THE MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF KING ARTHUR AND THE KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE

Thanks to the bankruptcy-inducing King Arthur On Ice performance which was held to promote it, this album's become a bit of a lightning rod, with people either despising it as an example of the worst sort of vacuous, pretentious faux-artistic pomposity associated with prog rock, and others revering it as example of prog's soaring ambitions.

In fact, I consider it neither, and to be honest if it didn't have Rick Wakeman's name and a deeply misconceived concert surrounding it, it would be regarded as what it is: a well-executed but not absolutely essential example of mid-1970s prog. Whilst it has grown on me over the years, it's certainly the case that on initial listenings it risks coming across as rather generic keyboard noodling set against rather generic orchestral pomp without much meat to either.

There's a bit in the King Arthur stage show where ice skaters taking on the role of Lancelot and the Black Knight do a bit of duelling. They look extremely, extremely serious doing it, despite the fact that it looks extremely silly, partially because you can't actually do a decent fight scene like that on ice so they don't really bother and just fall back on doing generic ice skating moves and occasionally tap their swords together in that "We're deliberately hitting each other's swords and very obviously aren't actually trying to hit each other way" that's indicative of really bad fight choreography - all this whilst dressed as Monty Python and the Holy Grail extras with horribly unconvincing "horses" incorporated into their costume.

That one visual, for me, sums up what stopped the album from clicking immediately with me. You have all the ingredients to produce something amazingly cheesy, if the artists responsible just loosened up a bit and embraced the ridiculousness of it all and trim back the more po-faced bits; alternately, you have all the ingredients needed to make something deep and artistically meaningful, if you just toned down or took out some of the goofier ideas. But as it is, Rick tries to go broad, embracing both the cheesy (there's a goddamn ragtime section smack in the middle of Merlin the Magician) and the more seriously dramatic (that same ragtime section is followed by a more serious, sweeping build to the conclusion... and then there's more ragtime).

Still, I've warmed to it over time: perhaps its biggest problem was that it came out in 1975, at a point in time when prog fans had heard much of this sort of thing already. It certainly seems like a continuation of the approach of Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, but doesn't seem to take its ideas all that much further. Indeed, there's a funk-influenced section in Guinevere which feels like a callback to some of the groovier moments of Six Wives, suggesting that Rick was settling into a bit of a creative rut. Though I've come around to the album and think it's very solid, it shows a lack of progress which might explain why Rick's solo career got a bit bogged down a few years later, even if it still had some gems like this to offer.