Got this cd from a friend that past away... took him to Jethro Tull concert and on the way in and back we listened to this epic album.. RIP Bent.. may you still Rock
When I listen to Sky I'm taken back to the very early 80's sitting in the living room on the floor, for our Sat night LP sessions with my parents. Heaven
I bak also but I was a young adult bought the lp when it came -I heard when it was played on national radio so it was a buy and I had a super audiosystem.
Thanks for sharing. I had all the SKY LPs back in the 80s and was and still am a huge fan. It is great that other people share this love. What a marvellous band, made up of wonderful musicians that had their greater success somewhere else, but still, SKY is timeless and fantastic.
Used to listen to Sky 1 when I was very young with my Dad. Haven't listened to the album in over 30 years. Revisited, brings it all back. Fantastic album. Surprised to read negative reviews on websites. This album is wonderful.
As debut albums go, this is still one of the best ever, by any band. None of the music on this album has dated. This and Sky 2, I don't hear it and automatically say "yeah this is late 70s, early 80s" - doesn't happen. Fantastic music by fantastic musicians.
I wouldn't say "prog rock", just "GENIUS". Visionary melodies, written by incredibly tasteful, accomplished musicians. And how perfectly recorded! Still sounds good on the stereo.
I was 17 years old, sitting in the middle of some old theatre in Sydney, around 1980, being absolutely blown away by SKY!!! Best concert I've ever been to: ever!!! Toccata was the encore and I was screaming, crying and jumping up and down, like everyone else at that amazing show. The only sad part? I was sitting 2 seats away from this gorgeous guy and my sister was sitting in the middle. She wanted to swap seats so I could talk to him, and he was smiling at me, but I was too shy. Bummer! Wonder what would have happened if I'd switched seats? "Where Opposites Meet", indeed.
Im only 18 years old, and just picked this album up on Vinyl in the leftovers basket of a music store. The cover intrigued me. And damn! Its good! Ive been a fan of progrock for a while, like Camel, Pink Floyd, Mike Oldfield, King Crimson, and more. Great new addition to my collection!
I'm 18 and obviously grew up on the modern music of the 21st century. I always share my musical discoveries with my dad and for a while now he's kept on telling me to look into sky because they were his favourites back in his younger days and I must say, they are quite fascinating and not like anything I've heard before. I'm really intrigued about their style and the atmosphere they produce, it almost gives me a clear vision of what it was like in the 80s. When I listen to this, I feel like I kind of miss those days, even though I wasn't actually present at the time
Well I played through the 80's. It was not all like this. I know after an orchestra rehearsal when the band went to their first rehearsal, Fry had never played drums. He got good pretty fast! :)
To be fair, it's less of an example of 80's music, more a superlative example of the "Exception to the rule"... in popular culture, if you believe in such things, the 80's was dominated by pop and trends. Groups such as Sky, and many, many other excellent bands didn't aspire to such trends.
I remember I used to read the trilogy "Lord of the rings" with this music in the background. I played it over and over when I was reading and it was around 1980 and I was 15 years old. It was a great experience and now when I hear this music I always think back of that moment. I am now 55 years old and still remembers it very well.
@@GrinnenBaeritt I'm about the same age as y'all and trying to figure out why I never heard of them til just a couple of years ago. I mean, it's not like I wasn't listening to music. Hell, when other young kids were listening to stuff like The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round, I was listening to America Pie and Rolling Stones and stuff.
This takes me back. What a truly fantastic piece of music. Enormous depth and harmony, beautifully arranged. The contrasting falls and rises on keys and guitar work so very well. MANY THANKS for the upload !!
Earphones - I always think you get the full musical recording and you don't miss a thing - Just make 'em a good set...... I still use my old Wharfdales, they must be 20 years old but the sound quality is spectacular !!
Unlikely to happen. Kevin Peek and Steve Gray have passed away, and John Williams and Francis Monkman are still doing other great things. Sad as live, they sounded as good as their recordings. Can only say that about Rick Wakeman when you toured 30 years ago!
@@poisenbery I'd be really interested to listen to some of the modern jazz fusion you're talking about, if you'd be so good as to give us a few names to check out? If it's capable of making John Williams, Francis Monkman, Herbie Flowers, Tristan Fry and Kevin Peek (RIP mate) appear lacking, it must be unbelievably good!
@@poisenbery I agree. It's an interesting time-capsule, but it's crap really. In fact, I think even in their day Sky gave progressive rock its reputation for being boring pretentious crap.
My mum bought this album when I was 12... Prior to that, I was into Abba, Cliff Richard and the soundtrack to "Grease". After this revelation, I did the whole prog-rock thing, with a major detour into the wonderful world of Goth. An interesting journey. Try "Van-Der Graaf Generator" meets "Scraping Foetus Off the Wheel"? A song for every mood!
Uncanny. I was also 12, had the whole Abba backlog and the Grease album. Sky turned me to rock too. My gran embroidered the sky logo on a demin jacket for me - how cool was that ? Eventually I succumbed to the less gentle melodies of Status Quo and Iron Maiden.....
They were not promoted in the right way. They were absolutely brilliant!! Yeah...the dark side to the music business. Politics, pay offs, drugs, sexual promiscuity, journalism with its lies...total garbage that has nothing to do with being naturally talented nor can it measure the abilities in music . Its creativity!
Yes, this is really worth looking at, especially the bit where the train crosses the Nullarbor Plain. The smallness of human achievement against the vastness of nature.
Absolutely my parents were Sky fans and I remember both listening to the albums with them and Watching the Great Railway Journeys of the World too ! This album worked so well with the Australian journey !
I am from Mexico , and let me tell you something : the real meaning was the ORIGINAL SOUND of word " MEXICO " but say it in spanish , MEHEECO . and if you carefully listen, has a MEXICAN TOUCH ( not latin touch)
Can anybody give me a link (torrent) with all of their albums included? I tried but I did not have much success (probably because I searched "sky band" "sky rock band" and stuff like that so it's not an easy job...) This band is awesome, too bad they split up. I need all of their albums!
When you say '...a link with all their albums included', what exactly do you mean? If you just want a full discography, you can do no better than going to the indispensable Discogs site (Discogs.com). Just put Sky into the search box, and click on the first image of them (black and white) on the top line of pictures. The next thing you get will be their complete discography (albums, singles, compilations and videos), and many of the pages will have a small video box showing tracks linked to Discogs from RU-vid.
Can we cut out this "Prog Rock" crap? What an insulting term! "Prog Rock"! It sounds like something you would shovel off your driveway or find with an endoscope! Back to our roots the term is "Psychedelic Symphonic Rock - Fudge, Butterfly, Moodies, Zep, Crimson, Crow, ELP, Sabbath etc.
In 1981, TVB, Hong Kong's largest TV station, began to use the portion of this track starting at 16:55 as the theme music for its current affairs programme, "News Magazine". It lasted into the new millennium.
This is one of my all-time favourite pieces of music, written by Francis Monkman (with maybe a bit of Mike Oldfield influence in there?), and performed brilliantly by the brilliant musical talents that went to make up Sky.
What a great masterpiece! This exemplifies the prog rock long form like few others - those that spring to mind are Pink Floyd's Echoes, Van der Graaf Generator's A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers, Emerson Lake and Palmer's Tarkus, Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick, Genesis' Supper's Ready - I could add quite a long list, but let's leave it at that. The memory that is burnt into my mind is how this piece was used as incidental music for the BBC's Great Railway Journeys of the World episode on the railway that runs the entire width of Australia, titled The Long Straight. The track runs for 297 miles dead straight across the Nullarbor Plain, connecting Sydney to Perth, and is the world's longest stretch of straight track. There are parts of the journey where the rattle of the wheels becomes mesmerising, emphasised by the endless, featureless terrain, and there are sections of Where Opposites Meet which fit perfectly with that part of the film. It was great to be reminded of this again by searching for this piece on YT - thanks.
Count. Daniel John Fogarty Hi Daniel, thanks for your comment, sorry to be a little slow in responding. I've had problems with my PC going dead slow. I've got it sorted now. Oh, and a little thing beginning with X got in the way! I've been thinking about what to include, and what to leave out. I don't know if any of the pieces I mentioned in my previous post are of interest to you, but I'm quite happy to point you in the direction of anything you'll be receptive to. I don't know whether you're looking for things that are similar to the Sky piece - in which case, it'll be a fairly slim volume, as there is little that ever came close to that. Or are you happy to trawl through the wider catalogue of rock symphonic which could include anybody from there to Pat Metheny through to Tangerine Dream, Alan Stivell to Todd Rundgren, or Jade Warrior to Virginia Astley - I can point you any which way you like, through whatever takes your fancy in my personal 50-year collection of around 10,000 items, and virtually every musical genre you could care to name! Probably best if this is done by e-mail, but I'm not sure if we can do that via RU-vid. All the best for '14.
I used to own this wonderful album. I saw that episode, "Great Railway Journeys of the World: the Long Straight". And it's now on RU-vid (in parts, unfortunately). The use of "Where Opposites Meet" is extremely effective. As you say, it fits exactly with the scenes from the sky of the train crossing the Nullabor Plain.
That is so true even with the great departed Robert Miles who wrote Great Albums like Dreamland and Children who passed away on the 9th of last month from stage 4 cancer would have most likely had to really loved the sky sound as they too were the pioneers of early progressive trance music.
Francis Monkman: I know he played in a band called Curved Air with a singer, but I imagine he had a lot of interesting instrumental music. Not too easy to hear. This piece would have worked better without the "attempt to do rock n'roll" (badly) a little over midway, but anyway...if heard as a b-side to Fifo, there's an album length of Francis Monkman music for you
Lo triste es que en las emisoras de radio ya no se programe este tipo de música. Es una pena. Bueno el consuelo es Internet aunque no me gustan los MP3
Music does not have colour clown, only the foolish remarks of invisible notes !! Have you every seen a blind person dance with his or her deaf partner ??
Sorry, what? This is classical and rock fusion. Don't recall any colour being mentioned. And I love New Orleans jazz and ANY blues. Doesn't sound like either of them.
