Listening to images, reading the records: The inclusive experience in British progressive rock of the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract

The article concerns the form of experience offered by the British progressive rock of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the light of the tendency to view the genre through the prism of modernism. The materiality of key musical albums within the genre—through elaborate aesthetic construction and reliance on literary ideas—played an indispensable role in interacting with the records. I argue that through constructing a narrative message in the form of record covers, progressive rock could be treated as a literary form which functions according to what Nicholas Royle describes as veering and which allows to avoid problems associated with considering the genre as modern or postmodern.