What a difference a few years in age! Grin!

I loathed '60s American folk á la PP&M, Kingston Trio, Seeger; musical pablum spoon-fed to the denizens of communes reeking of pot-smoke and unfortunate underarm odours. I have no idea why, but the sight of a tambourine or a pair of bongo drums still triggers a flight reaction.

Pop music was (and is today) just simplistic formulaic unimaginative commercial twaddle. "Yeah yeah yeah" as a lyric? Really? I couldn't stand the Beatles, nor the American stuff that came before. Even the Stones weren't really all that much better but they were better. I was a Doors man, but listened to the Big Bands of my dad's generation much more often; they were musicians, not glorified garage bands who knew three chords and maybe a relative minor.

Then came prog rock. Real musicians finally in the modern genre? Two fingers up the commercial record promoters to boot? What's not to like? I've worn out more copies of "Fragile" (Wakeman and the boys, the "Yes" you lament) than I can remember, and still have the CD out in the workshop. The guys crossing over from blues like Alman Brothers, I saw Lead Zep, The Who and Jethro Tull live, Frank Zappa too, the latter a fantastic musician surrounded by fantastic musicians and just taking the piss...

What a perspective difference; to me the '60s weren't so great, musically boring and personally unhappy. The '70s were when the music was taken back from the record execs and radio payola system from the '50s and returned into the hands of the musicians if only for a few glorious years. I loved it.

Today is just the same range of selections of canned effluvia as was the 50s/60s pop era all over again. The bastards eventually killed anything imaginative from the prog-rock era and its all hands turning the commercial crank again. Lady Gaga and Britney Spears my sweet arse. It is to weep, my friends. Pop has sucked for almost three-quarters of a century now, all except that one moment when the musical sun actually peeked out from behind the clouds of commercialism, at the same time drowning out the incessant baby-rattle of the tambourine, and shone brightly and far far too briefly.