Prog the Forest 2024 – Live Review

Sunday 1 December 2024

The Fiddler’s Elbow, Camden, London

An excitingly eclectic mix of prog bands perform to raise funds for an environmental charity

On a wet Sunday afternoon in early December, intrepid prog rock fans and supporters travelled from South London to North London… and also from Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium – and Manchester (your correspondent). This was a full day’s music festival without mud and dodgy toilets. There was a well-stocked bar, a small stage with an excellent sound and enough seats for those who didn’t fancy standing through sets by no fewer than seven bands and solo artists.

The event was jointly hosted by Malcolm Galloway of prog favourites Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate, who was the MC for the festival, and Chris Parkins of London Prog Gigs. Mark Gatland, the bass player in Hats Off, stage managed and helped organise the event. All performers gave their services for free to support the rainforest and wildlife conservation charity, World Land Trust, which ‘protects the world’s most biologically significant and threatened habitats.’ This was the sixth year of Prog the Forest and the most successful to date, raising £2750 to protect nearly 26 acres of rainforest and other threatened habitats.

“We’ve just sent £2570 to the World Land Trust from Prog The Forest 2024, enough to protect almost 26 acres of rainforest and other threatened habitats, in co-operation with local communities. That takes our cumulative PTF total to over 89 acres.“

Malcolm Galloway, on behalf of Prog the Forest

Malcolm Galloway entertained the audience in between acts with acre-related facts and fun quizzes. We learned that oxen need two shoes per hoof as, unlike horses (but similar to the Devil), they have cloven hooves. Before the invention of the yoke, the blood supply to a horse’s head was cut off with unfortunate consequences. As one band member quipped, ‘You wouldn’t get this at a Taylor Swift gig.’ Well, quite.

The first band was Spriggan Mist, a ‘pagan progressive rock band.’ In real life, lead singer Fay Brotherhood is a ‘professional ecologist and bat worker’, and she was on message with her splendid forest-related headgear, which featured forest greenery, antlers and flashing lights. An antler-related incident occurred when Brotherhood hit the mic with her headgear, causing a howl of feedback. The rest of the band are Baz Cilia on bass and vocals, Maxine Cilia on guitar, saxophone, woodwind and vocals, Neil Wighton on guitar and Ali Soueidan on drums.

Introducing the song Kintbury Witch, Fay Brotherhood asked, “Any witches in the house?” “Me”, came the reply from a female voice at the back.

Opening song Isambard was uplifting heavy rock, with Floydian guitar solos of epic length. The Portal was written the day the immortal David Bowie died, an upbeat pop song with a nice melodic bass line, lute-like guitar and fierce drumming. Coloured lights on Brotherhood’s gloves lit up in appreciation of the music. Brighid was more downbeat, Brotherhood – with her vibrato vocals, exciting headgear and compelling stage presence -reminding some audience members of the great Lili-Marlene Premilovich, better known as Lene Lovich.

Multi-instrumentalist Maxine Cilia also reminded us of the late ’70s/early ’80s by introducing a Keytar (pedants will note that the name wasn’t used until 2012) on When Stars Collide; she also played the saxophone later in the song. The next song, Ianatores Teresteres, began with a fuzz-guitar riff reminiscent of the 1973 single Radar Love by Golden Earring. Maxine Cilia further demonstrated her versatility by playing a heavily-echoed recorder. The band ended an exhilarating and highly theatrical set with Kintbury Witch, Brotherhood dancing enthusiastically with animal skulls, which she held in either hand to illustrate a witches’ ceremony.

Singer-songwriter Leoni Jane Kennedy was hand-picked by members of Queen for the Freddie Mercury Scholarship. She has supported Rush tribute band Moving Pictures with acoustic covers of Rush songs. She started her set with a cover of ‘Kid Gloves’ from Grace Under Pressure (1984), singing in a lovely low, sultry voice and accompanying herself with virtuoso strumming and versatile picking on her acoustic guitar. She played a gorgeous, melancholy cover of ‘Tears’ from Rush’s 1976 album 2112. She also covered ‘New World Man’ from Signals (1982), judiciously changing its name to ‘New World Woman’, the title of her 2023 album.

Leoni Jane Kennedy asked the audience if anyone had heard of Rush’s 1976 album 2112. When she got an enthusiastic response she said, “I’m in the right room!”

Kennedy also writes her own songs. On Temple, she demonstrated the full range of her voice, with lovely legato singing, and nice guitar harmonics at the end. She held the audience spellbound with Life Like This, which had interesting chord changes and a nice harmonic structure. Her best song was Ammunition, written as part of her Master’s in Songwriting. Although written to a brief, this was a beautiful, poignant song about her relationship with her father, ‘You weren’t there to watch me grow.’ With her soulful voice, superb guitar playing, and charismatic stage presence, Kennedy deserves to go far.

MC Galloway teased us by introducing a group of five Russian composers, Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Borodin, sometimes known as ‘The Mighty Handful’ or the (partially famous) Five who apparently ‘changed the perception of time in their music’. This concept would appeal to prog fans, who love a complex time signature.

MC Galloway announced The Mighty Handful as including a ‘former music director of Strictly‘. We were now firmly into prog territory, with time signatures on songs like Vital Signs and Exit Piece that even the best Strictly dancers would have struggled to illustrate through the medium of interpretive dance. Ralph Blackbourn on keyboards made a stunning impression of Rick Wakeman in several songs, although sadly without the cape (the Uncaped Crusader?) And on Cavalier Spirit, he channelled the cavalier spirit of the great Jon Lord (Deep Purple) on bluesy Hammond organ.

“We’re here for the trees”, announced Matt Howes of The Mighty Handful. Faster than lightning in a rainforest, the response came back from the audience, “The trees can’t be here!”

Matt Howes was a mesmerising frontman, singing in a rock style on Cavalier Spirit and in a stratospheric falsetto on a new song, All the Birds, which he quipped wouldn’t be released until 2026 to avoid putting pressure on themselves. Guitarist Christopher James Harrison brought some fine playing to the driving guitar rock of Hypothetically Speaking from the band’s epic concept album Still Sitting in Danny’s Car, which Howes described as ‘going on and on’. Bass player Tom Halley, a member of a barbershop quartet in another life, brought funky bass lines and then beautifully cascading lines to Distant as the Stars. Howe introduced The Signal (ii) as a difficult song that ‘might go wrong’. The song was, in fact, superbly executed, with a proggy start, a funky keyboard solo from Blackbourn, and a spacey section with complex polyrhythms. At the end of the piece, Blackbourn leapt with joy, and the audience shared in the sheer exuberance of the band’s performance.

According to their Facebook page, Mountainscape play, ‘Instrumental post-metal. We blend elements of post-rock, black metal, doom, sludge and ambient in a filmscore inspired way.’ For those in the audience who were post-metal curious, Chris Parkins of London Prog Gigs announced the three-piece as ‘prog adjacent or modern prog’ and said that they had been written up in Prog magazine; as Parkins said, if Jerry Ewing, Prog’s Editor, said they are prog they must be. Talking to band members later, they admitted playing a ‘softer’ set than their usual metal offering. Perhaps, in honour of the occasion, the band should have changed their name from Mountainscape to Treescape (although apparently some mountains do have rainforests growing on them).  

Mountainscape consists of Dan Scrivener on guitar, Ethan Bishop on bass, and James Scrivener on drums, but the band’s sound was so full that they often sounded like a much bigger band. Atoms Unfurling began with ambient, spacey sounds and military drumming, then soaring, anthemic guitar. There was some black metal riffing at the end, but not enough to frighten the horses of prog – there were strong melodies that belied the band’s description of their music as ‘sludge’. On Iridescent, they lived up to their description. They created a compelling soundtrack for an imaginary film or video game, with a soaring, legato guitar solo with a few nicely proggy corners. Supernova featured some thrillingly evocative key changes, and Belonging began with a halo of tranquil electronics followed by deep, visceral bass and uplifting black metal riffs. The band’s exhilarating and prog-friendly set ended with the low-slung groove of Patterns in the Mist.

During the interval (or should that be a Winterval?), the audience went off to forage in the forest for food… or perhaps to comb the streets of Camden, while there were sound checks for the festival’s second half.

Theo Travis is a member of Soft Machine and has played saxophone and flute with numerous jazz and prog bands; the list of musicians he has collaborated with reads like a who’s who of jazz and prog. He also played duduk – a wind instrument with a large double reed, originally from Armenia – on‘ Beautiful Scarecrow’ on Steven Wilson’s last solo album, The Harmony Codex. His latest solo album is the beguiling Aeolus: One Hour Duduk Meditation, with ‘Production and Soundscapes’ by Steven Wilson. Last Sunday, he treated us to a short set for solo flute, made up of five evocative pieces. He used a loop pedal extensively to create harmonies and multi-layered trance-like themes. He also used flutter tonguing above stately melodies, sounding like a delicate butterfly or a bird’s wings fluttering. Sometimes, the effect was deliciously unsettling; elsewhere, the melodies sounded medieval and ineffably sad. He also created mesmerisingly deep organ notes. In the final piece, he played a stately riff, with complex flourishes above, building multiple parts that at one point sounded like one of Bach’s two-part inventions. A spellbinding set.

At the start of his set, Tim Bowness invited us to visualise dry ice and the epic strains of German composer Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra (the ‘theme music’ for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey)

Then it was the turn of Prog Royalty to grace the stage – Tim Bowness was one-half of no-man with Steven Wilson (or originally one-third of the band that also consisted of violinist Ben Coleman, who played violin on The Harmony Codex). He introduced his band Butterfly Mind, saying they first played together in a five-minute soundcheck during the interval. The band consisted of Andrew Booker (drums), who had joined at very short notice, Rob Groucutt (keyboards), John Jowitt (bass) and Matt Stevens (guitar). Theo Travis, ‘dressed for the occasion’ in an elegant smoking jacket (if that’s the correct term; this Blog shouldn’t be relied on for fashion tips), played on some songs.

The band began with a blistering version of ‘Time Travel in Texas’ from no-man’s 1996 album Wild Opera, with a scorchingly funky bass line and an amazingly virtuosic guitar solo. Bowness was in fine voice here and throughout the set. The band were incredibly tight, despite their lack of time together. Next was ‘All the Blue Changes’ from no-man’s Together We’re Stranger (2003), which began with delicate piano and guitar and morphed into a punk/indie rock anthem. There was a change of pace for ‘Wherever There is Light’ from 2008’s classic no-man album Schoolyard Ghosts – which also contains the classic Pigeon Drummer –  the band’s last album before 2019’s Love You to Bits. Bowness’ voice was a soft-grained wonder on this track. Theo Travis on flute provided a simple melodic theme that was very different from his solo set, with a gorgeous tone; the second time round, he decorated the song with delicate, filigree ornaments. Another early highlight was ‘Sing to Me’ from Tim Bowness’s third solo album, Stupid Things That Mean the World (2015). Bowness’ voice was pure, sweet and thoughtful. The band brought warm backing vocals, loose-limbed and relaxed drumming, gorgeous piano and bass flourishes, a lovely echoey guitar solo, and a heart-stopping key change after the words ‘the way she looked at you.’

‘Rainmark’  from Bowness’ fifth solo album, Flowers At The Scene (2019), included the lyrics, ‘I would save you/From the coming flood’, giving him the chance to meditate wittily on the floods that had come to his adopted home of Bradford on Avon, which apparently were so bad that from his house on the hill, the Co-op could only be reached ‘by dinghy’. and there was ‘no Ocado for three days!’ More remarkable than these First World Problems was the final acapella section of the song, with stunning drumming from Booker, effectively a drum solo with amazingly complex rhythms. The band were joined again by the ‘elegantly attired’ Travis for a stunning version of no-man’s 1993 single Sweetheart Raw. He played warm, low saxophone, then let rip with a fluid but angular jazz solo, playing an extraordinary number of notes in a very short time. Travis played soulful flute on ‘Mixtaped’ from Schoolyard Ghosts, then fiercely passionate sax. The song ended with Bowness’ beautiful solo voice. Travis rounded off ‘Things Change’ from no-man’s Flowermouth (1994) with a jazzy flourish while Stevens held his guitar aloft in triumph.

To close the festival, MC Galloway was joined onstage by Mark Gatland from Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate. The band began with a world-exclusive premiere of ‘Certainty’ from their new album, The Uncertainty Principle. The song was a showpiece for Galloway’s superb guitar playing, ranging from a lyrical Floydian solo to jazzy, offbeat playing and an epic, bluesy solo. The band were joined by Galloway’s wife, the flautist Kathryn Thomas, on Century Rain. Having already heard Theo Travis on flute, all we needed was Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson to complete the prog flute trio, but perhaps he was busy recording voiceovers and flute for the next Opeth album. Unlike Anderson, Thomas played while standing on both legs, but more importantly, her solo was wonderfully florid, matched by Galloway’s equally ornate solo, while Gatland provided viscerally robust bass.

Gatland introduced ‘Walking to Aldebaran’ from Hats Off’s last album, The Light of Ancient Mistakes, as ‘the hardest, slightly maddest’ song of the set, combining as it does prog metal and Andrew Lloyd Webber, all in nine minutes! The song began with fierce prog metal riffing, then Hendrix-style guitar. Galloway sang with Bowie-like passion. Another fearsome prog-metal section led to a melodic passage that could have come from a West End musical. The song ended with melancholy piano and a haunting guitar solo, giving it a dystopian feel like many of the band’s songs.

The highlight of the set was another song from the new album, ‘Between Two Worlds’, about somebody waiting for the result of a scan. Galloway explained that this puts the patient metaphorically in the position of Schrödinger’s cat, simultaneously well and not well, while awaiting a diagnosis. Galloway explained that on the new album, the song will be a piano ballad, but as he can’t carry a keyboard to gigs he played a guitar version instead. The result was a moving, contemplative ballad, Galloway singing with compassionate empathy while Gatland and the audience listened respectfully. As Gatland quipped, it was ‘the feel-good hit of the summer.’

In common with much of the finest prog rock, the band’s subject matter is frequently depressing, but there was also joy and passion in their playing. In the final song, My Clockwork Heart, they were joined onstage by Chris Parkins, who smiled and nodded along and then joined in the chorus. This brief moment of joy summed up the spirit of the whole festival. There was genuine camaraderie – other musicians stayed and watched the other bands, and some performers from previous years came to watch, too. Many of the musicians chatted with the audience members after their sets; at times, it felt like an amiable networking event for prog rockers and their fans… Bring on Prog the Forest 2025!

Update at 14.04 on Sunday 15 December 2024: The next Prog the Forest one day festival will take place on Saturday 6 December 2025.