Confession #1: Shortly after I bought this record, I plagiarised one of the verses in Time Table (the one that begins "A dusty table…") in one of my English essays. I think the feedback I got was that my work seemed uneasily caught between descriptive passages and plot. Had it not been for the plagiarised bits, it would have been all plot; I didn't know how to do descriptive, and felt the whole concept was faintly suspect and, well, sissy — let's just get on with what happens next! Such prog plagiarism was rife at our school at the time (1979ish), and some Genesis lyrics lent themselves well to it. J was a serial offender, and certainly used ripples never come back. By comparison, Yes and Rush lyrics were just a little too spacey to strike the right note with the Powers That Be. Van der Graaf Generator would have been ideal, and in authentic Sixth Form tone, too. But we weren't yet in the Sixth Form, and I didn't discovered them until a year or two later.
I wonder who our successors at school plagiarise? I fear it might be Keane. Though — and this is the killer — the chances are that the current generation of teachers would recognise Keane lyrics if they were reproduced in English essays (we had one chemistry teacher who admired Dire Straits' Love Over Gold but that was the Establishment's most advanced bridgehead into our culture). Then the thought occurs: what did Keane plagiarise? And I don't mean Coldplay; I mean when they were at school. For — and here comes Confession #2 — Keane went to the same school as me. Hence, in that posh-and-pleased-with-ourselves milieu, I was socioculturally programmed to buy prog LPs with gatefold sleeves at the age of fourteen. Admittedly not everyone succumbed, but, as with zits, some got it bad and some got away lightly. I was on the wrong side of average in both cases.
It's a weird piece of work, listening back to it. Get 'em Out by Friday is a very rum piece, cut from the same cloth as the twaddle on Nursery Cryme like Harold the Barrel. I believe it was the only appearance of Harlow New Town in popular music until Darren Hayman, the arch-Peter-Gabriel-antagonist, produced a whole album dedicated to it earlier this year. Then (as with "Cryme", as we never called it) there's one track where they pull it off and all those unlikely elements come together to make something coherent despite itself.
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