Think.

It as far from here to Sergeant Pepper as it is from him to 1925.

Lawks. Getting old.

And so it is that I recently have meandered back again to a couple of the records of my, hem, student years.

Quadrophenia, by The Who.

And (gulp) Tales of Topographic Oceans, by Yes.

These were both double albums intended to be in effect one long piece. Few bands have tried attempt anything on this scale. Even fewer have succeeded in achieving musical distinction and overall coherence. The Wall by Pink Floyd is perhaps the best known effort.

Listening again to Quadrophenia I am amazed above all by the drumming. Keith Moon’s non-stop assault on the drum kit defined the sound of the whole group in a way no other drummer has ever achieved. Try this: 

Keith Moon was not a distinguished scholar ("‘Retarded artistically. Idiotic in other respects"). But his frantic drumming and scarcely less frantic attempts to blow up hotel toilets were more than distinguished.

As for Quadrophenia, the general theme is (of course) teenage angst but cleverly expressed via a young man with a personality split in four ways, each member of the Who having his own memorable musical motif picked up variously throughout the album. Not all of it works or is especially memorable, but the best songs are terrific; the sustained lyricism and sheer musical technique shine through.

The concluding punning Love Reign O’er Me is a wonderful piece of music:

Only love
Can make it rain
The way the beach is kissed by the sea.
Only love can make it rain
Like the sweat of lovers laying in the fields.

Love, Reign o’er me.
Love, Reign o’er me, rain on me.

Only love
Can bring the rain
That makes you yearn to the sky.
Only love can bring the rain
That falls like tears from on high…

On the dry and dusty road
The nights we spend apart alone
I need to get back home to cool cool rain.
The nights are hot and black as ink
I can’t sleep and I lay and I think
Oh God, I need a drink of cool cool rain.

Topographic Oceans is something else again. Serious top-end ‘progressive’ rock musicianship (ie likely to be bought by students with too much time to pore endlessly over the imagery and obscure words), but serving up many wonderful melodies, coming and going and twisting and turning for over an hour.

Here the ‘sound’ is defined primarily by Steve Howe’s guitar, Rick Wakeman’s keyboard solos and Jon Anderson’s beyond impenetrable but yet somehow touching mystic-style lyrics:

Skyline teacher
Warland seeker
Send out poison
Cast iron leader

And through the rhythm of moving slowly
Sent through the rhythm work out the story
Move over glory to sons of old fighters past

Young Christians see it from the beginning
Old people feel it, that’s what they’re saying
Move over glory to sons of old fighters past.

This shows how in later years they were still playing sections from it:

Part of the problem with this record is the fact that the technology of the time drove the group towards having to fill a full four sides of LP vinyl. With tough editing and deletions of various passages where it sounds as if they had run out of ideas (most of side Three, bits from the other three sides) Yes could have produced a phenomenal double album.

Quadrophenia too could have been shorter without too much artistic loss, but at least it is made up of manageable songs, so if you are downloading it on iTunes you need not have the boring bits. With Tales, it’s best to take the lot and hope for the best.

As it is, once you have made your way through Tales a few times (as I obsessively did far more than a few times back in the 1970s) you see the genius of the work as a whole. You put up with some of the clunkier less melodic parts, as so much of the rest is lushly intricate, stirring and beautiful.

Music like this lives on in the original recordings and whatever can be found on YouTube, as listened to mainly (I suppose) by people like me returning to it in middle-age nostalgia. But as the surviving members of the bands themselves get too old to perform the work, few if any cover versions will ever be made by others.

Young people now will sneer at it if only because they’ll think their parents are not cool by definition, so their music can not be any good either. And so it will all fade away, just as most of the music of the 1920s means nothing to most of us now.

But if you are interested in something special and substantial from the best years of the ‘classic’ rock genre which you have not heard before, or if all this stirs some long-lost memories, treat yourself: