FREE SPIRITS

Despite playing around the countryside for decades, Solstice are the best-kept secret in British prog. This year they celebrate their 45th anniversary with a new album. Welcome to the Clann!

- Dave Everley

Solstice guitarist Andy Glass never expected to be playing for Queen Elizabeth II.

His band emerged as the spliff-wielding hippie wing of the early 80s British prog revival, and had followed a fairly wayward path ever since.

Yet there they were, in 2007, performing in front of the reigning monarch on a makeshift stage at the opening of Milton Keynes football team MK Dons' brand new stadium, while jazz singer Cleo Laine waited to follow them.

"We're essentially a Milton Keynes band and they wanted some local representation," says Glass, whose Hawkwind-roadie ponytail and chilled stoner's drawl match his band's laidback but exploratory music. "God knows why they picked us though. But we were invited, and I thought, 'Yep, definitely.'"

They only played one song, the title track of their early 90s album New Life. But Glass swears he saw HRH digging it. "We're going at it, and she was, like 'Whooh! I love this prog rock!'"

He's kidding. Solstice are unlikely candidates for any kind of royal approval. Rarely has a band been so disinterested in playing the game. Where their onetime peers Marillion became unlikely mid-80s pop stars before settling into their current late-career purple patch, Solstice's own stop/start 45-year career has been defined by an absence of burning ambition and suspicion of the mainstream music industry.

"I don't regret having that attitude one bit," says Glass cheerfully. "We went and sat in front of a couple of big record company desks with a bloke smoking a cigar behind them. We always left thinking, 'Fuck that, just no.'"