Neoprog experienced its heyday in the middle of the eighties. The reference works of the genre, which resumed the melodic prog of the seventies and poured into a new, more modern (with some bands also: more kitschy) form, originate from this time. Some few acts like Pallas or Marillion grabbed Majordeals, the latter even filled the big halls. But this high didn't last long: Only ten years later the MTV stars were Oasis, Spice Girls and Jamiroquai, on the radio they played "Killing Me Softly" by the Fugees and Alanis Morissettes "Ironic". Prog and Neoprog were considered to be extremely uncool in the rock scene of the nineties and initially lived a wallflower existence again.
Just in this time, in which a whole genre was pushed into the Schmollecke, some new bands slowly but surely dared to the surface (among others Jadis, Enchant, Aragon), the heroes of the eighties celebrated remarkable comebacks (IQ, Pallas). And Pendragon? In 1996, they released their perhaps most important album, one that - with good sales figures - stood out from the crowd in terms of quality and was one of the most popular and important neoprog albums: "The Masquerade Overture". Twenty years after its release, it is fair to say that this record has outlasted time and, along with the top albums of Marillion and IQ, is one of the milestones of the genre.
As I said, Prog did not play a major role in public perception in 1996. Pop, Electro, Nu Metal and R'n'B outshone everything. Neoprog was at best a niche product, something for weird guys with an even weirder taste in music. Also for Pendragon mastermind Nick Barrett, who never cared about musical fashions and always did his thing, the overnight success of "Masquerade" came as a surprise. All the more astonishing the birth of this album, which completely rejected the zeitgeist and instead made use of those prog clichés that had the stamp of yesterday: hardly any dirt under your fingernails, instead rich keyboard surfaces, harmonious melodies, almost too perfect hooklines, a good dash of bombast and icing as well as a polished production.
Barrett guessed in that summer at his house in Maidenhead which coup he had succeeded with his band. The album had just been released on the group's own label Toff Records when the orders piled up. "We got tens of thousands of orders in. It was extremely stressful because we loaded and packed all the CDs individually," recalls Barrett. 25.000 pieces went out in the first load, another 25,000 orders were to follow. In total, Pendragon of The Masquerade Overture sold over 60,000 units - enough to earn them a reputation as one of the last survivors of a dying species.
