Author: fgt

Welcome to The Classic Rock Quiz, a new weekly quiz that will split families down the middle and set friend against friend.

20 questions, covering everyone from Van Halen to Pink Floyd and many more besides.

All questions are multiple choice PLUS you win the chance to be humiliated and insulted at the end, depending on your score.

Share your scores with your friends and come back next week for more. Good luck!

Tom Poak has written for the Hull Daily Mail, Esquire, The Big Issue, Total Guitar, Classic Rock, Metal Hammer and more. In a writing career that has spanned decades, he has interviewed Brian May, Brian Cant, and cadged a light off Brian Molko. He has stood on a glacier with Thunder, in a forest by a fjord with Ozzy and Slash, and on the roof of the Houses of Parliament with Thin Lizzy’s Scott Gorham (until some nice men with guns came and told them to get down). He has drank with Shane MacGowan, mortally offended Lightning Seed Ian Broudie and been asked if he was homeless by Echo & The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch.

Oasis had enjoyed a monumental 12 months as winter turned to spring in 1995 but the Britpop titans weren’t done yet. Far from it. This was a band whose songwriter and chief Noel Gallagher was in the midst of a generational purple patch, knocking out classic anthems left, right and centre and things were about to get supernova for the boys from Burnage.

Their era-defining debut Definitely Maybe had only been released a matter of months before but they were already pushing on. The orchestral-tinged euphoria of Whatever, released as a standalone single in December 1994, had demonstrated that and next came the song that put them at the top of the UK single charts for the first time. Released 30 years ago next month, Some Might Say marked the beginning of a period where Oasis turned from thrilling rock’n’roll band into cultural phenomenon, the first cut from their world-conquering second album (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?.

Noel has never been shy about his influences, or the fact that he would happily “repurpose” songs he loved in his own work. The Beatles, Bowie and Pink Floyd were obvious touchstones in Oasis songs but the inspiration behind Some Might Say is one of Noel’s more curious lifts, taking its cue from a song by long-forgotten US rockers Grant Lee Buffalo.

“They were an American indie band who had this tune called Fuzzy,” Noel explained in an interview to mark …Morning Glory’s 25^th anniversary a few years ago. “You can see it’s a big influence on Some Might Say. I’ll obsess about a song for years and I’ll rip it off 12 times and get 12 different tunes out of it.”

“Everything I do is a nod to something or other,” he continued. “I’m not a genius, I’m a fan of music. Paul McCartney is a genius and Morrissey and Bob Dylan. I’m not, I’m just fans of theirs. I’ve got a good knack of putting shit together but I’m not a snob about where it comes from – I’ll tell you. Nothing is original, there’s only 12 notes anyway.”

The similarities are clear as soon as Fuzzy begins, not so much in anything about the songs themselves – one is a delicate acoustic number and the other is a chugging rocker but both are rooted in a swinging, bluesy riff.

Some Might Say, as Noel explained to Fran Healy in an interview for the Travis frontman’s radio show a few years ago, was written almost a year its release. “When I wrote it, I was living opposite a studio in Chiswick called Eden Studios,” he recalled. “Across the road, they had a house where if you were working at Eden Studios, you could rent one of the rooms. But I wasn’t working there and for some reason I was living there, on the top floor, above Mike Oldfield’s ex-wife, not that that has anything to do with anything. I wrote it over a couple of days in the top flat. I’d just moved to London and was sampling the nightlife of London and I remember coming home at all hours of the morning and writing, which is why the lyrics are quite nonsensical… dogs itching in the kitchen and all that, I was quite hammered when I wrote it. Everybody would read different things into the lyrics and I’d just agree with all of them, going, ‘Yeah, that’s what it is!’.”

Returning from a bout of touring a few months later, Noel was determined to get a demo on tape, not a regular occurrence at the time, he said. “I was so excited about it I wanted to do a demo. At that point, I wasn’t big on doing demos. It was the only demo I did for Morning Glory.”

He contacted Owen Morris, the producer who had rescued Definitely Maybe when sessions weren’t going to plan and who was away working with The Verve on what would become their second record A Northern Soul. “He said, ‘I’m in Wales with The Verve but I think they’re having the weekend off, so why don’t you come down for the weekend?’,” Noel remembered. “I jumped on the train and went to Loco Studios and the demo is actually recorded with all of The Verve’s equipment, it’s me playing the drums and the bass and all that but it’s Nick McCabe’s rig and Simon Jones’ bass.”

It proved to be a journey worth taking – on the way back Noel’s train broke down in the Severn Tunnel and whilst sitting there, he wrote the classic Oasis B-side Acquiesce. “It turned out to be one of the best weekends ever,” he beamed.

The band recorded a new take of Some Might Say for the single release but Noel says he prefers the demo version. “It was a tiny bit slower and a bit more 70s,” he explained. “The way we did it with Oasis was a bit more Britpop. The demo was a bit dirtier and sleazier. The demo was slow and a bit more boozy.”

Released in April 1995, Some Might Say went to Number One and also marked the end of Oasis Mk 1 – original drummer Tony McCarroll plays on the track but by the time it was top of the charts, he had been replaced by Alan White behind the kit.

“It’s a funny song in the Oasis catalogue cos we gave up playing it pretty quickly because Liam struggled with it,” Noel reflected. “It’s probably my favourite Oasis song, I think the chorus is brilliant. I’ve always got fond memories of it.”

Liam seems to have overcome any troubles in that department though – the song was a regular fixture in his solo setlists between 2018 and 2022, hopefully meaning Some Might Say will feature in setlists when the Oasis reunion shows roll round this summer. If not, we’ll always have this rendition from their iconic Knebworth shows to fall back on…

Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleagues Ted Kessler and Chris Catchpole. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he’s interviewed some of the world’s biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more. Radiohead was only for eight minutes but he still counts it.

Whatever Ian Anderson is sprinkling on his porridge is working. Curious Ruminant is the third Jethro Tull album since he resurrected the name for 2022’s The Zealot Gene. Calling that album and its follow-up, 2023’s RökFlöte, a late-career hot streak seems a little unbecoming for a someone as donnish as Anderson, but it suggested there was a renewed vigour or underlying urgency to the 70-something frontman. Or maybe both.

That vigour is evident on the latest release, another great album from a band in the autumn of their career. Its two predecessors presented a relatively tough version of Tull, with some prominent guitar lending them a modern edge. But Curious Ruminant heads off down a different path.

The guitars are still here, courtesy of new member Jack Clark, who dances around Anderson’s vibrant, vivid flute playing on Puppet And The Puppet Master and adds both colour and two impressive solos to the vivid title track.

But elsewhere, greater space is afforded to the accordion, provided by keyboard player/multi-instrumentalist John O’Hara. He weaves in and out of The Tipu House and the Macbeth-referencing Dunsinane Hill, and lends a Celtic air to Savannah Of Paddington Green, the latter finding Anderson addressing urban growth, climate change and the passage of human time. It lends Curious Ruminant the same rustic feel as Songs From The Wood or Heavy Horses – not a spiritual successor, but certainly cut from the same woad-dyed tunic.

Of course, any Tull album is a benevolent dictatorship with Anderson as President For Life, and it’s his voice, flute and words that define the band. What the former lacks in the acrobatic theatricality of old, his words make up for in vividness.

Disappointingly, the abum title isn’t a sly synonym for ‘Nosy Cow’ – the ruminations of the title are more meditative. Over Jerusalem is a prime example: a twisting drone’s eye view of the ancient city that expresses both love for the region and sadness at its current situation.

The sole disappointment here is penultimate track Drink From The Same Well. At 16 minutes, it’s the longest Tull song since the mid-70s; but there are few twists, turns or surprises to justify its running time. Anderson conceived it years ago as a collaboration with Indian bamboo flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia, and it still bears the whiff of new age meditation retreats.

Thankfully it’s followed by Interim Sleep, a genuinely moving spoken-word piece that finds the singer considering the possibility of existence and reunion after a bereavement. Autobiographical? He says not, but it reaffirms that sense of urgency that surrounds both the man and his band.

Curious Ruminant is on sale now via InsideOut.

Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.

In 2019 Prog readers were invited to list their favourite Genesis songs. It was our biggest-ever poll at the time, with tens of thousands of people having their say. Here’s the resulting top 10.

10. Dance On A Volcano

From A Trick Of The Tail, 1976

Proving that the band could survive and thrive without the recently-departed Peter Gabriel, Dance On A Volcano was born out a jam between Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford and Phil Collins at the outset of the writing sessions for the album, while Steve Hackett was still busy finishing his solo record, Voyage Of The Acolyte. “It set us off in a really good direction,” says Banks.

9. Ripples…

From A Trick Of The Tail, 1976

As Phil Collins steps up to the mic as lead singer for the first time, the music begins to evolve to suit the new four-piece format. The composition also seemed to successfully straddle Genesis’ past and future approaches to songwriting.

8. In The Cage

From The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, 1974

In The Cage captures the mounting panic of the album’s protagonist, Rael, trapped in a prison formed of stalactites and stalagmites. Underpinned by the heartbeat of Banks’ pulsing keyboards, the musical intensity builds alongside Rael’s growing claustrophobia. It’s tempting to read In The Cage as Gabriel longing for the creative freedom he would eventually embrace as a solo artist.

7. Watcher Of The Skies

From Foxtrot, 1972

Banks’ swirling Mellotron providing the entrance music for Gabriel, daubed in make-up with bat wings on his head to portray the Watcher, an alien visitor looking over planet Earth devoid of the now-extinct human race. Rutherford and Collins’ syncopated, staccato rhythm section provides the punchiest counterpoint to Banks’ lines.

6. Dancing With The Moonlit Knight

From Selling England By The Pound, 1973

The beginning is positively pastoral, with Gabriel’s plaintive voice over Banks’ classical piano, before Rutherford’s 12-string picks up the melody. Collins’ drumming is nimble and propulsive, particularly in the expansive instrumental passages where he sets a galloping pace – inspired by listening to Mahavishnu Orchestra.

5. Carpet Crawlers

From The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, 1974

On a frenetic album about consumerism and masturbation, you need your moments of contrast to count. This is the band’s most moving, emotive ballad, based on the lush atmospherics of Banks’ rippling keyboards yet sparing in its arrangement, allowing the song and its almost whispered chorus to shine.

4. The Musical Box

From Nursery Cryme, 1971

From the opening passages led by 12-string guitar and flute, the song features Hackett’s rousing electric guitar work and a spirited organ solo from Banks in the galloping mid-section. The old man mask Gabriel wore onstage only added to the track’s madcap drama when Genesis played it live.

3. The Cinema Show

From Selling England By The Pound, 1973

One of the rare upbeat songs from the Gabriel era, it eschewes their usual minor key melancholy for a cheerier vibe. The Cinema Show begins with Gabriel reaching up into his falsetto range to sing about Romeo and Juliet getting ready for their date at the movies.

2. Firth Of Fifth

From Selling England By The Pound, 1973

When Banks’ classically-influenced tinkling begins, you’re drawn in to the subsequent perversely complex time signatures, shifting tempos, and melancholy duelling between Gabriel’s flute and Hackett’s reiteration of the same pattern on guitars, which sound more like violins. For Hackett too, this is a career high – it’s usually one of the crowning glories of his live set to this day.

1. Supper’s Ready

From Foxtrot, 1972

Chris Roberts has written about music, films, and art for innumerable outlets. His new book The Velvet Underground is out April 4. He has also published books on Lou Reed, Elton John, the Gothic arts, Talk Talk, Kate Moss, Scarlett Johansson, Abba, Tom Jones and others. Among his interviewees over the years have been David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, Bryan Ferry, Al Green, Tom Waits & Lou Reed. Born in North Wales, he lives in London.

Peter Sinfield, whose dream was to make an artistic contribution that would “enlighten, provoke or stir,” was the lyrical mastermind behind some of King Crimson’s best-loved works. The poet had a significant influence on the world of progressive music, applying his skills to Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Roxy Music and PFM before branching out into the world of pop. Although he had retired due to ill health, his death on November 2024, at the age of 80, came as a shock to those who knew him.

What image comes into your mind when you think about King Crimson? Chances are it’ll be the screaming face gazing out from the cover of the group’s 1969 debut album. That it’s there at all comes down to Peter Sinfield, who, when the group were casting about for cover ideas, said he knew someone who might be able to do something.

“I used to hang around with all these painters and artists from Chelsea Art School,” Sinfield told me in one of the many long telephone calls we exchanged as I was writing the band’s biography. “I’d known Barry Godber for a couple of years; he’d been to a few rehearsals and spent a bit of time with us.I told him to see what he could come up with. I probably said that the one thing the cover had to do was stand out in record shops.”

Godber managed to achieve that and more. When printed on the LP’s gatefold sleeve, his inspired work channelled the raw paranoia and Cold War dread of the times; and in doing so, stuck a doom-laden chord in the consciousness of the public. As a result, Sinfield – who had also come up with the band’s name, and was at that point the group’s roadie, live sound engineer, light show operator and lyricist – became the group’s de facto art director.

“Peter had a lovely saying he referred to throughout his life,” recalls Stephanie Ruben, who was his girlfriend in 1969, married him a few years later and, despite their eventual divorce, remained a lifelong friend who saw him on the day he passed away. “He’d say, ‘There are kings and makers of kings. And I’m a maker of kings.’ That’s actually a lovely place to be. He didn’t mind not being a face, not being upfront but more in the background.”

He used to self-deprecatingly describe himself as Crimson’s pet hippie, by which he meant someone who was profoundly more connected to the esoteric milieu of London’s underground scene – certainly more so than West Country lads,Michael Giles, Robert Fripp, Greg Lake and Ian McDonald, the latter only just a year out of buying himself out of the army.

Sinfield had a nose for what was hip and knew lots of groovy people at groovy parties. Evidence can be glimpsed in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in Ken Russell’s 1965 BBC documentary movie The Debussy Film, where Sinfield dances to pop music while Claude Debussy (played by Oliver Reed) searches among the revellers for his muse.

At that point, Sinfield fancied himself as a bit of a singer-songwriter. Admiring Donovan’s Catch The Wind, which was riding high in the singles chart, he thought: how hard can it be? Where Donovan would catch the wind, Sinfield figured he would talk to the wind instead. Recognising his guitar playing was a bit iffy and his singing wasn’t great, he agreed with McDonald when they met in 1968 that Peter should concentrate on writing the words and leave writing the tunes to him.

In an early press interview, Sinfield admitted to being something of a hustler. Perhaps it was meant tongue-in-cheek, but there was some element of truth in it. When King Crimson imploded at the end of 1969 and, he lost his natural writing partner McDonald, Sinfield decided to throw in his lot with Fripp, and went from riding in the back of the van with the roadies to co-ownership of the group. To many fans, the Fripp and Sinfield partnership felt like some progressive rock equivalent of Lennon and McCartney; and while it undoubtedly produced some remarkable material, it was in essence a collaboration born out of necessity.

By 1970 and the recording of King Crimson’s Lizard, Fripp noted Sinfield’s increasing hostility toward him. For his part, Sinfield thought Fripp wasn’t taking his work seriously enough. Stephanie Ruben says Sinfield would sometimes work through the night on a particular lyric, only for Fripp to give the words a perfunctory examination. After the recording of 1971’s Islands, Fripp telephoned Sinfield to say it was over.

“I don’t think Peter ever got over being fired from King Crimson,” says Jakko Jakszyk, who cites Sinfield as responsible for launching him on a trajectory that would see him join the band in 2014. “I think Robert was increasingly uncomfortable with some of the lyrical material and he was uncomfortable with Pete’s attempts to influence or direct the music. But after Crimson, Peter went on to bigger, more financially successful things. He may not have gone there had he not been fired.”

One such opportunity came when he was asked to produce Roxy Music’s 1972 self-titled debut. Some in the group would later express their dissatisfaction at his work – but whatever it might have lacked in the way of audio finesse, Sinfield intuitively zeroed in on capturing Roxy’s raw, experimental edge. This aspect would be lost as their career took off. Sinfield would often say his proudest achievement with Roxy Music was their single Virginia Plain, frequently claiming the credit for spotting its hit single potential.

Urged to do so by Greg Lake, whose ELP-owned Manticore label also bankrolled the venture, in 1973 he began recording a solo album, Still. While bands might come and go, the fact that he was still Peter Sinfield seemed to have been one of the subtexts of the project. Released in May of that year, there was definitely a part of him wanting to prove that the ineffable qualities people admired about King Crimson didn’t just reside with Robert Fripp.

Boasting guest appearances from Crimson alumni including Boz Burrell, Ian Wallace, John Wetton, Robin Miller, Keith Tippett, Lake and Mel Collins (the record’s musical director), Still is consistently underrated. Underpinned by pastoral, heartfelt high points such as The Song Of The Sea Goat, Under The Sky, his account of life in Crimson via Envelopes Of Yesterday and Greg Lake’s anthemic vocal on the title track, the album took a lot out of him.

“Working on Still was probably the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life,” he once said. “I can’t stress how difficult recording the album was. And although there was some joy in it, overwhelmingly everything was hard work. There comes a point where you think, ‘Thank God that’s finished!’ Afterwards, it wasn’t too hard to step away from being the solo artist.”

He could be dangerously capricious. Still’s original cover was salmon pink. One day, he gleefully told this writer that he decided that he’d like it to be blue. That impulsive decision required the withdrawal of the pink edition and the issuing of another version, just as expensively embossed as the first. He would later lament the fact that Still didn’t sell enough to recoup the cost.

While his production work with Manticore continued with Italians PFM and singer-songwriter Keith Christmas, his time became increasingly occupied with ELP. The early Crimson connection with Lake paid off handsomely in the huge solo hit I Believe In Father Christmas, which he co-wrote. It reached No.2 in the UK charts at Christmas 1975 and has become a staple of every seasonal radio playlist ever since.

Sinfield fully embraced the possibilities of writing for a broader audience when he partnered with Andy Hill in the 1980s. With artists such as Cher, Céline Dion, Bucks Fizz, Cliff Richard and other mainstream acts covering their material, Sinfield’s words – once derided as pretentious by his critics in the rock press of the 1970s – had entered the mass market.

In 1993, his solo album was reissued as Stillusion, in a different running order and featuring two tracks from an abandoned 70s follow-up album. (For many years, when asked what he was up to, he’d say he was working on another solo release with help from Family’s Poli Palmer, although it never materialised.)

Recalling Sinfield’s role as a kingmaker, Jakszyk says: “It was Peter’s idea to put together a band of ex-Crimson members. Talking to Mike Giles and Ian McDonald, he suggested me as someone who could play the guitar parts. I remember the first rehearsal was meant to be with John Wetton, but he didn’t make it and Peter Giles turned up instead. So that became The 21st Century Schizoid Band. It was all at Pete Sinfield’s inception. That’s how I got involved in the whole thing – and ultimately from there into King Crimson.”

When Crimson did reconfigure in 2014, Fripp asked Sinfield to update the lyrics for 21st Century Schizoid Man. “We laughed,” Ruben recalls, “saying, ‘What a cheek!’ You know, like asking Beethoven to change part of a symphony. But, of course, he did it happily. He wouldn’t have done that for anybody else, not Céline or Cher or anybody. But he did it for Robert.”

Crimson revisiting some of the pieces that Sinfield co-wrote gave him an enormous boost. “They played and sang his songs and that was like a gift,” says Ruben. “They could spit and crack out those words out of their mouths and they did it gloriously. That’s all he ever wanted.”

Sinfield could be confrontational and a contrarian, says Ruben, but it was his way of keeping others at bay. “Peter didn’t always make it easy for people. A wordsmith can be quite spiky. There’s always a part of the artist who doesn’t believe in their work. Peter didn’t really understand how loved his work had become over the years.

“He would have been utterly moved by all this outpouring of love and respect for it after he died. He might have hoped for it, but he never expected that so many took his work to heart; that these people heard something, learned something or just liked something of his.”

Dogged by various serious medical conditions in his later years, he tried to avoid being defined by them. “He was so brave. good-humoured and sharp-witted throughout the last 10 years of the most appalling illnesses,” Ruben says. “He always used to say that one should leave something behind – not necessarily with your name on it, but a contribution to the planet, however tiny that might be. A contribution that might enlighten, provoke or stir.”

Sid’s feature articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including Prog, Classic Rock, Record Collector, Q, Mojo and Uncut. A full-time freelance writer with hundreds of sleevenotes and essays for both indie and major record labels to his credit, his book, In The Court Of King Crimson, an acclaimed biography of King Crimson, was substantially revised and expanded in 2019 to coincide with the band’s 50th Anniversary. Alongside appearances on radio and TV, he has lectured on jazz and progressive music in the UK and Europe.  

A resident of Whitley Bay in north-east England, he spends far too much time posting photographs of LPs he’s listening to on Twitter and Facebook.