Emerson, Lake & Palmer

Whilst participating in a debate on science and mysticism at the Glastonbury festival a few years ago, as part of the Radio 4 show The Infinite Monkey Cage, Blur guitarist Graham Coxon claimed that “I’d like to put faith in dark matter, but without the danger of becoming a progressive rocker.” We’ll assume he was joking, of course, but you have to wonder quite what the issue would be with becoming a progressive rocker; after all, if you take a band like Emerson, Lake and Palmer as your touchpoint, you’d realise that there’s certainly always been a wide audience for that style of music. The group enjoyed huge success during the seventies, bringing the influence of both classical music and jazz fusion into their sound in equal measure for a unique approach that saw releases like Tarkus, Trilogy and the brilliantly-titled Brain Salad Surgery meet with a fine commercial response in that decade, with gold certifications across the board for the band’s seventies output. After initially splitting in 1979, Emerson, Lake and Palmer reformed in the nineties to tour extensively - with extended, career-spanning shows meeting with superb reviews - but eventually would split again over concerns about a future direction of new material; since then, they’ve played just the one date, in London in 2010.