In all of the interminable books, memoirs, articles and TV documentaries contemplating punk rock, there’s one thing they all seem to agree upon: that punk killed progressive rock. “Almost overnight, after the Sex Pistols prog rock came to a halt,” declaimed one pundit in a recent BBC documentary. Very well phrased – but totally untrue.
The fact that Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten once wore a Pink Floyd T-shirt with the words ‘I HATE’ scrawled in biro above the band’s name is always held up as evidence that punk was some kind of reaction to prog. Yet Rotten (as John Lydon) was a huge fan of Hawkwind, Van Der Graaf Generator, Can and various other bands whose progness was never in doubt. The idea that punk ‘had to happen’ because a whole generation was idly fuming away at the complexity of King Crimson or the overblown theatricality of Rick Wakeman’s – admittedly daft – staging of King Arthur & The Knights Of The Round Table on ice is just absurd.
