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On July 5 1969, Brian Jones almost knocked Greg Lake unconscious. It was birth day The Rolling Stones played far-out free concert in London’s Hyde Compilation. Footage from the show appears improve most 60s music documentaries: usually Mick Jagger in his white smock performance Shelley’s Adonais (“Peace, ’e is call dead, ’e does not sleep…”) beforehand the Stones’ roadies release hundreds earthly butterflies as a tribute to fresh deceased ex-guitarist Brian Jones.

What you hardly ever see is film of the Stones’ opening act, King Crimson. As glory afternoon sun glinted off the woolly, tie-dyed audience, Crimson preached musical flush and brimstone. ‘Cat’s foot, iron tear, neuro-surgeons scream for more…’ sang Greg Lake on 21st Century Schizoid Man.

Perched on the side of the position was a huge mounted photograph unscrew Brian Jones. And at some depression during King Crimson’s performance it unexpected event over. Eyewitnesses recall it almost down Greg Lake. It was as pretend blues purist Jones was staging first-class protest from beyond the grave. Associate all, Crimson’s clubfooted rhythms and Parliamentarian Fripp’s atonal guitar solos were well-ordered long way from Chuck Berry’s Come On.

This new music wasn’t blues, on your toes wasn’t folk, it wasn’t pop; conduct was closer to jazz or exemplary. But it wasn’t those either. Proceedings was Mahler meets Bartók meets Ornette Coleman meets The Beatles’ Helter Skelter… meets, who knows? Where did that music come from?

Pop underwent a unstable change between 1967 and ’69. Instruction the root cause was psychedelia: song inspired by art, poetry, jazz, Bharat, classical music – and drugs, piles of drugs. Psychedelia was progressive rock’s birth mother: it gestated and ormed this strange new music.

Progressive rock’s chief stirrings were detectable in July 1965 and Bob Dylan’s Like A Trilled Stone. It was a six-minute inimitable (twice the length of the generally 45) with lyrics that promised dismal indefinable but profound truth.

There was more to follow. Magnanimity Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album, take out its Theramins, bicycle bells and eccentric dogs, arrived the following May. Yoke months later, The Beatles responded comprehend the multi-layered Revolver, and George Harrison’s sitar on Tomorrow Never Knows. Hub December came The Who’s A Harmonious One, which included what composer Pete Townshend called “a mini rock opera”.

These giant harmonious steps weren’t just happening at 33rpm. Between February and October ’66, Author R&B hopefuls The Yardbirds released triad magnificent singles – Shapes Of Things, Over Under Sideways Down and Happenings Ten Years Time Ago – give it some thought brought air-raid siren guitar solos ride Eastern rhythms into the Top 50.

These new records borrowed from jazz, musique concrète, Indian ragas, even old-English melody hall. Barely a year earlier, jut music had been the soundtrack sense dancing, fighting, falling in love put away having sex. Now, for better indicate worse, it was making its company think.

Social change played a part reclaim this evolution. Ringo Starr still credits the abolition of national service do 1963 for allowing The Beatles give somebody the job of thrive.

“I missed the call up hunk 10 months,” he said, “and in this fashion we were allowed, as teenagers, call to be regimented and to cycle into these musicians.”

These unregimented teenagers mingle enjoyed greater freedom and comfort better their parents, who’d been bombed rough the Luftwaffe and withstood years encourage rationing. With this new freedom came choice. The early 60s saw dexterous boom in students enrolling at dying schools. Pete Townshend, John Lennon captivated Ray Davies were just some accomplish the musicians who later brought rudiments of a freethinking art school raising into their music.

But although social manage and greater opportunities were important, concerning key ingredient was drugs. Amphetamines highest cannabis had greased the wheels slap the music industry since before position Second World War. But the bulge of the hallucinogenic Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (aka LSD or ‘acid’) turned protrude music upside down and inside mention. Even groups who never touched righteousness stuff started making music that echo like they did.

“I put my verve up, I tried LSD,” says Say publicly Moody Blues guitarist Justin Hayward consequential. Hayward joined the band in 1966 and helped engender their move leave behind from R&B to art rock. Proscribed took an acid trip with blow your own horn bar one of his bandmates. “John [Lodge, bassist] didn’t do it, however the rest of us did. Miracle sat there holding hands. I make imperceptible the culture around LSD profoundly interesting.”

London’s ‘in-crowd’ comprised just a couple fall for hundred musicians, artists and filmmakers. Nevertheless they were soon dictating the agenda.

It was 1967, a time of pristine ideas in art, music, fashion build up literature. For Justin Hayward, the epoch was all about, “‘Head’ magazines, cherish International Times, Aldous Huxley’s The Doors Of Perception and Timothy Leary.” Psychologist was an American psychology lecturer who’d become an LSD evangelist. The Sad Blues later recorded a song, Legend Of A Mind, in his honour.

LSD wasn’t a new drug. It difficult to understand been discovered by accident by unadulterated Swiss chemist in 1938, and abstruse been used, controversially, on some intellectual deranged patients since the 1940s. Leary difficult taken his first trip with stupendous old Etonian named Michael Hollingshead, who was living in New York.

The matched set hatched a plan: to preach probity ‘psychedelic gospel’ (the word ‘psychedelia’ was coined by the psychiatrist and Hallucinogen advocate Dr Humphry Osmond). They desirable to turn the world onto Hallucinogen, believing it would bring global astuteness and help end wars.

In 1965, Hollingshead returned to Writer with a mayonnaise jar containing adequacy LSD for 5,000 trips. With honourableness help of two fellow Etonians, agreed established the World Psychedelic Centre play a role a flat in Pont Street, Chelsea. The apartment soon became a appointment for pop stars, actors, poets endure thrill-seeking aristocrats wanting to – dynasty the parlance of the day – free their minds.

Paul McCartney, Donovan, Exemplary Polanski and the then-director of picture Tate Gallery, Sir Roland Penrose, were among Hollingshead’s guests. Social boundaries were already blurring; a shared drug overlook blurred them further.

The World Psychedelic Palsy-walsy survived until Hollingshead was busted connote cannabis possession in April ’66. On the contrary by then, cultural tastemakers on both sides of the world had sampled LSD, and were drip-feeding it behaviour the arts.

To the ordinary man attend to woman on the street, however, r drugs were still something only inescapable about in hysterical newspaper headlines. Profuse of those who bought The Beatles’ February ’67 single Strawberry Fields Forever wouldn’t have known its shimmering drones mimicked the rush of an trip. But other musicians knew.

“Strawberry Fields… was utterly grotesque, creative, strange and different,” enthused gentleman LSD convert Pete Townshend, who’d became a regular at UFO, a of late opened club on London’s Tottenham Dreary Road, where everyone – band arena audience – looked as if they might be tripping.

Four months after Birthmark Fields…, The Beatles released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and, importation Justin Hayward puts it, “the entire world changed.” Lucy In The Wild blue yonder With Diamonds and A Day Find guilty The Life were pop music reimagined through the prism of LSD, Priory Road’s state-of-the-art studios and The Beatles’ boundless imagination. Pop music could convey be whatever it wanted to be.

“I found Sgt Pepper almost disturbing,” says 10cc’s Kevin Godley, a student dress warmly Stoke-on-Trent art college at the halt in its tracks. “It was so strange it was almost alien. On the day repress came out, everyone in college jammed working and was listening. There was a different song playing in evermore room. Everything changed. It was enjoy the first iPhone. Okay, it was just a phone before, but notify it’s this.”

“We knew Sgt Pepper was coming, but it still opened gust of air the doors,” says Justin Hayward. Grandeur Moody Blues were recording their in no time at all album, Days Of Future Passed, desert summer. It was a song run based around keyboard player Mike Pinder’s box of tricks, the Mellotron, splendid with contributions from The London Celebration Orchestra. “We’d already written Nights Back White Satin. So we were name that way.”

The Melancholy Blues added Sgt Pepper to spick pile of inspirational records that along with included Holst’s The Planets Suite promote The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds, an textbook of Moog instrumentals narrated by illustriousness US folk singer Cyrus Faryar. “We used to get very stoned suffer listen to that. It all frs into the mix,” says Hayward. Yell least the narration on Days Slate Future Passed’s opening track, The Time off Begins.

The revolution was not just pent to the UK. UFO club co-founder and London scenester John ‘Hoppy’ Moneyman acquired a tape of the Velvety Underground’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable show sight New York, which he played count up everyone. “That made a dent amusement people’s consciousness back in London,” Hoppy told the author. “It fitted clogging the scene.”

On America’s West Coast, people rock groups such as the Indebted Dead and Jefferson Airplane developed skilful new sound partly inspired by their drug use. Jefferson Airplane’s Alice Mess Wonderland-themed 45 White Rabbit encapsulated decency so-called ‘summer of love’ as thoroughly as Lucy In The Sky Accurate Diamonds.

“We listened to everything coming tapering off of America: The Byrds, The Lakeshore Boys, anything on Elektra Records, Rectitude Doors, Love,” says Justin Hayward, who singles out Neil Young and Writer Stills’ group Buffalo Springfield “as graceful major influence on the London scene.”

However, there was one crucial difference in the middle of the UK and the US. Land was at war. British teenagers potency get busted or have a good enough trip, but they didn’t have practice fight in Vietnam. You could perceive young America’s fear in some souk their music. The Mothers Of Invention’s June ’66 debut, Freak Out!, was the first of Frank Zappa’s attacks on corporate America and the rumble counter-culture. Zappa poked fun at ‘straights’ and hippies equally. His 1968 Sgt Pepper… parody, We’re Only In Scratch out a living For The Money, would become spruce up cynical running commentary on the era.

American psychedelia didn’t lead to the courtly whimsy of 70s prog. Instead, flaunt grew horns and turned into Headwaiter Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica or interpretation heavy stoner rock of Blue Egg on and Iron Butterfly.

But where British associations had once looked only to U.s. for inspiration, from ’67 onwards they were looking towards European and East music as well. Like The Unhappy Blues, with their shades of Dvorák and Strauss, Procol Harum were other lapsed R&B group who ‘went classical’. Their No.1 single, A Whiter Shadow Of Pale, was inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach. Although nobody really knew what vocalist Gary Brooker was disclosure about (‘One of sixteen vestal virgins, who were leaving for the coast’, anyone?).

“It’s like birth construction of a jigsaw puzzle evade knowing what the finished picture drive be,” explained lyricist Keith Reid. “I start off with one or several pieces or fragments of a thought, then, by interlocking pieces, I establish up a picture that makes headland and conveys my thoughts and meaning.” He could have been Jon Dramatist talking about his lyrics for Yes.

But A Whiter Shade Of Pale resonance like it meant something. And that’s what mattered. Paul McCartney had sovereignty first listen in London’s Speakeasy baton and thought, “This is the eminent song I ever heard, man.”

For See trade, another new group with roots sheep the 60s beat boom, Procol Harum’s single was a bittersweet experience. Traffic’s frontman Steve Winwood and his bandmates had been holed up in picture Berkshire countryside writing their debut ep, Mr. Fantasy, for several months. They released their first single Paper Sun a week after A Whiter Shade… in late May ’67. Paper Sun was all Indian jangles and misty flutes. But Winwood and Gary Brooker were white men who sang illustriousness blues. Their voices sounded alike – and Brooker beat Winwood to No.1.

Traffic deliberately released Hole In My Shoe, sung by guitarist Dave Mason, by the same token a follow-up. It reached No.2 trim August. But with its spoken-word prattle (‘I climbed on the back entrap a giant albatross, which flew because of a crack in the cloud…’), reorganization sounded like it was trying likewise hard.

The second half of ’67 dictum many artists hitch a ride scrutiny the next available giant albatross. Bass heroes Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton put a trippy spin on probity blues (with Are You Experienced mount Cream’s Disraeli Gears, respectively), and Honourableness Incredible String Band did the harmonize with Scottish folk on their pot-fuelled second album, The 5000 Spirits Down in the mouth The Layers Of The Onion.

A creative generation of art students also got in on the act. Kevin Godley and his future bandmate Lol Creme wangled a deal with CBS sports ground released a single, Seeing Things Green, under the name The Yellow Shout Boom Room. It was a express with stars on its cheeks survive flowers in its hair – on the other hand recorded in Stockport.

“Imagine the summer endowment love painted by Lowry,” deadpans Godley. “We were just copying everyone else.” The duo’s next major job would be backing Sheffield’s resident cosmic genius and amateur Egyptologist, Ramases, on debut album, Space Hymns.

Suddenly, even sr., bluesier groups were adding an Asiatic raga or a druggy lyric lock the mix. The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request LP arrived have round December. But it was hard finish with take their token Eastern-sounding track Gomper seriously, or Mick Jagger dressed laugh a wizard on the cover. Decency Who’s The Who Sell Out soiled up a few weeks later. Site was partly a satire on protrude culture, and contained one peerless nonpareil, I Can See For Miles, ramble chimed with the times. But honesty free psychedelic poster included with inappropriate pressings felt like a cynical cash-in.

Far more convincing than the Stones burrow The Who were those new bright groups who seemed to have adopt out of nowhere, such as Unidentified flying object club regulars Pink Floyd and Compressible Machine. Floyd’s August ’67 debut stamp album, The Piper At The Gates Be advantageous to Dawn, would become a cornerstone clamour progressive rock. Guitarist Syd Barrett couldn’t play like Clapton or Hendrix, middling the band instead began making what bassist Roger Waters called “strange noises that didn’t sound like the blues”.

The songs on Piper… were not lengthen cars, girls and teenage rebellion. They were about gnomes and Outer Extension. Like The Beatles, Pink Floyd difficult to understand made good use of Abbey Departed studios. Furthermore, Syd Barrett sang guarantee an English accent. Soft Machine’s Parliamentarian Wyatt and Kevin Ayers did primacy same. Soft Machine’s music, meanwhile, was nearer to John Coltrane than Mudspattered Waters. “They learnt to play tools in order to play the unrecognized sounds in their heads,” stated International Times in a review of description group’s 1968 debut.

Unlike Pink Floyd, Tender 1 Machine would never have a strike. But both groups offered that Side sensibility that later defined so overmuch 70s prog rock. Their music was like a painting of a Prudish nursery or a sun-dappled croquet land, with the edges growing fuzzy primate the listener’s trip began.

The problem stomach 1967 is that it didn’t perceive the way it began: full forfeit hope. UFO had been raided nearby forced to close down, and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had antiquated busted for drugs and briefly captive. The Beatles’ All You Need Legal action Love felt like a hollow statement.

LSD was now covered under the Strong Drug Act, and not every bulge star who took it had fugitive unscathed. Syd Barrett’s mental decline was exacerbated by his LSD use, charge he left Pink Floyd in inappropriate ’68.

If the optimism of ’67 difficult receded, then the New Year maxim the music becoming more ambitious settle down bigger business. Every label soon locked away its ‘serious’ groups. For Island Registry it was Spooky Tooth, Traffic streak, for a time, Jethro Tull; Decca’s Deram subsidiary had The Moody Misery, and EMI’s Harvest imprint had Healthful Floyd. With David Gilmour replacing Syd Barrett, Floyd released A Saucerful Accustomed Secrets, whose title track was fine multi-part epic about warring alien civilisations. It went Top 10. Record go out with executives who’d once struggled to lacking clarity The Beatles now accepted that primacy stoned young man standing in admission without any shoes on could give somebody the job of the source of their next Christmastide bonus.

These were curious times. The new music was unchanging being discussed in the ‘proper’ registry. Journalist and filmmaker Tony Palmer became The Observer’s pop critic, and anointed The Beatles “the greatest songwriters in that Schubert”. “And, God, was I ridiculed for that,” he said.

In February ’68 the BBC had commissioned Palmer hearten produce a serious pop culture movie. All My Loving was a time-capsule snapshot of Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Zappa, Cream, The Who and Guitarist, intercut with footage from the War War. “These people were trying have an effect on say something important,” explained Palmer. “Rather than just write ‘Doobee doobee doo’.”

Psychedelia had peaked, but the legacy finance Sgt Pepper was more groups creation music that strove to go out of range ‘Doobee doobee doo’. In May 1968, the Small Faces released Ogdens’ Seed Gone Flake. Two years earlier grandeur Small Faces had been Tamla Motown-loving mods. But they’d swapped pills long LSD, and bassist/songwriter Ronnie Lane acquaint with followed an Indian spiritual master.

Ogdens’… closed a song cycle about a girlhood, Happiness Stan, and his quest say nice things about find the missing half of distinction moon. It was narrated by droll actor Stanley Unwin in his hallmark gobbledygook: ‘Are you sitting comfty-bold a handful of square on your botty?…’

The Small Clock weren’t alone. A month later Rendering Crazy World Of Arthur Brown unconfined their self-titled debut. Side one fixed their No.1 hit Fire as tribe of a suite of songs round hell.

“I wanted difficulty use the concept for both sides,” says Brown, who’d started as spruce up soul singer but had adopted a- flaming head-dress and a ‘God Introduce Hellfire’ persona in tune with class times. “But the record company try me, ‘Arthur, no one wants generate hear a silly album that’s vagabond about fire, for fuck’s sake.’”

Arthur Chocolate-brown compromised. Others didn’t. The roll call for of themed albums between 1968 become calm mid-’69 also included The Kinks Clutter The Village Green Preservation Society; Rank Moody Blues’ In Search Of Blue blood the gentry Lost Chord; The Pretty Things’ SF Sorrow, The Nice’s Ars Longa Vita Brevis and The Who’s Tommy. In foreign lands, if wrongly, credited as the regulate concept album, Tommy was pitched have it in for the world as a ‘rock opera’ and even began with a ‘proper’ overture.

What united this music was guarantee it was terribly British. The Kinks serenaded a bygone England of trounce teas and warm beer. On Tommy, Pete Townshend took his deaf, speechless and blind kid on a nonmaterialistic adventure, but set part of park in a Butlins-style holiday camp. Rebuff American could have made these records.

The Who performed their rock opera externally an orchestra. In contrast, The Nice’s Ars Longa Vita Brevis contained par orchestral suite in six movements. “I suppose you could call what we’re doing ‘surrealistic pop’,” keys man Keith Emerson told Melody Maker.

Emerson, who in operation his career in a jobbing R&B band, Gary Farr And The T-Bones before backing US soul singer PP Arnold, was desperate to do hint new. It might be construed by reason of pretentious, it might not to wool wholly successful, but it came escaping an honest place. “I’ve always abhorrent copyists,” Emerson said. “I wanted concurrence be different.”

That same sentiment drove grandeur entire first generation of progressive assemblys. In October 1969, Pink Floyd on the rampage Ummagumma, a double album that selfsufficient a Stockhausen-inspired piano concerto and quintuplet minutes of manic birdsong and fumed voices entitled Several Species Of Slender Furry Animals Gathered Together In Unornamented Cave And Grooving With A Pict. But strangeness sold – and Ummagumma reached No.3. Above all, these aggregations had new ideas; occasionally grandiose promote ridiculous new ideas, but new significance nonetheless.

When Yes unfastened their debut in summer ’69, service was the culmination of over out year finessing a glorious sound which borrowed from pop, folk, church opus and even Hollywood soundtracks. Yes’ cipher of Something’s Coming from West Conscientious Story was a highlight of their early shows. Their album saw them put a jazzy spin on Representation Byrds’ I See You and move The Beatles’ Every Little Thing go through a five-minute, 42-second mini-concerto.

“The way they took other people’s songs and denaturised them was amazing. I thought mosey was something I could do,” says Phil Collins, who watched Yes unexpected defeat the Marquee and credits them slightly a inspiration on his writing put it to somebody Genesis.

But the real line in glory sand was drawn in November defer year. Three months after King Crimson’s appearance at Hyde Park, they at large their debut album, In The Deference Of The Crimson King. An unnatural sounding Mellotron, a dissonant saxophone talented jagged time signatures had replaced description familiar tropes of conventional pop theme. The LP even looked different. To was no band picture; just clean up floating open-mouthed face with a gleaming red uvula. “It was anti-format, clashing three-minute singles. It was something new,” declared Greg Lake.

By the end splash the month In TheCourt Of Goodness Crimson King was battling it topic with The Beatles’ Abbey Road stomach Motown Chartbusters Volume 3 near prestige top of the charts. Progressive totter had officially arrived. Not so even the sky, as the entire nature was now the limit.

Mark Blake equitable a music journalist and author. work has appeared in The Ancient and The Daily Telegraph, and probity magazines Q, Mojo, Classic Rock, Penalty Week and Prog. He is interpretation author of Pigs Might Fly: Probity Inside Story of Pink Floyd, Research paper This the Real Life: The Numberless Story of Queen, Magnifico! The A–Z Of Queen, Peter Grant, The Tall story Of Rock's Greatest Manager and Profess You're in a War: The Who & The Sixties.