Automobiles

Tim Dowling’s relatively recent The car was the last bastion of the CD and the full-length album. Now they are no more article in The Guardian reminded me that it came of something of a surprise when I found out that the last car I owned, an updated model  of the previous car, bought new in 2015 didn’t have a CD player. We’d owned it for a number of weeks before I required it for a longish trip and I dutifully selected some suitable CDs for the journey, sat in the car and looked for the slot to insert the disc… I never quite got the hang of plugging in my mp3 player because for reasons best known to itself the car audio system defaulted to shuffle, which I believe is an invention for people who don’t like music. Fortunately, being bereft of the technology is no longer a problem; thanks to London’s public transport networks and the ready availability of pooled car-hire facilities, we dispensed with our own wheels in 2023.

ProgBlog's wheels 2015- 2023

The first car I owned was a D-registration Ford Fiesta bought in 1986 which only had a radio. I’ve never been much of a fan of radio; between the demise of the Alan Freeman show in 1978 and the advent of web radio there’s barely been a programme that catered for my taste in music, the ‘barely’ being the pirate station Alice’s Restaurant which played a couple of hours of progressive rock early on a Sunday morning, which I could pick up when I lived in Upper Norwood between 1984 and 1985.

The next car was bought in 1989, a restyled, fairly hi-spec Fiesta which included a joystick for controlling the speakers and where the standard radio was replaced with a removable Pioneer radio cassette I had fitted by a work colleague’s husband who ran one of the burgeoning auto hi-fi stores you could find on any suburban London high street. Despite its portability it was the victim of theft, car-related crime being another burgeoning business (but it had begun to chew through tapes I’d recorded from LPs.) We bought a small tray for mounting a portable CD player as an accessory for one of our subsequent vehicles, a device which somehow plugged into the car stereo system. It proved to be somewhat imperfect because the data buffering was insufficient to prevent skipping when the car went over a bump and was soon abandoned. This was superseded by a fitted CD player in our Renault Mégane, bought in 1997, which also saw the advent of our zipped CD holder, as described by Tim Dowling in his article. I could play music selected from my collection if I had to drive to work but family trips had to involve some compromise. The most memorable journey playing my son’s choice of music was on a road trip, just me and him, driving back from the Kennedy Space Centre to Miami during a tropical storm in 2003, with Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory, Reanimation and Meteora cycling through the CD player.

Drivin' music, 2003

Nick Mason’s association with motor racing is the fulfilment of a childhood dream. He first took part in the Le Mans 24 hour endurance contest in 1979 and has been an avid collector of historic and supercars since around the time of The Dark Side of the Moon, when he bought a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO. Both Mason and David Gilmour took part in the 1991 Carrera Panamericana race in Mexico, filmed and released on video the following year featuring a Pink Floyd soundtrack combining previously released material with compositions specifically written as soundtrack music. Mason finished 8th overall while the guitarist crashed during the race but was unhurt and managed to finish. Unfortunately co-pilot and Pink Floyd manager Steve O'Rourke suffered a broken leg.

Rick Wakeman also collected cars in the mid 70s and owned a car rental business called Fragile Carriage Company. He claims to have owned around 200 vehicles including what he estimates as ‘around 20 Rollers, 20 Bentleys and 30 Jags’ although he had to part with a fair few of them in his first divorce settlement, including Clark Gable’s custom 1957 Cadillac. His father had taught him to aspire to owning a Rolls Royce, the cream of British engineering, and realised his ambition at the age of 24 when he picked up the keys to a 1958 Silver Cloud I.

Rick Wakeman's cars, 1973 (photo D.Morrison/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

It’s really no surprise that cars are conspicuous by their absence in prog songs because the subject matter tends to be somewhat more thought-provoking than rock ‘n’ roll. Rock ‘n’ roll and the associated false glamour of a ‘live fast, die young’ ethos seem inextricably linked with motor cars and consequently there have been hundreds of songs written about driving or automobiles. This can be explained by the contemporaneous development of music and driving, two major aspects of (American) youth culture, coinciding with the end of post-war austerity and the invention of the American Dream, issuing in a world of leisure and consumerism. Songs about driving frequently suggested rebellion but whatever the message, songs about cars pervade much of rock music from Chuck Berry’s No Particular Place to Go (1964) and The Beatles Drive My Car (1965) to Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run album (1975) and there’s a strong association, at least amongst older British TV viewers, of Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain (1977) and F1 racing. The movie Grease with its cod 50s rock ‘n’ roll appeared in 1978 and has become the most popular musical film of all time. There even seems to be a morbid glamour that has attached itself to automobile accidents, brilliantly explored in JG Ballard’s collection of related stories The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and full length novel Crash (1973), epitomised by the by the death of James Dean in his Porsche 550 Spyder in 1955, the crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales in Paris in 1997 and even the assassination of JFK in his open topped limousine in 1963, partly the subject of Peter Gabriel’s Family Snapshot from Peter Gabriel III (Melt), (1980).

JG Ballard's Crash, exploring the morbid glamour of the automobile accident

The shorter songs on Peter Gabriel’s debut solo offering are not conceptually linked but do display thoughtfulness in their composition. This may have been Gabriel’s return to the music business after a hiatus but it was on his terms, informed in part by the years he’d spent in Genesis while reflecting other influences. I don’t think it conforms to a strict definition of progressive rock but it is undoubtedly progressive. The immediacy and a more contemporary feel put it more in art-rock territory, as though The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway’s Rael showed Gabriel what he was able to become and although it was recorded in Toronto and London, I get a New York vibe to the album. One similarity between The Lamb Lies Down and Peter Gabriel is the humour in the rhyme, the use of couplets, half rhymes and rhymes within a single line which, for instance, is evident on Moribund the Burgermeister: ‘Bunderschaft, you going daft? Better seal off the castle grounds...’ or Humdrum: ‘I ride tandem with a random/Things don’t work out the way I planned them.’ As Gabriel himself put it in Rael’s story on the inside gatefold of The Lamb Lies Down, ‘the rhyme is planned, dummies’. However, to my eyes there’s a less obvious break with progressive rock on Peter Gabriel that hits you the moment you see the LP in a record store or take the album out from your own collection: the cover photo of Gabriel in the passenger seat of Storm Thorgerson’s Lancia Flavia. It’s probably coincidental but the album contains a couple of automobile references, in Excuse Me where Gabriel muses ‘who needs a Cadillac anyway’ and a more technical, almost Ballardian reference to a ‘red hot magneto’ on Modern Love.

Peter Gabriel aka 'Car'

The lyrics of Adrian Belew on Beat (1982) and Three of a Perfect Pair (1984), the second and third releases by the 1981 – 1984 incarnation of King Crimson are something of an exception when it comes to prog and cars, if we accept that the 80s version of King Crimson was indeed prog, rather than some new wave – art rock hybrid;  Beat was inspired by Jack Kerouac so it’s unsurprising that road trip references abound in Neal and Jack and Me: ‘I’m wheels, I am moving wheels/I am a 1952 Studebaker coupe... ...I am a 1952 Starlite coupe’. King Crimson’s experimental industrial music on the second side (right side) of Three of a Perfect Pair begins with a homage to the scrapped car, Dig Me, which reminds me of Christine (1983) the Bill Phillips film adaptation of Stephen King’s horror novel and where the degree of detail in Belew’s lyrics appears to affirm the suitability of Ballardian prose for the description of abandoned automobiles. It shouldn’t have come as a shock to Crimson-watchers that tyre manufacturer Dunlop used a portion of 21st Century Schizoid Man for their rather surreal adverts in 1996 as this was almost a reprise of a pre-Crimson Giles, Giles, Fripp and McDonald appearing in a 1968 TV commercial for the same company when groovy-looking people were required to act as a band and their female singer, safely negotiating the road between gigs to stardom on Dunlop tyres (the ‘female singer’, model Mary Land, would later become Michael Giles’ second wife and appear on the cover of McDonald and Giles from 1970.)

In 2021 Ford used The Four Horsemen (from 666) by Aphrodite’s Child as the music for an advert for their Kuga plug-in hybrid model. It was a strange choice as the lyrical content of the song doesn’t match or even hint at any of the qualities of the car which are portrayed in the video, which for some reason involves a VR world.

Kuga advert from 2021 - Ford horsemen of the apocalypse

A rather odd exception to the prog-and-car canon is White Car from Drama (1980) by Yes. Lasting only 1’20” this song was allegedly brought to the band by Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman replacements/newcomers Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes. It’s likely to be seen as throw-away because of its brevity but in that time it opens out to reveal a cinematic scope, with nice keyboard orchestration and poignant percussion. I don’t know what the lyrics allude to but it conjures images of a classic Rolls Royce on a road atop of Yorkshire or perhaps Devonshire moors. It’s dramatic, and maybe that’s where the album title comes from; it’s certainly not car as analogy for sex object!

A cosmic take on the idea of cruising along having attained a certain level of success, Highways of the Sun was released as a single and appeared on Camel’s Rain Dances (1977). It doesn’t matter whether they’re ‘in an old sedan that’s lost a wheel’ or ‘sailing in a ship that’s got no sails’, this is hardly the same imagery as that visualised by heavy rockers Deep Purple, on Highway Star (from Machine Head, 1972) with its suggestion of sexualised power. Hard rock seemed to go for this form of association; the video of ‘fast’ women, hot cars and hard guitars, apparently reinventing scenes of bikini-clad women draped over cars at a motor show for the MTV age... and critics called prog musicians dinosaurs! But if Roger Waters was being ironic with the cover artwork for The Pros and Cons of Hitch Hiking (1984), it really doesn’t show.

Progressive... ...and not progressive

The idea that cars offer personal freedom isn’t necessarily incorrect, but car ownership is equally a form of selfishness, stoked by the manufacturers and burned into our brains through some really inane advertising campaigns which feature perfect families, empty roads and lots of wonderful architecture to take your mind away from the ugliness of the cars and the stupidity of the name of each model, exhausting the formula to keep us in love with our cars. I'm sure there are prog-heads who are also petrol-heads but if musical genres were modes of transportation, prog would be some form of public transport and Italian prog would specifically be a tram!

Do all advertising agency workers live in a bunker? Have they tried to navigate the national motorway system? From an environmental point of view it’s good that the fastest rising sales are hybrid and battery-powered vehicles but we’ve been seduced by SUVs with their poor environmental and safety statistics since the late 1990s, such that they accounted for 48% of the world's passenger car market in 2023 and have therefore become the target of Paris authorities and the international Tyre Extinguisher group. The giant factory car parks filled with new petrol- and diesel engine vehicles is an indication of a huge crisis in the automotive industry as Covid-affected work patterns and austerity changed our car-driving habits. 90% of new cars are bought using financing deals and though interest has fallen to Bank of England target rates, there has been sustained nervousness about how the UK’s £43bn car loan market mirrors the sub-prime mortgage scandal which caused the global financial crash in 2008.

It seems we never learn.