SeriesPortraits
The Progressive Rock Band Book Series: Beyond the Sound Portraits
One band, one book. I take a single progressive rock band and stay with it, from the first line-up to what the music was worth afterwards.
- SeriesBeyond the Sound: Portraits
- AuthorMarcus Stone
- ApproachOne band, one book
If you want a progressive rock band book that follows one group from its first line-up to long after it stopped, this is the series I wrote for that. Beyond the Sound: Portraits gives each band a book of its own.
Where the five volumes of Beyond the Sound map whole scenes, a Portrait stays with a single band: the line-ups and why they changed, the labels and what they wanted, the records in the order they were made, the tours, the break, and what the music turned out to be worth afterwards. Each volume is, in effect, a progressive rock band history and a progressive rock band biography in one book, told as a story rather than a catalogue.
The Portraits
Each Portrait stands on its own and assumes no other reading. More Portraits will be added here as they are published.
More about the Gentle Giant book → · Download the free Gentle Giant reference card ↓
More about the Supertramp book → · Download the free Supertramp reference card ↓
More about the Pineapple Thief book → · Download the free Pineapple Thief reference card ↓
How a Portrait works
Short enough to finish. Each Portrait is built to be finished: short enough to read in a few sittings, long enough to say something.
Checked against documents. Every factual claim is checked against a documentary source before publication. Where sources disagree, I report the disagreement instead of quietly resolving it, and judgements about how the music sounds are attributed to the critics who made them.
No lyrics. No song lyrics are reproduced.
A free reference card. The Portraits published so far come with a free downloadable reference card.
Portrait or the five-volume series?
If you want the wider picture, scene by scene and country by country, start with the five-volume Beyond the Sound series. If you finished a volume and wanted the whole story on one of the bands inside it, a Portrait is the next step.
Explore the bands on Prog Atlas
All three bands also have full guides on this site.