In 1979, progressive rock was supposed to be dead or dying. The big names were cutting their songs down, chasing singles, apologising for the twenty-minute suite. And then a band from Stuttgart, two of whom had started it in high school seven years earlier, put out a debut that opens with a twenty-four-minute suite in four movements and does not apologise for anything. Adonis arrived as a blast of fresh air precisely because it refused to read the room. It is one of the finest German symphonic prog records, and it came out at the exact moment nobody was supposed to be making them.

The short version

Their debut, recorded and mixed at the Tonstudio Zuckerfabrik in Stuttgart in September 1978 and released in 1979 on Metronome; four tracks, sung in English. Harald Bareth plays Fender bass and sings lead; Uwe Karpa plays six- and twelve-string electric guitar; Matthias Ulmer plays grand piano, Fender Rhodes, Hammond organ, ARP Omni and Minimoog, and sings; Kono Konopik plays drums. All the music is written and arranged by the band; lyrics are by Conny Becker and the group. The whole of side one is the title suite. The band produced it themselves with Werner Bauer.

Two high-schoolers in Stuttgart

Anyone’s Daughter formed in Stuttgart in 1972, founded by guitarist Uwe Karpa and keyboardist Matthias Ulmer while they were still at school. It took seven years and the arrival of drummer Kono Konopik and singing bassist Harald Bareth to complete the classic line-up and get a debut onto shelves. The timing looked disastrous on paper: by 1979 progressive rock was in retreat, its biggest bands changing their sound in search of the charts, and a young act arriving with a side-long symphonic suite should have been laughed out of the room. Instead Adonis landed as something bold and welcome. The band are German and it shows — the obvious comparison is not the English giants but their countrymen Eloy, a link the band themselves have always denied — and Bareth turned out to be one of the more genuinely pleasant voices in German prog, closer to Greg Lake or John Wetton than to anyone local.

The sound

Melodic, warm and expansive symphonic rock, easy to get into without being lightweight. Karpa is the not-so-secret weapon: his guitar leads are tasteful and lyrical and they blend with Bareth’s bass and voice so cleanly that the band avoid the one-dimensionality neo-prog would later fall into. Ulmer’s keyboards do the heavy symphonic lifting — grand piano, Rhodes, Hammond and two synthesizers — and he doubles Bareth’s vocals often enough that the two voices lock into a single instrument. The gentle vocal harmonies sit on top of real progressive muscle underneath. It is less about aggression than about melody and build, and when the band do reach for intensity they earn it. For a symphonic act arriving this late in the genre’s first life, the confidence is remarkable.

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The songs

Adonis takes the whole first side, twenty-four minutes in four movements — Come Away, The Disguise, Adonis, The Epitaph — and it is the reason to be here. It opens peacefully, beautiful melodies drifting out of the speakers, Bareth’s bass soulful underneath, Ulmer doubling the vocal lines into that perfect union, and it builds and shifts across its length with the patience of a band that grew up on the English classics but sounds like nobody in particular. Blue House is the adagio instrumental, a slow and lovely showcase. Sally is the short one. And Anyone’s Daughter, the closer at nine minutes, is the track that comes nearest to the jackhammer intensity of the suite — the band’s own name turned into their hardest-hitting song, and the perfect counterweight to the gentleness of everything before it.

Reception and legacy

Adonis established the band and began a run that lasted into the mid-eighties, through the German-language albums that followed once they switched from English, and on to the gutsy neo-prog of Neue Sterne in 1983, before better-financed British acts came to dominate the movement they had helped restart. Bareth eventually stepped away — he left for military service and went on to a career in medicine, resurfacing much later as a guest voice on other people’s records — while Karpa and Ulmer kept the name alive across decades and many line-ups. Among people who follow German symphonic prog, Adonis is a touchstone: the record that proved the form still had life in it in 1979, made by a band who were too young and too committed to know they were supposed to have given up.

The verdict

For the curious, and a genuine reward if symphonic prog is what you love. It is warm, tuneful and unfashionably ambitious, and the title suite alone justifies it. Do not expect Krautrock — this is the melodic, English-influenced end of the German scene, not the cosmic one. Play the Adonis suite whole, then the song Anyone’s Daughter. Then Eloy for the countrymen they resemble and deny, and early Genesis and King Crimson for the English roots underneath. Two schoolkids in Stuttgart, seven years of patience, and a debut that walked in exactly when the door was closing and propped it open.

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