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Nektar

Entry updated 2 April 2015. Tagged: Music.

UK progressive rock band, founded in Hamburg in 1969 and based thereafter in Germany. Their first album, Journey to the Centre of the Eye (1971) spins an only obliquely Verne-like premise in which an astronaut travels to another dimension from which he is able to witness the nuclear destruction of Earth. A Tab in the Ocean (1972) is an incoherently druggy suite of songs, this time premised on the idea of dropping an enormous "tab" of LSD into the ocean and intoxicating the whole of nature (see Drugs; Urban Legends). Better, and more unambiguously sf, is Remember the Future (1974), a concept album about a blind boy in communication with a Christ-like extraterrestrial called Bluebird. Down to Earth (1975) is a circus-themed concept album (the first track, "Astral Man" concerns not an astronaut but a high-wire walker). Perhaps the group's best work was on Recycled (1975), a musically deft concept piece that, inspired by the nascent 1970s environmentalist movement, prophesies a depleted and polluted future world in which only recycled energy is available to mankind. Musically, Nektar are reminiscent of other 1970s prog bands with space-rock sounds, particularly Pink Floyd and Genesis. Later albums moved in the direction of a blander, more mainstream sound and are much less notable. [AR]

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