POP
ELP
Duncan Fallowell
Keith Emerson is a very clever man. Some would say too clever. He is partnered by two more very clever men: Greg Lake on guitar and Carl Palmer on drums. And the music they make is, in the best sense. murderous. Its pace is hectic and doomladen or briefly and sinisterly subdued. Music to be psychoanalysed by perhaps. Or, at least, definitely not the kind of pap to be piped among the tables at your local Berni Inn. It is characterised by the keyboard playing of Emerson, whose technique is formidable and grounded in the classics (via the Royal College) rather than the blues. Occasionally the technique begins to take over like a supersophisticated clockwork toy but just as one is beginning to think that all the musical muscles are on the outside Emerson does something absolutely hairraising with the moog synthesiser, incredible sounds detonate in one's ears and mushroom in the head like nuclear bombs and one knows that this group, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, are something special after all. Before Christmas they held a miniseason at the London Pavilion, the first rock group to be billed in eight-foot neon letters in this esteemed corner of the old city centre. In concert they are doubly impressive and sufficiently vulgar, sufficiently wild and uninhibited to get away with it. After all they are not an electrified Palm Court orchestra sawing away at your 100 Best Tunes, but a rock group with all the flexible immediacy that implies. This quality of music being made in the moment is what gives rock, and jazz for that matter, its excitement and unpredictability. Contrary to cultural prejudice this is not easier than reading off a score and when one is taking music into uncharted areas, as ELP do, it demands considerable know-how to hold the extemporised structure together. And ELP know how.
Again it is Keith Emerson, the musical hustler, who leads the field on stage. He dresses like a transvestite leather fetishist, intent on raping a vast interlinkage of electronic machinery which throbs monstrously in the red half-light. With Palmer powerful, berserk and pretty behind an array of drums, cymbals, bells, gongs (so vast they have to be pummelled with sledgehammers) and assorted ironmongery whose exact function becomes apparent later during a lethally demanding and rather wayward percussion solo, with Lake's bass line pumping and boiling like bitumen, it is the cue for Emerson to ride across the stage on top of one of the keyboard instruments, like a deranged organ-grinder's monkey, simultaneously doing complicated and dangerous tricks with a lot of levers and switches, and sticking knives into the thing at certain vital interstices; or he may jump into the audience with some electronic device like a sensitised phallus which generates unbelievable ear-shattering noises when manipulated; or perhaps sit at a piano with BECHSTEIN along the side in large white letters and toss off a convulsive set of variations; and at the end the audience roar and stamp their approval as though emerging from an ordeal by fire.
ELP's most recent album, generously put out at £1.49 (Island) as a Christmas gesture, is the group's own arrangement of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. The choice, I would say, is no accident. Mussorgsky's music has the same leashed madness about it, a similar dynamic of light and dark, as well as employing folk melodies, which makes it particularly susceptible to this kind of glorious mutilation. But in another sense the liaison is fortuitous. This is not another attempt at classic-rock fusion but the creation of a new and authentic musical experience which goes beyond compromise. Perhaps ELP are the only group who could make it something more than just another hammy exercise in mutual relations.
However they will only realise their full potential when drawing entirely upon themselves. I want them louder still, and bigger and more psychotic and less hamstrung by their own dexterity. I want to hear more of Lake's guitar, and his voice (which is lovely when he is not too nervous or too near the microphone). I would like them to link sound with light, by direct electronic means, and spread it around the auditorium. In fact I want their imaginations in full flight and I want it because I am sure they could do it.
Previous page
