Progressive Rock

Progressive rock, also known as prog rock or prog, is a rock music subgenre that originated in the United Kingdom, with further developments in Germany, Italy, and France, throughout the mid-to-late 1960s and 1970s. It developed from psychedelic rock and originated, similarly to art rock, as an attempt to give greater artistic weight and credibility to rock music. Bands abandoned the short pop single in favor of instrumentation and compositional techniques more frequently associated with jazz or classical music in an effort to give rock music the same level of musical sophistication and critical respect (.....) Music critics, who often labeled the concepts as "pretentious" and the sounds as "pompous" and "overblown," tended to be hostile toward the genre or to completely ignore it.

Progressive rock saw a high level of popularity throughout the 1970s, especially in the middle of the decade. Bands such as Jethro Tull, The Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, Yes, King Crimson, Genesis, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer (ELP) were the genre's most influential groups and were among the most popular acts of the era....(read more at Wikipedia)

Links to Peel
The adjective "progressive" was used to describe popular music genres long before the advent of progressive rock. Peel, who had been listening to music and buying records since the early 1950s, was no doubt familiar with its usage to describe various kinds of post-World War Two jazz. The popular bandleader Stan Kenton even labelled his music "progressive jazz", but, as with the response to prog rock in the 1970s, critics accused his band of pretentiousness and bombast. Peel's preference was for more traditional forms of jazz.

By the time Peel returned to Britain from America in 1967, London music papers such as Melody Maker were writing about "progressive pop", by which they meant the music of the Beatles and their contemporaries, such as the Beach Boys, Yardbirds, Who and Byrds, all of whom were seeking to make original and inventive music within a pop framework. It was also used to describe the new generation of record producers, such as Denny Cordell at Deram Records, and to records by groups such as the Mamas and Papas and The Association, which in later years were described as "baroque pop", "sunshine pop" and "folk-rock".

Peel played some of these records on Radio London and on his early BBC shows, but the most successful new style of the late 1960s was a loud, sometimes improvised music played by groups such as Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience and West Coast groups such as the Doors and Jefferson Airplane. Peel featured this music heavily on his programmes and gradually, following the example of American magazines such as Rolling Stone, it became known as "rock" - "underground rock", "heavy rock" and, finally "progressive rock". It was no longer played by "groups", but by "bands". Many well-known prog bands such as The Nice, King Crimson and Jethro Tull did sessions for Top Gear.

Peel was happy to go along with this, until around 1970, when he began to express misgivings, feeling that some progressive rock bands (he singled out Ten Years After and Deep Purple) were not "progressive" in the true sense of the word but tending increasingly to be all show and no substance. He was profoundly unimpressed by Emerson, Lake & Palmer, calling their début London concert "a complete waste of time, talent and electricity"

tbc

Sessions

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Other Shows Played
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 * DD Month YYYY: Song (single/album) Label