1969. The Apollo 11 moon landings, the first flights of the Boeing 747 and Concorde, the births of Dave Grohl and both members of Air, the cinema release of Midnight Cowboy, the Woodstock festival, the first transmission of Monty Python's Flying Circus and the release of The Beatles' album, Abbey Road and Led Zeppelin I & II. These are just a few of the historical events that happened in that year, but it is also a year when a very important progressive rock album was released - King Crimson’s 'Court of The Crimson King'. 1969 is where this website begins but not where my life begins as that is just nine years later in 1978.
The idea of this website was conceived in early 2018 and finally launched in 2019. I had been writing a few Marillion album reviews and these had been very popular on Facebook, but I wanted to write about other progressive rock albums as well. I had been listening to many of these albums since I was a teenager back in the mid-1990s but others I had only discovered and began to appreciate in the last few years. I hope there is a good range of both older and more recent albums.
I sometimes feel that I had been born twenty years too late, but I am grateful to have seen over a hundred different bands and artists over the last twenty-five years. I hope you enjoy reading the reviews of these albums and shows as much as have enjoyed writing them and that it will encourage you to either rediscover or discover them for the first time.
On a final note, in case you were wondering about the name of the website. It is derived from the Supertramp album 'Crime Of The Century' as 'Prime Of The Half Century' and then shortened to 'Prime Half Century'.
Aidan Campbell (editor & writer)