The slightly fringe, cultic movement of fantasy and science fiction made a large dent in the habits of book fans and rock enthusiasts all over the world. Chains and independent bookshops such as Forbidden Planet (UK) and A Change of Hobbit (US) emerged, carving out their own market chunks of devotees and collectibles: fantasy novels, comics, figurines and the like.
Rock bands in several western realms also felt drawn to the mystical world of fantasy and space adventure.
A quick glimpse through the discographies of Rick Wakeman, ELP, Focus, Steve Hackett, Pink Floyd, and Uriah Heep is enough to show how they all gave audiences sensations of shiver and mystique on stage and through their studio recordings. The new sounds of synthesisers opened opportunities for the music industry as well as for creative pioneers - Keith Emerson, Roger Waters, and Brian Eno among them. Colossal tours hosted in the basketball arenas of Europe and the States brought in huge investments in stage props – lights and smoke machines –, and are well remembered by long-haired rock veterans of Yes and Genesis tours of the late 70’s.
Hungarian rock bands at the time had the then unseen advantage of strong grounding in classical music set against dozens of drawbacks: restricted travel to the West, a poor economy with tiny foreign currency allowance for tourists, and a generally unsupportive political establishment. Some bands, nevertheless, took giant leaps in the direction of space rock and fantasy.
Some Hungarian bands of the era were able to approximate the best of the British music scene and use the fashionable musical components.
They used sound effects, tonality, and futuristic chord structures - in order to create the illusion of fantasy and space adventure. Omega to this day remains the biggest selling and touring Hungarian band outside the borders. Their shows in Poland, the DDR (East Germany) and the FDR (West Germany) made them an accessible band for a young audience hungry to consume whatever brought the beacon of perceived light from the free western world. Despite their great advances in space rock, stage gimmicks and synthesiser sounds, their critics point to a rather minimal progress in musicianship and instrumental mastery.
Especially from the early 80’s, the up-and-coming Hungarian formations, East and Solaris, on the other hand, have definitely deserved a place on the shelves of keen record collectors from Japan to Germany. Solaris, in particular, was able to get together everything we like about albums such as The Journey to the Centre of the Earth (Rick Wakeman) and the Voyage of the Acolyte (Steve Hackett) to only mention two. Complex musical parts, instrumental virtuosity, strong compositional features from European classical music all contribute to the hard-hitting prog-rock sound. This video of Solaris from 1990 is from an era immediately after the regime change in 1989, and uses a track recorded in 1980, in the early stages of the band’s recording history.
One of their early studio recordings:
