“We made bad albums. Two of them should be melted down into flowerpots. But how many great pieces of artwork are you going to create in your career?” What Carl Palmer really thinks of ELP

Features
By ( Prog, Classic Rock ) published

Comparing his band to Yes and Pink Floyd, the sole surviving member looks back on OTT productions, getting carried away with overdubs and constant criticism – but insists: “We were setting a standard”

Rock musicians (from left to right) Greg Lake (1947 - 2016), Keith Emerson (1944 - 2016), and Carl Palmer, of the group Emerson Lake And Palmer receive their awards at the 1972 Melody Maker Pop Poll; readers of the weekly music paper voted ELP the World's Top Group, and between then they won seven awards, 30th September 1972. (Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images)
(Image credit: Getty Images)

Emerson, Lake and Palmer appeared to be enjoying a resurgence in 2020. Sole surviving member Carl Palmer was assembling a live show based on 1992 footage, which was to be edited so that he and his band could be seen playing live along with Keith Emerson and Greg Lake on video screens.

Meanwhile discussions were underway to make a sci-fi movie from some of the concepts ELP covered in Brain Salad Surgery, a new documentary was being produced, and Palmer was putting the finishing touches on his memoir, Fanfare For The Common Man.

Having secured the permission of his late colleagues’ families to make the most of ELP’s legacy, Palmer told Prog why it mattered so much, and what the band meant to him a decade after their final concert.

“I’m thinking about where we are now as a band, even if it’s just me. If I was up there and Keith and Greg were down here, they’d be doing the same thing as this. We always embraced technology; we were always at the forefront of that. We had this golden time around Brain Salad Surgery where we were embracing new ideas and making them work in our music.

Not to be rude, but we’ve never recorded something as abstract as Topographic Oceans – I’ve never known what it was all about! I’m not putting Yes down, because they’re a great band, but we had it all. We never managed to get political like Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

FORT LAUDERDALE, FL - JANUARY 30: Carl Palmer of Carl Palmer's ELP Legacy performs live in concert at Au-Rene Theater at Broward Center for Performing Arts on January 30, 2022 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. (Photo by Johnny Louis/Getty Images)

(Image credit: Getty Images)

When we did something like that it was Tarkus and it was a bit cartoon-like: an animal shaped like a tank. It was all a bit gimmicky, perhaps not intellectual enough. But the music is absolutely stunning, so we kind of had it all wrapped up. We just didn’t do it for long enough; that was the problem.

Unfortunately, from Trilogy onwards, we overdubbed so much. With an album like our debut, we’d made it so you could produce it on stage as three people and make it sound really big. But we obviously couldn’t play Tarkus all the way through – on that song alone there are 17 edits.

Brain Salad Surgery had even more overdubs – we couldn’t take it to the stage without four auxiliary musicians, which was almost frowned upon in the 70s. We were known as this powerhouse trio so we thought it would be wrong to do that. We thought we had to make the best record we could, and we did – but we couldn’t produce it and tour it as much as we’d have liked to.

We were always frowned upon by journalists and even some bands wouldn’t talk to us because they thought we were up our own arses. But we were setting a standard. We were one of the first bands to do a production, where there was eye candy, a bit of film, Keith hanging off the ceilings...

Then the big production became the norm, and we always carried that thing: ‘they’re too overblown, they’re too OTT.’ But the music itself stood the test of time.

We made bad albums – In The Hot Seat and Love Beach should be melted down and made into flowerpots. But how many great pieces of artwork are you going to get to create in your career? I think we managed to do four or five that stand up today, and I couldn’t ask for more than that.”

Philip Wilding
Philip Wilding

Philip Wilding is a novelist, journalist, scriptwriter, biographer and radio producer. As a young journalist he criss-crossed most of the United States with bands like Motley Crue, Kiss and Poison (think the Almost Famous movie but with more hairspray). More latterly, he’s sat down to chat with bands like the slightly more erudite Manic Street Preachers, Afghan Whigs, Rush and Marillion. 

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