A development of UK pop music that began in 1967 with the sonic exploration of the Beatles' Strawberry Fields Forever and the classical allusions of Procol Harum's A Whiter Shade of Pale, and continued as an active underground scene in many parts of Europe into the late 1990s. It was predicated on an achieved maturity of UK rock, divorced from American precursors, an ideology of free expression and a complementary striving for legitimation often founded on the appropriation of classical referents.
Features include the escape from the format of the three-minute pop single, e.g. Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven and Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick, references and allusions to, and borrowings from, art music as in Emerson, Lake and Palmer's Pictures at an Exhibition or Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, and the integration of free jazz techniques shown in King Crimson's 21st-Century Schizoid Man and Van der Graaf Generator's Man-Erg. Lyrics often display a pretentious quasi-mystical quality, as in Yes's Awaken, and frequently eschew narrative, e.g. in Knots by Gentle Giant.
These experimental approaches were enabled by growing studio sophistication, a general shift from a working-class, dancing market to a student, listening market, and an economic boom, which gave the major labels the space to invest in artists and relax their hold over product and marketing. The struggle for legitimation frequently led to critical charges of pretentiousness. Punk was perceived in Britain as the necessary antidote.
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ALLAN F. MOORE