But slowly, some gems emerged, Nostell Priory 198(3) introduced me to a fledgling Marillion, who rapidly became firm favourites. Later, I discovered IQ, whose first two albums I think are actually even marginally better than Marillion's first two. Big Country emerged from the ashes of the Skids and released some quite brilliant albums - some have definite progressive traits. Dire Straits became much more complex and sophisticated and released three albums which are quite superb and flit round the fringes of prog. A Celtic Rock band called Runrig emerged from the Western Highlands and released their third album, an astonishing concept album (Recovery), which had half the songs in their native language (Gaelic). Their followed it up with Heartland (equally astonishing) and a series of excellent, commercially successful "song" albums and a live album of incredible energy which ranks up there with the very best.

One or two of the 70s acts kept the faith. Camel reversed their late 70s decline with the brilliant Nude and, after a blip with The Single Factor, bounced back with Stationary Traveller, an album which improves enormously with repeated listening. Jethro Tull released Crest of a Knave which I don't like much but many do ( does anyone else think that, at times, they sound a bit like Dire Straits clones on this?).

And there's Asia. I don't regard their first album as particularly progressive but, if it had been released by four musicians who had never been in a prog band, I'd have liked it a lot (and I do) because the songs are great. Most of the hate seems to be because it was recorded by prog heroes who were viewed as "selling out". 

There are many more good albums from the 80s

However, there's a lot of utter dross too.

[But then music is not delineated on neat 10-year intervals - it did not all change at 00:00:01 on the 1st January 1980 as the new decade dawned and it did not come to a graceful end at 23:59:59 on the 31st December 1989.]