Sunday 6 April 2025
Camden Club, London
*****
A double-header of new prog rock albums in a Sunday afternoon launch
Despite the London sunshine, rather than lazing on a Sunday afternoon, progressive rock fans packed themselves into the small but perfectly formed venue that is the Camden club. Long songs and high concepts were promised, and this gig didn’t disappoint. The event, organised by the tireless Chris Parkins of London Prog Gigs, saw the launch of two new albums. Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate were here to showcase their eighth studio album, The Uncertainty Principle. But before that, a relatively new band – albeit made up of veterans – Ghost of the Machine had travelled from Yorkshire to launch their second studio album, Empires Must Fall.
The afternoon began with a short Q&A session hosted by Charlie Bramald of Ghost of the Machine and Malcolm Galloway of Hats Off. An audience member asked if there would be any dancing. Galloway said that, as a former doctor, he would recommend physical exercise and invited the audience to ‘express themselves physically,’ before admitting that sounded wrong. He asked Bramald which came first in creating an album, ‘the concept, the music… or the choreography.’
As Genesis themselves admitted, prog rockers generally ‘can’t dance’ – presumably because of the complex time signatures (one of the most amusing sights I have seen at a prog rock gig was several seated gentlemen on the front row of a Steven Wilson concert, desperately trying to head bang in time to one of Wilson’s more esoteric rhythms). Bramald, whose band have been compared to Genesis, admitted that the genesis (see what he did there?) of the songs was usually a keyboard part from Mark [Hagan]. Galloway said that he usually wrote in speech rhythms, and did an uncannily inaccurate [sic] demonstration of Beyoncé singing a melismatic melody.
Bramald asked Galloway how the eighth Hats Off album differed from the previous seven. Galloway quipped that the main difference between the albums was the colour scheme of the booklet. But there was a serious point – the album traces the development of quantum physics up to the 1950s, so a Cold War colour scheme was felt appropriate. Some of the highly imaginative images from the album were projected on a screen behind the band. However, before we became too impressed by the technology, the band’s bass player, Mark Gatland admitted he couldn’t hear his bass amp as it was hidden behind the screen.
Ghost of the Machine have only one fewer word in their name than Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate, although it could be argued they are syllabically challenged in comparison. They made up for their lack of syllables by having six band members on stage – Bramald (vocals), Graham Garbett and Scott Owens (guitars), Mark Hagan (keyboards), Stuart McAuley (bass) and Andy Milner (drums). They decided to treat us to the entire album, Empires Must Fall, in the order it appears. This was their first London gig, and early on Bramald said it had been worth coming all the way from Yorkshire; the sold-out audience was very enthusiastic.
The new album is, naturally, a concept album. It continues the narrative from the first album, Scissorgames (2022). At the end of that album, the main character, Hope, who appears on the cover of both albums, freed herself from a tyrant but ended up in prison as a result. She becomes a superior being and creates an empire of light into which she draws those who are due to commit crimes in the future. As Bramald told Stephen Lambe of Prog magazine, the moral ambiguity of this is similar to that of the 2002 film Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise. She starts a revolution which leads to war, but the album ends on a more hopeful note of forgiveness.
It’s tempting to play a game of spot the influence with a relatively new band. As mentioned earlier, Genesis is a possibility, as is Marillion. There were touches of Asia, and Yes, and Bramald’s voice was sometimes reminiscent of Geddy Lee of Rush or Roger Hodgson of Supertramp. However, while acknowledging that these luminaries make excellent musical company, the band itself prefers not to be categorised. The only overt influence was when keyboard player Hagan gave a brief rendition of Tubeway Army’s 1979 smash hit Are ‘Friends’ Electric, written by Gary Numan, his musical hero. However, there was a definite influence from Rick Wakeman’s 1974 classic, Journey to the Centre of the Earth, particularly in the opening song, Keepers of the Light. The instrumental section was lacking a glittering cape but was suitably proggy, before the band returned to one of its great strengths, strong melodies. Bramald, as in all the songs, was a compelling stage presence, acting out the lyrics while his voice soared above the band.
Days That Never Were began with gentle piano and synth, and a lovely bass riff that introduced a rocky number with a beautiful harmonic change. The song ended with a mighty drum flourish. Bramald explained that the next song, Panopticon, is the centre piece of the album. For those who don’t know (I admit that I didn’t), a panopticon is a circular prison designed by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century, to allow all the prisoners to be seen at the same time. It’s a perfect metaphor for isolation, as in the wall that surrounds the protagonist in Pink Floyd’s 1979 album The Wall. As the lyrics of Panopticon state, we are ‘prisoners of our own design’, who eventually break out from prison, just as Pink Floyd’s character tears down the wall. The panopticon is also a metaphor for surveillance culture, a malevolent form of the benign accumulation of data that Peter Gabriel describes in his song Panopticom (note the change in the final letter) from his 2023 album i/o. But, as Days That Never Were states, ‘Empires must fall’… and, according to Bramald, we can help bring them down. Interestingly, Hats Off expressed a similar opinion in the song All Empires Fall from 2022’s The Confidence Trick. As Galloway writes,
Even the most evil dictator will, like everyone else, die. Every empire eventually crumbles. At the most basic level, the second law of thermodynamics suggests that any conquest is ultimately temporary. All empires fall.
The highlight of Ghost of the Machine’s set was the final song from their new album, the 14-minute epic After the War. The first section, ‘Runs Away’, began as a piano ballad, featuring gentle guitar and backing vocals from Graham Garbett. The song built up pleasingly to a metal guitar section, with a sense of inevitability and majesty. The next section, ‘Bells’, featured a suitably bell-like piano part by Mark Hagan, frenetic percussion, and swirling guitars. Section three, ‘Sunrise and Sirens’ began with a flowing piano part and an almost funky guitar riff, expressing optimism around the lyric ‘the war is over’. In the next section, the instrumental ‘Sorrow in the Silence’, Scott Owens played a spiky guitar solo, and Garbett joined him in a lovely duet. The final sections, ‘The Sound of Home’ and ‘With Me’ were uplifting, including another fine solo from Garbett, whose playing had been superb throughout the set.
Malcolm Galloway of Hats Off self-deprecatingly offered to ‘kill the mood’ with ‘an hour of very educational stuff about quantum physics.’ As a former neuropathologist, the concepts behind the Hats Off albums often have a strong scientific basis. But as Galloway said in the Q&A session, the songs aren’t ‘just dry physics.’ For each track, he adopts the perspective of a different character. A good example is the One Word That Means The World (Arkhipov), the first single from the new album, in which Galloway describes an agonising dilemma in an eloquent and moving vignette about ‘not starting a nuclear war.’ Galloway and Gatland performed a blistering version; Galloway’s agonised vocals bring out the song’s anguish and essential humanity in a stunning performance. The opening song, Certainty, the first track on the new album, began with a vocal duet, Galloway and Gatland singing in gentle unison. But as the song reached its climax, Galloway’s voice exploded with emotion. The deep bond between these two gentlemen (they have known each other since school) was evident when they faced each other, and a warm smile passed between them.
Galloway reassured the audience that there would be ‘no shouting’ on the third song in the set, the instrumental The Ultraviolet Catastrophe. This is difficult to play, but as Gatland quipped at the end, ‘someone’s been putting the hours in.’ There was a spacey, psychedelic intro with sequenced keyboards, and virtuosic guitar-playing from Galloway – those hours of practice paid off. Gatland’s bass-playing was delightfully chunky, and at one point he played his bass around his knees like a prog rock Peter Hook. A genuinely inspiring performance. Galloway’s voice was lower, richly warm in Copenhagen, another single from The Uncertainty Principle, bringing out the humanity and ambiguity of the much-disputed meeting between quantum physicist Niels Bohr and his former student Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen in 1941.
The deep humanity of Galloway’s performance was evident in another new song, Between Two Worlds, which one suspects is more personal, given that he has suffered from complex medical conditions. To use an analogy from quantum mechanics, the song explores the dilemma in Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment, the uncertainty in waiting for test results which could be either positive or negative. Galloway performed a moving version on solo piano, with half-spoken contemplative vocals, drawing us into a strange world between two worlds.
From the personal, Galloway brought us back to the political in another new song, Think Tank. In a lengthy and fascinating introduction, Galloway explained that the song is inspired by a whistleblower from a US nuclear war think tank in the 1950s, which decided it was too complicated to have two different plans… so the best thing to do was to nuke both China and Russia. As Galloway dryly pointed out, ‘the apocalypse leads to some administrative challenges’, some of which were resolved by the five-digit nuclear code being incredibly hard to guess (00000 in case you were wondering). At least, as Galloway said, we were lucky that we weren’t in some hideous post-apocalyptic wasteland. ‘How do you know?’ came the witty response from an audience member. Whatever the theoretical background of the song, Galloway and Gatland’s performance was stunning. Galloway’s guitar playing throughout the set was fluid, passionate, virtuosic and compassionate. Gatland was also playing at the top of his game. It was a privilege to witness the two of them together.
The set ended with an ‘encore’ (due to time pressure, the band didn’t leave the stage and wait for adoring applause and shouts for more), the new album’s title track, The Uncertainty Principle. Kathryn Thomas joined them on flute. With a look of fierce concentration on her face, watching Galloway like a hawk, she matched his bluesy guitar solos, bringing a lovely jazz element in contrast to the distorted guitar. At the end of the song, Galloway bade the audience ‘goodbye’.
But there was a surprise to come, an extra song, dedicated to Béla [Alabástrom], who had come all the way from Brussels, Century Rain from 2020’s Nostalgia For Infinity. The song also came as a surprise to the laptop providing the backing tracks; it gave up and left the trio to perform ‘a cappella’ as it were, with a very witty false ending in the style of King Crimson. The audience rose to its feet to give the band a well-deserved standing ovation.
Sources
Stephen Lambe Empire of Ghosts (Prog Magazine Issue 158, 07.03.25)
Malcolm Galloway The Confidence Trick – Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate (hatsoffgentlemen.com)