Listen to Mercury Rev

In one of his most memorable performances, the comedian Tony Hancock pleads the case of truth and justice in a courtroom. “What about Magna Carta?” he asks at one point. “Did she die in vain?” There have been times over the past few years when I’ve found myself wondering something very similar. Reasonably similar, anyway, although, admittedly, we have to lose the single most important document in the history of human rights and replace it with the first single by the Damned.

So, the question is: what about New Rose? Did she die in vain?

Tomorrow, Mercury Rev release their new album, which has apparently been named after two teenage girls’ ponies. Snowflake Midnight appears on the 10th anniversary of Deserter’s Songs, the album that made Mercury Rev famous — and the album that opened the door and allowed prog rock back in.

When New Rose signalled the beginning of the punk wars way back in 1976, it was pretty clear who the enemy was: a vicious axis of bloated rock dinosaurs, cheesy pop acts and absurdly pretentious prog rockers. The punks sent the prog rockers howling into oblivion, dragging their silly time signatures, exotic instrumentation, Phrygian scales, bass solos and irritating references to classical music behind them. But the price of good rockin’ is eternal vigilance, and we got lazy. We let the prog rockers sneak back in, and now they’re not only among the most successful bands around (Muse sold out the new Wembley Stadium), they’re among the coolest. MGMT were the must-see band at this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. They have secured support slots with Radiohead and Beck, have played Glastonbury twice and are very much a name to drop — and, though they like to refer to their music as “psychedelic”, it isn’t. It’s prog.

If the passage of time hadn’t turned the punk generation into Grumpy Old Men, the rise of prog certainly would have done. Where did it all go wrong?

The reason punks hated prog rock so much was simply that prog rock isn’t really rock at all. The original wave of progressive rock bands — Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull, Gentle Giant, the Moody Blues, ELP — claimed to be extending the frontiers of rock music, but what they actually did was rip out its heart. They took the blues out of rock. And that’s like taking the laughs out of a comedy, the conflict out of a drama, the paint out of a painting.

Much of the generation-defining power of rock’n’roll — if you’ll allow me to crudely stereotype two entire continents for a moment — derived from the fact that it pushed aside the entire European classical tradition and said, no, actually, music springs from Africa. The prog rockers tried to reverse that rejection, but they were swimming against strong cultural tides; when punk came along and reaffirmed the importance of energy, rhythm and simplicity (as well as flattening the third and seventh notes of the scale), prog was left looking ridiculous.

So, how did prog sneak back onto the agenda? Part of the explanation lies in the fact that, before it was wiped out in the punk wars, prog had cunningly placed a secret agent behind enemy lines. When I listed the first generation of prog bands, I left out King Crimson, because they, arguably the first prog band, are entirely atypical. First, because they actually lived up to the genre’s name, in that their sound did progress, constantly evolve and change; and second, because their leader, Robert Fripp, put the group on hiatus in 1974, then headed out to find out what this punk and new wave was all about. Fripp’s guitar is featured on two key new-wave albums, Blondie’s Parallel Lines and Fear of Music, by Talking Heads.

So, when Fripp reassembled King Crimson in the 1980s, the new version embraced new wave, proving that prog could coexist with simpler, less excessive rock styles. While King Crimson are an obvious influence on prog bands such as Tool and Porcupine Tree, Fripp’s greater influence may well have been in signalling that intellectual prog rock didn’t have to be the enemy of more emotional forms of music.

This lesson was clearly learnt by Mercury Rev, on Deserter’s Songs, and by Flaming Lips, whose The Soft Bulletin, released a year later, confirmed that a new style of unashamedly prog- influenced Americana was emerging, combining the ambitious open-endedness of prog with a listener-friendly understanding of conventional song structure and melodies. In Dallas, Secret Machines added a krautrock influence, proving that bands who loved prog could also love cool music. Now, with MGMT, the wheel has come full circle, and prog bands actually are cool. It’s a worrying thought for anyone who grew up with the punk ethos, but what’s even more worrying is that MGMT are fantastic. Prog has been rehabilitated and reinvented, and has come out sounding wonderful. The old musical certainties are dead.

Or are they? I’ve been playing Mercury Rev’s Snowflake Midnight for a while, and I can’t help thinking the balance has tipped too far in the prog direction this time. Any album that begins with the lines “Snowflake in a hot world / Don’t let them get to you” and ends with a track called A Squirrel and I (Holding on . . . and Then Letting Go) is bound to raise a few suspicions. Senses on Fire proves that the Rev can still engage with an earthy musical reality if they want, but such moments of visceral connection are few on an album that sounds as if it would have benefited from a decent helping of restraint and self-control.

Maybe it will grow on me, but for now I reckon creative freedom has strayed into self-indulgence. Wait a minute. . . What’s that thundering noise? Is that the punk cavalry coming over the hill again?

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