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Rick Wakeman spent six months of 1977 recording Going For The One with Yes. Meanwhile, JJ Burnel and The Stranglers released two albums over the same time period in the same year. When Prog put the pair together in 2012, some might have expected the punk wars to resurface. What happened instead was an epic revealing of home truths about the time when prog’s glory years ended, and another movement took its place.

“What’s all this about?” asks Stranglers’ bassist Jean-Jacques Burnel is leaning forward in his chair and enquiring why he’s sitting next to the rather less buff former Yes keyboard player and all-round prog overlord Rick Wakeman.

We decided to bring together two men from opposite ends of the musical spectrum to find out what things were really like on the frontline all those years ago. In 1977 Wakeman had spent six months in Queen’s Mountain Studios in Montreux working on Yes’ Going For The One album. In stark contrast, The Stranglers were preparing to release not one but two albums, six months apart: Rattus Norvegicus and No More Heroes. For Yes it marked the end of their imperial phase. For The Stranglers it was the beginning of theirs.

The pair greet each like old friends – and it turns out that they are old friends, their paths having crossed several times over the years. “1977, then,” booms Wakeman, settling back into his chair. “I’m not certain either of us will remember that far back…”

For JJ, 1977 would have been the start of an adventure, whereas Rick had, to put it bluntly, been round the block a few times.

Rick Wakeman: Thank you!

Jean-Jacques Burnel: It was the first time we’d released an album. We felt something was going on – a bit of a revolution, and with every revolution you chuck the baby out with the bath water. It was a Year Zero for many people. It was only years later that people started admitting to having liked anything before Year Zero.

How long did that take?

JJ: A long time. I do remember Captain Sensible at the time, without any irony, admitting he liked Abba; and when I saw the Sex Pistols they were playing old Monkees covers. There was a dichotomy between what people were doing and what they were claiming in the press.

A lot of the bands claimed punk had nothing to do with drugs. I was like, “What?!” We used to get called hippies because we smoked dope. Everyone was broke and tight, so speed was the drug of choice because it was cheap.

What was 1977 like for you, Rick?

RW: In 1977 I’d just rejoined Yes and we were recording Going For The One in Switzerland, which took six months…

JJ: Six months! We recorded our first two albums in 10 days!

RW: A lot of that time was spent with Alan going skiing, Steve tuning his guitars, and trying to wake Chris up! But [label boss] Ahmet Ertegun came to us and said: “I don’t know how much longer I can keep funding records like this.” We realised that this was the last bastion of prog rock as we knew it. We were aware of punk – I’d seen it coming a few years earlier when I saw The Tubes and took them to A&M, who signed them.

JJ: Really? We used to love The Tubes.

RW: We were aware that something was going on. And it kills off what went before it, at least for a bit. When prog came along, it did away with the old beat and psychedelic groups, the way the beat groups had done away with the crooners before them.

JJ: When something new comes along, everyone wants to be a part of that peer group, to the extent that they’ll deny their history. It’s only when they’ve gained some confidence that they can start to admit where that history actually came from. Up until that point it’s almost politically incorrect to admit your influences!

But you can tell by just listening to the music. On our first album, the nearest thing we had to a prog rock song was this four-part piece called Down In The Sewer. That was about 11 minutes long and it was a suite. Prog rock, essentially, even if it was prog à la Beefheart and The Doors.

Did that kind of rivalry exist in prog, Rick? Did you have any dust-ups with ELP or Genesis?

RW: No. The press tried to stir things up, between myself and Keith Emerson especially. But we were great friends and we used to laugh about it all. We let it go on because it fuelled press.

But that rivalry did exist between punk bands and prog bands?

JJ: We used to laugh at things like Pink Floyd taking years to make an album. But we’ve just taken two years to make our album [Giants, 2012]. The creative process can take time, because you’re not on an assembly line. And you have a life outside the band as well. The two worlds did occasionally meet: Freddie Mercury bumping into Sid Vicious in the studio, members of Led Zeppelin turning up to punk gigs…

I don’t really recall fraternising with any bands from the previous generation apart from Dr Feelgood. When I was a kid I’d go and see bands like Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac and Black Cat Bones, who became Free, and I felt that kind of vibe in Dr Feelgood.

Our keyboard player, Dave Greenfield, was a prog rocker, though. When I first met him he had platform boots on, his jacket had frills, and he had long hair and what we called a semi-pro moustache. He introduced me to In The Land Of Grey And Pink by Caravan. I did like that. I do remember the Yes singer [Jon Anderson], though. Is he still into elves?

RW: Jon has his own little world. When he doesn’t like what’s happening in
the real one he retreats into his own one. He’s a big fan of yours, though,
JJ. We were touring together recently, driving around in the same car, listening to all sorts of music. We played some Stranglers, and he said to me: “You know, there’s a few of their songs that Yes could have done.” He was right. Certainly something like Golden Brown.

How did get you away with that?

JJ: There was a lot of hypocrisy involved at the time, like people claiming to be working class when they weren’t. I remember Joe Strummer crying on my shoulder when we were the first band to support Patti Smith and the Ramones. He was in a rhythm and blues band called The 101’ers; he was going, “Oh, I wish I had a band like yours!” He used to live in the Notting Hill squats at the time. No one knew his dad was a diplomat.

Was there a rivalry between the punk bands at the time?

JJ: Not until success kicked in. I remember meeting Steve Jones and Paul Cook from the Sex Pistols when we supported Patti Smith in 1976, and all Steve said to me was: “We’re going to be famous in six months’ time. I like your haircut!” Then a year later I remember having a punch-up with Steve and Paul and Paul Simonon from The Clash at the old Dingwalls. That’s when the rivalry seemed to start – when we started outselling everyone.

JJ: I’ll tell you something about Golden Brown that I’ve never told anyone before. It actually developed out of a prog rock suite. We were recording the La Folie album, and Hugh and I were pissed off because we seemed to be writing all the songs. So we said to Jet and Dave, “Right, you two are going to write a song. We’re off to the pub. Have it written when we get back.” We fucked off to the pub all afternoon.

Now, with Dave being a prog rocker and Jet being a jazzer, when we got back they presented us with this six-part piece of music. And we were like, “Fucking hell, we can’t record this.” We went, “Don’t like that bit… don’t like that… oh, wait a minute, we could something with that.” And the part we did like formed the basis for Golden Brown.

1977 has retrospectively been cast as the year of punk, but the biggest-selling albums of the year were Bat Out Of Hell and Rumours. Has there been a bit of rewriting of history?

JJ: Have you seen these re-runs of Top Of The Pops from 1977 on telly? What a load of shite! It’s like karaoke central.

So, 1977: was it fun?

JJ: It certainly was. I knew a year later that things were changing, though. I had a bank account, and I went in and the teller was a young girl with streaks of green in her hair. The great British assimilation had begun.

RW: It becomes mainstream.

JJ: Yes. It had become the norm.

In early 2007, a small, select group of journalists were sent to Petrax Studios in Hollola, 100 km North of Helsinki. Their mission was top secret: to report on recording sessions for Nightwish’s then-unannounced sixth album, Dark Passion Play, and interview their new singer, Anette Olzon.

“It was in the wintertime, and there was a lot of snow. We went out on sleds, Tuomas was driving, and I was in the back,” remembers Anette. She fondly calls the remote sessions, where she and band leader and songwriter, Tuomas Holopainen, holed up with just the studio techs and cabin staff, like “living in a camp for three weeks”.

“I took long walks in the snowy forest, which gave a lot of inspiration, and you could take breaks,” she adds. “So we had no pressure.” Keeping her identity a secret was a covert and time-consuming operation.

“That was a hell of [a lot of] work!” Tuomas said in a 2007 interview on the Nightwish forum. “We always avoided being seen together at the airport. Inside the plane, we were sitting totally apart and distant from each other. When [Anette] needed to come to Finland, we booked different hotels, with different names.”

Then again, it’s no surprise that Tuomas wanted to record Nightwish’s next musical chapter off-grid. To say the cycle for their previous album, 2004’s Once, had been a whirlwind would be putting it mildly. The record had turned the symphonic metallers into superstars, but behind the scenes, inter-band relationships had reached an all-time low. On 21 October 2005, after a huge, triumphant show in Helsinki, the band fired their then-singer, Tarja Turunen, via an open letter which they immediately posted to the Internet.

The drama caused a furore, with even the then-Finnish prime minister, Matti Vanhanen, giving his opinion (“I’m not for either side,” he said. “They are young people and hopefully will manage to go forward in this difficult situation”). Looking back, Anette admits she wasn’t aware of just how much things had kicked off when she took the job.

“I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I was quite naive, I guess,” she says. “I didn’t know how big the band was. And I think that’s my personality; if I want to do something, I jump on board.” She sighs. “Then, of course, I saw immediately that they had done this letter, and it was not so nice.”

Immediately, she found herself embroiled in melodrama. “If anything about [Tarja] came up on the tour bus, I didn’t want to be involved,” she says firmly. “It felt awkward for me to be in the situation.”

Released on 26 September 2007, stacked with cinematic bombast and dynamic musical statements, Dark Passion Play remains one of the best albums in Nightwish’s discography. Immediately, one song in particular, Bye Bye Beautiful, caught the attention of fans. Glossy and frantic and containing the lyric: “Still fresh from the red-hot blade of your words”, it didn’t take long for fans to figure out they were listening to symphonic metal’s first diss track, a personal, gloves-off, flip-off to Tarja.

“I talked to Tuomas about that,” Anette admits. From the start, she says was uncomfortable singing a song so personal and emotionally charged. While the lyrics in her verses are pretty obscure, Marko’s chorus is far more direct: “Did you ever hear what I told you? Did you ever read what I wrote you? … You chose the long road, but we’ll be waiting.”

It was important to Anette that Bye Bye Beautiful didn’t define her identity as the band’s newest member. “In the live shows, if you watch the YouTube [videos], you will see that I turn around when he sings his part,” she continues. It was a way to distance herself from the situation, and a move designed to show respect towards Tarja, with whom she has a positive relationship.

“Me and Tarja have talked on Instagram. I really love Tarja,” she adds firmly. “I’ve always stood up for her. I think she knows that. It was hard. It wasn’t the nicest situation for me either.”

For Tuomas, the song was a purge. “This is the reason I became a songwriter,” he told Faceculture in 2007. “I need to drill a hole into my head to let all the demons out. This song had to be done because I was feeling so bad about everything. It still is a huge part of my life, everything that happened, so of course I needed to do a song about what happened.”

Despite Bye Bye Beautiful’s direct message, he insisted his intentions had been pure with the song; it had been a form of therapy. “I hope no one gets offended by this song because it’s not a song about hatred at all,” he continued. “It sounds more aggressive than the meaning behind the song actually is.”

It was more, he says, about getting closure than pointing fingers. “For me, it’s just a farewell, a song about frustration and bittersweet feelings. It’s a song about a really sad happening where no one was really innocent.”

Despite her misgivings, Anette understands why Bye Bye Beautiful needed to exist. “Sometimes, Tuomas didn’t tell me what the songs were about, and sometimes I had to ask him, because he writes a lot in metaphors,” she says. “I need to know, when I sing, what I am singing about. Of course, with Bye Bye Beauitful, I knew what it was about. He was fully clear.”

She now sees herself as a narrator for Tuomas’ pain: “I think, for him, it was important to have that song there and a statement for him.”

By their own admission, Nightwish had been looking for something different when they started looking for their new singer. “The only thing we knew for sure was we did not want another classically trained operatic singer in the band,” Tuomas said in a 2007 interview with About Heavy Metal. “I personally think we hit the jackpot with Anette. She has a storyteller’s voice and doesn’t sound like Tarja at all.”

Even so, Dark Passion Play was something of a baptism of fire for the singer. Her first tour with Nightwish was their biggest and most intensive to date, spanning almost 200 shows over two years. Meanwhile, on her arrival at Petrax Studios, Tuomas had already written the full album, laying down the orchestral and choir parts during an extravagant eight-day session at London’s Abbey Road studios, at a cost of over 500,000 Euros. It meant that Anette had very little say in the songs.

“As a singer, you’d normally want to be able to change the key of the songs so that it fits your voice,” she says. “Many of the songs were really high. I had to work hard on [album opener] The Poet and the Pendulum, and For The Heart I Once Had is really high too. I’m not like a high soprano, I’m like a Meso soprano. I have my limits.”

For some fans who had followed the band since their inception, that switch-up between Tarja’s icy, operatic vocals and Anette’s warm, sweet belt was too stark a contrast, and some of them took it too far.

“I got hate letters sent to my home,” says Anette. She acknowledges now that reading YouTube comments, where many fans were often voicing cruel opinions and debating the differences between the two singers, had been detrimental to her mental health, leading to struggles with anxiety and panic attacks.

“That made me lose a lot of self-esteem,” she continues. “There were a lot of bad comments about my voice, that I couldn’t sing.”

These days she protects herself, taking medication for her anxiety and avoiding comments on social media: “I think it would have helped me a lot [back then] if I hadn’t read all the stuff [people] wrote.”

Nightwish stopped playing Bye Bye Beautiful in their live shows in 2008, with Tuomas calling the drama and song “dead and buried” in a 2009 interview. It’s the right move. While writing the track might have provided Tuomas with closure, the song itself felt catty even then, while many fans have argued the song was unnecessary given the band set out their reasons for Tarja’s sacking in their 2005 public letter.

Anette’s tenure would come to a similarly dramatic end. On October 1, 2012, during their Imaginaerum world tour, she was fired and replaced by current singer Floor Jansen, later claiming her sacking was because she was pregnant, a statement her former bandmates denied. Even so, she looks back on her time with the symphonic metallers with great fondness.

This summer, she set off on a European tour, playing her favourite Nightwish tracks from the two albums she sang on: Dark Passion Play and 2011’s Imaginaerum. And Bye Bye Beautiful, she says, will be part of the setlist.

“[For me] that song has nothing to do with Tarja,” she says. “It could be a Bye Bye Beautiful to anyone.” And while she says she hasn’t spoken to Tuomas since her acrimonious departure, she’d love to one day reunite with the band, with members both past and present.

“I cherish Nightwish with all the ups and downs, and I wish we could all be friends again,” she smiles. “I hope one day we will meet backstage and we can have a big hug again. I hope they feel the same. And maybe we could do a big show with all the singers.”