I don’t know when I acquired this particular instinct but I think I’ve had it since I was about 16. Perhaps you acquired it too. I still have it, even though I know it’s silly. What is it? The belief that if an album has a long song it will be good. I must have picked this up early but if a record had a 15-minute suite I had to have it. The first time this affliction reared its head was on that copy of Meddle and Echoes. A whole side! I suppose I thought it gave me something different from pop music, a way to cut myself a space in the world that felt like mine. It felt ‘grown up’ as though you had to have some degree of sophistication to appreciate it. That’s an often ignored attraction. That feeling that here’s this music, you might not understand it, but I do.
So began a lifelong attraction to ‘the long song’ I soon explored Man’s Be Good To Yourself and Back to the Future, then on to other stuff like Tales From Topographic Oceans and Relayer. I loved ELP’s Brain Salad Surgery, Humble Pie’s Performance; Live at the Fillmore and the sidelong I Walked On Gilded Splinters - a wonderfully titled Dr John track and Song Remains The Same with the half hour of Dazed And Confused. In the 70s, it seemed like everyone had a long song on every album and my love of the concept was such that when the 80s came and made it unfashionable, I clung tightly to my Marillion albums for carrying on the tradition.
Live albums were often where the longest lived such as on The Who’s Live At Leeds and Camel’s A Live Record and Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Between Nothingness And Eternity.
I was playing Traffic On The Road, a live double that is quite brilliant and only has two tracks on each side and I was reminded of how much of a purist about this concept I was, and how normal people were not. I had gone to a party aged 17 with that album, as I loved it. Obviously I was hoping to impress with my good taste. As it was half through Glad - with a piano riff I’m sure inspired Paul Weller to write songs on Wild Wood, especially, You Do Something To Me - someone took it off the turntable in favour of some disco hit of the time. Well, being a bit of a git, I took umbrage at this, declaring some sort of sin had just been committed. So disgusted was I that I collected the album and left, not wanting to spend time with such heathens.
All of which probably illustrates how seriously I took it all and what a bloody silly boy I was. Such are the travails of youth. But that feeling of comfort you get playing In Memory Of Elizabeth Reid on the Fillmore album for 20 minutes still captivates me. Settle in, get comfortable, this is going to be a long one. Bliss.
This is going to be a long one...
