Art & Creativity Quote by Michael Giles

It is a humblebrag, but the kind progressive rock was built to justify: we weren't chasing a genre, we were chasing an identity. Michael Giles frames the band’s choices in negatives - not blues, not jazz, not rock, not even the reigning rock royalty of Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones. The list works like a fence. By naming the obvious templates, he signals fluency in the era’s musical language while insisting they refused its most marketable dialects.

The subtext is less about purity than positioning. Late-60s Britain was crowded with acts defining themselves through lineage: blues revivalists, heavy rock maximalists, psychedelic experimenters. Giles is describing a strategic refusal of inheritance, an attempt to sound like no one else in a moment when “authenticity” often meant sounding like your heroes. The little swerve from styles (“blues,” “jazz,” “rock”) to proper nouns (Zeppelin, Stones) matters: they weren’t just dodging genres, they were dodging the gravitational pull of brands, the shortcut of borrowing someone else’s swagger.

It also quietly explains a certain tension in ambitious bands: the desire to be new collides with the fact that audiences use references to listen. Saying “we didn’t want to be like any of the other bands” is both manifesto and defense, a preemptive answer to the inevitable question of influence. In the progressive scene, difference wasn’t an accident; it was the point, the product, and sometimes the burden.