GOING OFF ON TWO

Almost all of us in Britain who grew up with Progressive Rock music have a boring tale to tell the rest of the world about our parents and a television programme called The Old Grey Whistle Test. This programme was treated by most people's parents as some type of horror akin to A Clockwork Orange or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and getting our parents to agree to let us watch this was either just a little harder or just a little easier (but not much) than getting them to agree that we could watch Monty Python's Flying Circus, depending on the parents of course. From all the fuss that we had to go through to watch this programme which was introduced, not by one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but rather by a genial bearded and softly spoken all round Nice Guy who actually put some prog bands on the telly. The programme was made in a dreary unadorned TV studio somewhere in Manchester and had no set, no really good lighting, not much space and not that many cameras. Yet they managed to get The Who, David Bowie and loads of other big stars in there to give terrific close up performances which have over the years become classics, far more immediate and in yer face than the modern DVD 30th anniversary galas of the bands who once gave their best performances here. There's not been much that really says the same thing for 30 years.

Until Now. This new DVD by The Tangent is not only brilliant musically (and it certainly is, more later) but the whole way in which it has been filmed and presented is magnificent, enjoyable to watch and a vastly refreshing blast of fresh air that clears the pretentiousness away with the efficacity of the top of the range Dyson Vacuum Cleaners. I have a Dave Gilmour video filmed in Poland here (very good mind you) that just pales into insignificance alongside this remarkable piece of work where director Paul Brow (never heard of this man and he seems to mainly do aerial stuff from the rudimentary research I've done) has revisited the whole "Whistle Test" /"The White Room" format, improved on it, brought it up to date and blown Gilmour into a cocked hat with I assume a budget that wouldn't have paid for the soundboard hire in Poland. I mean the great Dave no harm here, I'm a lifelong fan. We're just talking about something that is so head and shoulders above anything else I've seen from this genre in decades that it's hard to equal.

So don't expect lights. Don't expect a roaring crowd, lasers or, well, actually don't expect anything. About the most interesting visual prop stimulus on this DVD is a brown unvarnished door with a fire exit sign on it behind the drummer, on which someone has pinned a couple of Tangent posters. I find myself wondering where that door goes to from time to time, and presume that it must be the fire escape on which the band are photographed in the galleries that come as extras with the DVD. In front of the door, for one and a half hours, five men of varying ages and a lot of wires deliver a blistering set of symphonic, attacking, hard hitting lyrical progressive rock of the highest order. They do it with an energy rarely seen these days and with a conviction that is hard to find anywhere in the world of Rock Music in general, never mind Prog.

The musicianship is excellent. That's not important. The sound quality is superb, that's not important. The video quality is first rate. Not important. What makes this important is the utter and complete belief in progressive music that is manifested here, and every trapping of the music press' favourite "pretentious" label used so often to damn the genre is wiped clean off the slate. This makes the ongoing BBC belief that Punk Rock was the "real rock" into a joke. These guys play with joy, energy, experience, humour, and one of them is apparently under 25 years old and is having it all the first time around, you can tell.

The star of this DVD is a catalogue of some of the best and most relevant songs that have been written in this genre since the days of the 70s. Despite the Tangent's slide from the limelight since the VDGG and Flower Kings connections have come and gone, the quality has not dropped, nay, the band have got better and better. This I find worrying in that it suggests that fans of Musician X naturally assume that now he's no longer there everything will be irrelevant. Not so. I'd argue that Musician Z (Andy Tillison) is currently so outclassing Musicians W X & Y or whatever those letters translate to in Swedish, that a great deal of the prog fans of the past 10 years are firmly settled on the wrong train heading in the wrong direction. Make no mistake about this. The Tangent are vastly superior now to when they had the Flower Kings as conspirators, and have indeed eclipsed all recent work by that band's current spinoffs, and they leave Transatlantic floundering somewhere near the Azores. Morse may have the voice, but Tillison has the songs, the lyrics, imagination by the truckload and he now has a band who can prove it. Before I offend everyone in the known world, I need to state that the aforementioned artists are brilliant themselves and these comparisons are not made to diss these artists, rather to stress the urgency with which you need to check this DVD out.

Instead of Roine Stolt, Tillison now presents us with Luke Machin, a guitarist of considerable promise. This country boy can play the guitar just like a ringin' a bell. He's about 25 by the looks of him if not younger, yet plays as if he's on a 30th anniversary tour. Not afraid of the odd facial expression, (think Latimer!) he breathes life and enthusiasm into the band and within the first two songs has managed to do about 400 different styles from subtle Hackett-like injections, Knopfler melody rich lines, Howe complexity, to out and out shredding. The long guitar led passage in "Perdu Dans Paris" is a wonderful feast of talent in which even Tillison's keyboarding is eclipsed - although from the latter's smile he seems entirely happy to be so eclipsed.

Jonathan Barratt's liquid fretless bass (throughout - no standard bass at all!) is masterful, different, subtle and inevitably reminds one of, (insert name of famous fretless player here.) He's a worthy adversary for any of them. So if your bag is Pastorius, Jones. Karn or even Reingold, you should be making more room in the bag now. The man has the visual air of a businessman about him. A businessman who has a penchant for suddenly digging into a fretless bass with the look of an angry punk rocker. Along with the blistering perfomance from the Man Mountain that is drummer Tony Latham, this rhythm section scores very highly and for once, yes for once, they are not overlooked by singer and guitarist hungry cameras.

The video is seemingly intent on bringing us the music. The camerawork is fast yet steady, catching everything from spectacular guitar pull offs through patch changes on the keyboards, drummer changing sticks, feet on pedals with frequent creative use of split screen to make sure nothing is missed. Distractions are kept to a minimum, occasional scene setting footage comes in and out but usually without detracting from the performance in any way. These scene setters are usually in atmospheric sections like Tillison's wonderful T-Dream homage "After Phaedra" , where an unusually static keyboards player deftly adjusts a contol panel on his synths while psychedelic patterns curl away on another part of the screen. Take your pick. If you want more, well take a look at the very useful idea, the subtitles tracks which give you the choice of either having the lyrics for the songs on the screen, or some technical information about what the band are doing. I think we'll be seeing more of this when other bands get a whiff. Strangely for this all round perfect product, these subtitles just disappear towards the end of the very last song as though someone ran out of time.

Theo Travis is excellent throughout of course, and special note must be made of his fantastic flute playing on the acoustic duet he plays with Tillison "A Sale Of Two Souls" a surprising inclusion from the "Not as Good As The Book" album which both musicians deliver with real maturity and grace. Although not one of the rabble rousers of this set, it's a little jewel that can't help but hark one back to some of Peter Hammill's very best solo material from the "In Camera" era.

It only remains then to speak of the only member left on the stage from the first lineup of the band, Tillison himself. From behind a mass of unbelievably unkempt shockingly dyed red hair he manages to totally confound those who say he can't sing, deliver lyrics with real conviction and make his relatively small keyboards rig do things that Rick Wakeman would probably be amazed at. From shrieking synthesiser and Hammond lines through to glorious ensembles of Cor Anglais, strings and even emulations of acoustic guitars (on the duet mentioned above) this has to be among the performances of the year. That's before we even consider that he does all this wizardry (and for once this word is warranted) while delivering an amazingly dynamic vocal part and jumping around behind the keyboards with an energy that even the young Machin finds it hard to match, and for the first 20 minutes he does in in a full sheepskin coat. This man is, I'd guess, about my own age, i.e No Spring Chicken. If I'd performed like this (if I performed at all) I'd have been in bed with whiplash for a fortnight. The man has, according to interviews, been making prog rock since the late 70s. It seems we have given the roses to others on his journey and it's sad that our own real British Prog Hero has been eschewed so often in favour of others, something I find very hard to understand but not at all surprising.

The DVD has a variety of extras including some photo galleries of the sessions with some nice relaxation shots, posed pictures and photos of the crew. There are some useful and interesting interviews which are often amusing, particulaly Jonathan Barratt's which is pretty hilarious. The "End Credits" music is a hoot, a John Williams pastiche with all the Tangent songs and themes whirled together into a bombastic orchestral melée which suddenly metamorphoses into a 1970s TV theme tune over which the band evidently decide it's time to show off their dancing skills. This is a great DVD. One to watch more than once. I recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone. I sincerely hope we also see more from director Brow who seems to know what it is that is required in a music video and whose style is eminently suited to progressive rock music. While the world waits for the next Transatlantic album, or laments the lack of a Flower Kings release in 5 years or so, while forums debate whether Yes will ever make anything good again, whether Genesis will reform or whether Roger and Dave will ever work together again, ah, they just did! , the Tangent are releasing and making some of the finest Prog Rock that was ever made without ever sounding like any one of those aforementioned artists. And "We" (although I really want to say "YOU") are not listening. We can surely change this?