CD: Genesis, The Beginning 1970-1975

For anyone too young to remember the early 70s firsthand, progressive rock can seem almost impossibly arcane and strange. Was there really a time when a band could expect to do good business with 21 minute-long songs in 9/8 time about supernatural experiences involving the spirit of the pharaoh Akhenaten, performed by a vocalist dressed as a kind of bulbous alien with an inflatable penis? Punk's scorched-earth policy towards the bands it decried as dinosaurs was ruthlessly effective. Thirty years on, prog is still persona non grata. Unless you train an ear to Stuart Maconie's 6 Music show, or Fish On Friday, the Planet Rock show presented by the former Marillion frontman, you seldom hear prog on classic rock radio. Only Pink Floyd - never really a prog band, their penchant for long songs and "concepts" notwithstanding - are permitted into the 100 best album lists. The present-day bands who are held to be under the genre's influence sound absolutely nothing like prog, as will be attested by any Muse or Radiohead or Elbow fan who has made an investigative purchase of a Yes album, then recoiled with a baffled yell of horror when it started playing.

For years, it was held that this was a just state of affairs, that prog got what it deserved for its self-important pomposity. But in a rock world where a dreary and constrained notion of good taste has held sway for so long that it's definitely starting to resemble a failure of imagination, it's hard not to start looking a little wistfully at the prog era, at least in theory. That business with the long songs and the costumes might be silly and overblown, but can it possibly, as the punks claimed, be boring? Boring is surely Snow Patrol and Scouting for Girls, not jumping around dressed as an alien with an inflatable cock.

The five Peter Gabriel-era Genesis albums and sundry extras collected here allow the theory to be tested. The Beginning comes with sleeve notes from a selection of celebrities, among them Tony Robinson - you somehow just knew he was a prog fan, didn't you? - Jeremy Clarkson and David Baddiel. Baddiel claims that if you strip away the extraneous matter from Genesis's early-70s output, you're left with brilliant tunes. He has a point. No matter where you are on The Beginning, you're never that far away from a genuinely beguiling melody: the chorus of 1973's I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe); Counting Out Time, from the following year's The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway; Nursery Cryme's lovely For Absent Friends. This state of affairs is usually aided by Gabriel's vocals, which strike a curious, appealing balance between resolutely English eccentricity and a smoky soulfulness. Maintaining the latter was no mean feat, given some of the lyrics he wrote: "A young figure sits still by a pool," he croons on Supper's Ready. "He's been stamped 'human bacon' by some butchery tool."

But there's an inordinate amount of extraneous matter to strip away, and it represents the collective sine qua non of prog. There are shifting time signatures. There are widdling keyboard solos and a lot of vaguely medieval-inspired guitar work. And there are concepts comprehensible only to their creator, not least The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, which spends an hour and half making no sense at all.

At times, some of this seems like an end in itself: it would take a hugely concerted effort to remain unstirred by guitarist Steve Hackett's solo on Firth of Fifth, long though it is. Equally, there are moments when it just seems maddening: the notion of writing songs with shifting time signatures appears to have largely died out after prog because the results are so ugly, so lumpily indigestible. As you plough through The Beginning, you are grateful when Genesis lay off the trickery and let fly with something straightforward: The Carpet Crawlers isn't the best song on The Lamb because it's devoid of superfluous folderol - it's just got the best tune - but the lack of superfluous folderol certainly helps.

At points during The Beginning, you understand the impulses that sent prog packing in the first place - it's a hardy soul that gets through White Mountain, a song from 1970's Trespass about a wolf called Fang having a fight with a wolf called One Eye, without being overwhelmed by the urge to form Sham 69. Elsewhere, however, you're confronted not by the pomposity of popular myth, but something else entirely: a band with ideas. Too many ideas, probably, and not all of them good; but better that than no ideas at all. Whatever its flaws, you'd never call the music on The Beginning boring.