Time Is Relative

Barclay James Harvest's co-founding singer and guitarist John Lees has been leading his iteration of the prog overlords since the band split into two separate entities in 1998. With a new studio album - their first in 12 years - having recently landed, Lees joins Prog to chew over the band's legacy, the perils of playing to 250,000 fans by the Berlin Wall, and why the door has seemingly been left ajar for future live dates and, whisper it, even a reunion.

- Johnny Sharp

I've got no expectations," says John Lees of Relativity, the first album by his incarnation of Barclay James Harvest since 2013. "It's just nice to look back now and think, 'Wow, we've created this."

He's talking about the eight-year, pandemic-disrupted process of making the third album as John Lees' Barclay James Harvest, but he could just as well be referring to the illustrious body of work he played a part in making since the Oldham-formed symphonic prog pioneers made their recording debut back in 1970.

"The fact I'm still involved in making this music at 78 seems amazing to me," he adds. "In my 20s, if you'd told me I'd still be doing this, there's no way I'd have believed you."

With help from longtime JLBJH bandmates Craig Fletcher (bass, vocals), Kevin Whitehead (drums) and Jez Smith (keyboards), he's made a record that seems to lean into those kind of reflections on the passage of time, as well as other subjects related to our place in the grand scheme of things. Bookended by two nine-minute parts of the title track characterised by ruminative, ebbing and flowing long-form prog, it also dips into more AOR waters on the soft rock of Peace Like A River and the uplifting acoustic anthemics of Love. Elsewhere, The End Of Days has touches of gospel woven into a rueful view of the planet's continuing demise, and Snake Oil gets angry at spiritual charlatans selling us comforting but bogus visions of the afterlife. The Blood Of Abraham might sound verging on Christian judging by its title, but Lees explains that it's more about finding common ground in our fellow humans.

"If you believe what's written, then all of us have some relation to Abraham. So you look at all these wars going on between peoples, at the end of the day, we could all be from the same source, all related," he says.