Pallas (band)
| Pallas | |
|---|---|
| Also known as | Rainbow |
| Origin | Aberdeen, Scotland |
| Genres | Neo-progressive rock, progressive metal |
| Years active | 1980–present |
| Labels | Sue-I-Cide (private) Granite Wax (private) Harvest Records Centaur Discs Inside Out Music Pallas Records Psonik Music Theories/ Mascot Records |
| Website | http://www.pallasofficial.com |
| Members | Ronnie Brown Niall Mathewson Graeme Murray Colin Fraser Paul Mackie |
| Past members | Derek Forman Euan Lowson Alan Reed |
Pallas are a progressive rock band based in the United Kingdom. They were one of the bands at the vanguard of what was termed neo-progressive during progressive rock's second-wave revival in the early 1980s. (Other major acts included Marillion, IQ, Twelfth Night, Pendragon, Quasar and Solstice).
Beginning life in 1976 as 'Rainbow', they dropped the name after Ritchie Blackmore left Deep Purple and called his new band Rainbow. Pallas began hitting the club circuit at the beginning of a grassroots revival of full-blown progressive rock; which, at the time, was extremely unfashionable due to the overwhelming influence of pop and new wave. They eventually secured a successful headlining run at London's Marquee Club (a hotbed for the neo-progressive revival). A highlight of their set at that time and also a highlight of the early Marquee shows (until the Marquee threatened to ban the band if they did not stop playing it) was a track called "The Ripper". A fifteen-minute epic about child abuse, insanity, rape and murder, the climax of "The Ripper" featured lead singer Euan Lowson dressed half as an old man, half as a woman, acting out a chilling rape on stage (the Yorkshire Ripper case was still, at the time, a fresh news item).
After releasing a self-produced LP entitled Arrive Alive (recorded in Scotland in 1981), Pallas was courted by EMI Records (who had just signed contemporaries Marillion) and went into the recording studio with Yes/Emerson, Lake & Palmer engineer Eddy Offord to record the album that would become The Sentinel. The plan was that The Sentinel would be a recorded version of The Atlantis Suite, an epic centrepiece of the band's live performances at the time based around a futuristic version of the story of Atlantis, with plenty of references to the Cold War.
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