They’ve been around since the late 90s, but Elbow have come of (prog) age on their 10th album, Audio Vertigo. Guy Garvey and Craig Potter map their evolution from a bunch of rock fans with lofty musical ambitions to award-winning, chart-topping art-rockers whose fans include Peter Gabriel.
By the time Guy Garvey joined his guitarist mate Mark Potter’s band, Mr Soft, in 1990, his music-savvy sister, Becky, had already ensured the 16-year-old was schooled in the good stuff –from Genesis’s Selling England By The Pound onwards. “I have a deep love of prog rock,” says Garvey, who turned 50 in March. “Mark liked more meat-and-potatoes rock back then, AC/DC in particular. He’d come around to my mum’s house, we’d sit in the kitchen and write songs on a guitar. Then one day –I’m still flattered by it –he said, ‘I get my wage this weekend. Can we go into town and will you buy me a record collection?’” That Saturday the pair trooped around Manchester’s Corn Exchange and Afflecks Palace, sifting what gold they could from the markets’ secondhand music shops.
“Close To The Edge was one of those records,” the singer recalls, “and Crime Of The Century and In The Court Of The Crimson King. There was some Pink Floyd and some Santana, too –we used to cover Santana tunes early on.
“Starting out, we sounded just like what we were: a bunch of lads who have only had a few hours of playing together. Then straight away we were writing songs with three movements in them: ‘This will be the fast bit, then it’ll break down and come back to the first bit!’ And of course, it was all awful, for fucking years… But it was ambitious.”
Mr Soft would go on to refine their songwriting process and wisely
rechristen themselves Elbow later in the 90s. Their stunning 2001 debut album, Asleep In The Back, was partrecorded at Real World, where the band met and struck up a friendship with the gaffer, Peter Gabriel. He would go on to record a beautiful orchestral cover of their tune Mirrorball; they returned the favour with a moving read of his Mercy Street.
From Gabriel down, a wealth of progressive artists and prog fans alike have a lot of time for Elbow. They get and respect the artistry of what they do: the controlled intensity of Any Day Now; the hooky intrigue of Leaders Of The Free World; the blues DNA of Grounds For Divorce’s sinewy central riff. Their soundworld has a cinematic dimension, their musical arrangements are lean, purposeful, subtly intricate. In husky, proudly Mancunian tones, Garvey offers d
