PICTURE the scene: the Casa Disco, Barnsley’s legendary record shop, in early 1971.
There I am, with my long hair and my feeble wispy attempt at a beard. I’m looking through the stacks of albums in the section marked ‘progressive’ because that’s the kind of music I like.
I like music that progresses with pomp and style and, yes, pretension, and, yes, bombast and, yes, symphonic grandeur and yes, a fiery drum solo involving gongs and temple bells.
But gosh, doesn’t it progress? Doesn’t it progress in a slow and deliberate way like the 37 bus making its way to the turning place at Great Houghton?
Yes it does, on a record or a double album or a triple album with artwork on the sleeve that looks like that dream you had after watching a horror film and falling asleep halfway through. Someone at the other end of the shop is talking to his mate in an excited voice about a progressive (or maybe he’s using the word prog to show that he is a native of that world rather than a visitor) track he’s just heard.
“And duz tha know it were nine minutes long man,” he says in a voice that’s a mix of Tarn and California.
His mate, wearing a waistcoat that, as the American detective writer Raymond Chandler once said about a woman’s hat, ‘looked like it had been taken from its mother too young’, isn’t Impressed.
“That’s nowt tha noz man, I heeard a track that was 17 minutes long wi’ a six-minute bass solo and it were cool and tha noz semmas Groovy.”
The reason I’m in Casa Disco is because of a musical direction that the band I’m the drummer for, Oscar the Frog, are going to take. Many people round these parts know Oscar the Frog as a marvellous ceilidh band but in the early days we were a band that tried to reflect the zeitgeist, if we would have known what the zeitgeist was and how to spell it. We wanted to be at the cutting edge, wherever that was.
So for our first couple of rehearsals in Martyn’s front room, we’d done existing songs like Ride a White Swan and Dream a Little Dream of Me. Then we tried out a couple of folk songs and Steve the violin player wrote a comedy piece called ‘In the World of Archibald the Aardvark’.
It was an eclectic selection, certainly, but our first gig at a jumble sale at Darfield Church Hall was approaching rapidly and we wanted to try something that would, if just for a fleeting moment, stop them in their tracks as they bought their cardigans and unwanted souvenirs from Ingoldmells.
That’s why we decided to become a progressive band, and check out the kind of things other bands were doing in the listening booths at Casa Disco.
We did briefly consider a change of name because Oscar the Frog might be considered a bit too twee for the Prog Universe. We toyed with possible names like Pithead Gear and Led Trackybus but they seemed even more unfit for purpose. And anyway, we’d bought some sticky letters to make Oscar the Frog T-shirts and Steve had painted a frog on his fiddle.
We reconvened at Martyn’s and persuaded his dad to let us have the key to the church hall so that we could make music that was louder and more progressive than In the World of Archibald the Aardvark.
We assembled in the supper room, the smaller of the two spaces in the church hall, and we set our equipment up.
I guess most prog rock bands would have a plan about the kinds of songs they wanted to write and perform and indeed before they began to rehearse them, they would have at least got a first draft of the music and the lyrics.
We didn’t; we thought that was a bit fancy and, at the same time, a bit too dull. We decided that we’d improvise for a while, setting up a kind of basic groove, tha knows, and then one of us would shout ‘Let’s Progress!’ and we’d, er, progress.
And that’s what happened, and the resulting racket progressed very nicely, very nicely Indeed.
Until the caretaker came in. He said: “Well, that’s just a row” and we said: “it’s progressive,” and she said, in the Barnsley way: ‘Ah’ll progress yore if yer dunt stop!’ Groovy, baby.
