Common Man - Emerson, Lake & Palmer

03 Stuart Maconie announcement

04 Living In the Past - Jethro Tull

05 Out-Bloody-Rageous, pt. 1 - Soft Machine

06 Stuart Maconie announcement

07 I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe) - Genesis

08 Northern Lights - Renaissance

09 Nights In White Satin - Moody Blues

10 Stuart Maconie announcement

11 Refugees - Van der Graaf Generator

12 And You and I - Yes

13 Tubular Bells pt. 1 (excerpts w. Matt Berry narration) – Mike Oldfield

14 BBC announcement

15 One White Duck - Jethro Tull (1992 recording)

16 BBC conversation with David Baddiel, pt. 1

17 BBC Radio 3 ID

18 Hocus Pocus - Focus (1970 recording)

19 BBC conversation with David Baddiel, pt. 2

20 More Fool Me - Genesis (1973 recording)

21 BBC announcement incl. Guy Garvey & Robert Ames interviews

22 Karn Evil 9: 1st Impression, pt. 2 - Emerson, Lake & Palmer (BBC Concert Orchestra w/1973 Greg Lake vocals)

23 Stuart Maconie announcement

24 Sylvia - Focus/Komfo - Osibisa/Peaches en Regalia - Frank Zappa

25 21st Century Schizoid Man/I Talk to the Wind/In the Court of the Crimson King - King Crimson

26 Guy Garvey announcement

27 Entangled - Genesis

28 On Reflection - Gentle Giant

29 Stuart Maconie announcement

30 Maker of Islands - Incredible String Band

31 The Great Gig In the Sky - Pink Floyd

32 Stuart Maconie announcement

33 Crime of the Century - Supertramp

34 Stuart Maconie announcement

35 The Great Gate of Kiev - Emerson, Lake & Palmer

36 BBC closing announcement

Total time: 2:27:36

disc break goes after Track 20

The BBC Concert Orchestra

Robert Ames, conductor

with

The Staves (Jessica & Camilla Staveley-Taylor) - vocals

Guy Garvey - vocals

Jane Weaver - vocals

Gruff Rhys - vocals

Peter Hammill - vocals

Vanessa Haynes - vocals

Carl Palmer - drums

Stuart Maconie - BBC presenter

Elizabeth Alker - BBC 3 announcer

24/48 DVD Audio from an HD FLAC file posted to the BBC 3 online channel site, 

apparently only for the first 24 hours after the broadcast of the show on July 24th

spectral analysis is lossless past 22 kHz, making this equivalent to a high end preFM source

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited and remastered by EN, July 2026
965 MB FLAC/direct link

A special side shoutout to the Soulseek user @80sBoy, who helped me track down the pre-broadcast version of this thing, which apparently was posted via some sort of high-def audio player on the BBC3 site for a minute last week, as far as I can determine. Maybe it's still there? I don't think so, but I have no idea because the BBC online stuff is only available in Britain, and a VPN is such a hassle for a techno-troglodyte such as I.

I did my best to paginate separate tracks for a lot of the talking parts -- in case you wanna cut those out when you hear this thing -- but I left them intact as part of it to preserve the documentary feel of the overall presentation. I will be back in August with more crazy white people in costume (yes, those guys), but I thought I would make my return here by making this performance available, in well-manicured audio form, for anyone that was interested in what it sounded like earlier in July when the Proms went Prog.--J.