CARL PALMER'S PM: 1 PM

After ELP disbanded Carl Palmer was the first (ex) member to form a new band.I remember Carl being interviewed on BBC Radio One which also included a phone in at the time and he picked a few songs from bands he liked including Blondie and The Police as I recall.He indicated his liking for 'new wave' music.He also picked My Generation by The Who.Interestingly he was asked on the phone in who he admired in the jazz rock field and he admitted he has very little interest in that style of music even though he was aware that he could play it to a reasonable standard.

So with that in mind Palmer was never going to form another prog band.He wanted musicians who could both play,write songs and even provide vocal harmonies and went about acquiring such personell via audition tapes.As it happened the ones he liked the most came from America.PM was born and this (their only album) was the result.As Bob rightly points out this does have some obvious Cars influence.However its a bit extreme to call it ''punk'' as such.Much closer to the AOR style that his next band Asia adopted.In fact some of the songs here are a good match up for the songs on Side One of Asia.Where this fails to get off the ground though is the lack of any real development of an original sound.Whereas Asia did Wildest Dreams and Time And Time Again the nearest comparison on 1PM is Children of The Air Age.PM also had an immature mysogonistic approach to writing lyrics as evidenced on Do You Go All The Way (btw Carl defended the lyrics on this!).

So is it actually any good? Well the greatest crime you can commit in my book is being bland.This is not bland in any way.In fact the melodies are decent and the playing is good throughout.The production is sub standard and for that reason I have to knock a mark off otherwise I might have considered it a 3 star album.Its not that bad though and as a debut album showed potential.Unfortunately Palmer just didn't have enough faith in his pet project and when the call came from Steve Howe the rest as we know was history.