Progressive Rock

Jean-Michel Jarre

Twenty-five times in his whole life

His father was Maurice Jarre, three Oscars for "Lawrence of Arabia", "Doctor Zhivago" and "A Passage to India", and he left home when the son was 5: "we saw each other twenty or twenty-five times in our whole lives". *Oxygène* came out in December 1976, recorded in the former kitchen of his flat with a broken Mellotron, and sold some 18 million. Of his father's inheritance he received nothing: the European Court of Human Rights dismissed the case on 15 February 2024.

Roger Hodgson

The two wrists and the broken pact

"Dreamer" and "Breakfast in America" are his, written at nineteen, even though they are attributed to Rick Davies. In 1983 he left Supertramp with a verbal pact that Davies broke five years later, and in 1987 he fell from a loft and broke both wrists: he was told he would never play again. Davies died on 6 September 2025, at the age of 81.

Yes

The cathedrals and the borrowed name

The only American number one credited to Yes, "Owner of a Lonely Heart", was strictly speaking recorded by a different band: Chris Squire, Alan White, Tony Kaye and guitarist Trevor Rabin had put together a group called Cinema, and in June 1983 Atlantic executives suggested they call it Yes. Jon Anderson joined once the album was well under way.

Vangelis

The music everyone knows and nobody can name

Vangelis never learned to read or write music: he pretended to read and played from memory. He was afraid of flying, which is why he did not collect his Oscar for "Chariots of Fire" on 29 March 1982 and never became the keyboard player in Yes. The main theme went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 that May.

The Alan Parsons Project

Designed to have no star

Eric Woolfson wrote almost everything, sang the hits and ran the business. And he gave the band his partner's name, because it sounded like technical prestige and his own did not.

Rush

They never made themselves easy

Three Canadians who for forty years played exactly what they wanted, with no concessions to radio, and who in return got the fiercest loyalty in rock. At the centre, a drummer who was also a reader and a writer, and who survived the unsurvivable.

King Crimson

The experiment that never stopped

They invented progressive rock with a 1969 album and then spent fifty years refusing to repeat it. Robert Fripp dissolved and rebuilt the band every time it threatened to get comfortable, like someone running an experiment again from scratch.

Roger Waters

The man who divides, pleading for empathy

His father died at Anzio when he was five months old, and his grandfather in the First World War. Out of that absence came «The Wall», rock's finest metaphor for the walls we build. The man who wrote it ended up building a few of his own, and today he splits a room in two.

Peter Gabriel

He wore masks in order to look

In 1982 he arrived on stage inside a coffin carried by four pallbearers, and his old Genesis bandmates knew nothing about it. He was bankrupt from staging the first WOMAD. The story of the man who left a band at its peak to open Western ears to the world.

Electric Light Orchestra

The chosen disciple

When the surviving Beatles wanted to finish some Lennon recordings, they called Jeff Lynne. The boy who had built a whole band to get closer to them.

Supertramp

Two voices taking turns

Two opposite writers who almost never wrote together and credited everything jointly. Heaven and earth taking turns at the microphone, album after album.

Is This Progressive Rock?

Eight famous songs and bands that confuse everyone, settled one by one. "Stairway to Heaven" is not; Radiohead is, though it cost them to admit it; and so are Los Jaivas, however hard the genre's official map tries not to look south.

Los Jaivas: The Progressive Rock That Spoke to the Land

How a Chilean band took prog's ambition and fused it with the Andes, Neruda and the blood of their own children. "Alturas de Macchu Picchu" was made in exile, from a manor house outside Paris, unable to return to the land it was singing about.

The Closest Queen Ever Came to Progressive Rock

The story of "Innuendo", the most ambitious epilogue from a band that always flirted with grandeur. Six and a half minutes, metres in 3/4 and 5/4, and a guitarist from Yes reluctantly talked into improvising flamenco inside a Queen song.

What Progressive Rock Is (and Isn't)

The definitive guide to the most ambitious and most misunderstood genre in rock history. The seven markers that really define it, its forgotten subgenres —from Canterbury to zeuhl— and why calling punk "progressive" confuses a thing with what came to destroy it.

Progressive Rock: Ambition Without Limits

From King Crimson in 1969 to punk's hammer blow in 1976: prog believed a song could aspire to anything. Masterpieces and monuments to ego, often on the same record. A defence without nostalgia.