A week or two ago I went to hear The Enid in concert. This wonderful prog rock band are on their 40th anniversary tour, which explains how it can be that I last heard them in 1981. That was in the Reading Hexagon, and I also saw them a couple of years before that in a Reading University hall of residence (St. Andrews? They blur a bit after all this time). It's not that I've been avoiding them for the last three and a half decades—our paths just didn't cross, but I kept in touch through their albums.
Forty years old the band might be, but of the six musicians playing at the Pocklington Arts Centre, only one looked like he was around in 1976. In fact only one of the original lineup is still associated with the band, and unfortunately ill health stops him performing live nowadays. Despite this, the concert was brilliant, and took me back to when I first heard the beautiful "In the Region of the Summer Stars" on Radio 3's "Sounds Interesting". The radio station dedicated to playing classical music let its hair down late on a Sunday night and played rock and popular music for an hour (possibly the channel controllers didn't stay up that late). I only listened to the show for a few months before I went to University, but it introduced me to progressive rock just as most people were saying goodbye to it. I've been there ever since.
Decades after Prog's heyday in the seventies there are loads of great Prog bands around again, but it's nice that a band like the Enid is also going strong. The next day I joined their fan club (if the concert audience was anything to go by, I'll be one of its younger members), so I can keep in touch with their touring schedule and not leave it another 35 years.
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