"The Queen Mother asked us to play something on the Moog. She was really cute": PFM on brushes with royalty, spaghetti with Aerosmith, and how to annoy America

PFM in 1975 sitting on a park bench .

In 2017, Italian progressive rock legends Premiata Forneria Marconi, aka PFM, released Emotional Tattoos, their first album of all-new studio material in over a decade and a return to the 1970s sound that had threatened to make PFM major stars on both sides of the Atlantic. Classic Rock spoke to the band and heard their extraordinary, unlikely story.

Greg Lake was knocked out. Having listened to a cassette of tracks by a band called Premiata Forneria Marconi that he was presented with during Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s tour of Italy, he couldn’t wait to hear more. Back home in London, he phoned their manager, Franco Mamone.