Was 1975 the peak year of the classic prog era?

A very passionate response and you make a good point about modern artist album sales – I stupidly forgot about Rush and Dream Theater because I don’t really follow them. Both those artists have succeeded in the States and hailing from the American continent clearly helped in their relative levels of success. The contemporary prog artists that I listen to most haven’t achieved that level of success. Indeed some would probably struggle to be recognised in the States because their music often has a very clear social comment that would not go down well. They also comment on the state of prog – if you haven’t heard Supper’s Off by The Tangent it is worth a listen, ideally in its original version which named the likes of Genesis and The Who as bands that the masses flock to listen to live while contemporary artists struggle to afford touring at all.

I hope you are right that prog is in good shape. I can’t remember the first album that I discovered in my youth that I loved so much that I kept playing it obsessively – it would have been a classical music album because that was my first love. But from then on I was always looking for the next album that had the same impact on me and that is what brought me to prog in the early 70s – the complexity of the albums is what had gave me that. In those days you could talk and empathise with most people about those artists because they were that well known. I lost touch with prog as it declined in popularity but had a brief foray into neo prog in the 80s and then after a prog-less 90s I rediscovered it in the 21st century and followed it more avidly than ever but I wouldn’t say that these artists are well known. Some of these artists are part-time musicians – Thomas Thielen and Andy Tillison are university lecturers. The people I talk to nowadays have never heard of these artists – as one of the UK’s more respectable newspapers commented recently, Steven Wilson, the prog rocker topping the charts without anybody noticing. Sadly, the same article notes that prog is seen as “associated in the wider consciousness with po-faced ageing males, interminable noodling guitar solos and daft symphonies about space”.