TALES FROM TOPOGRAPHIC FISHTANKS: DRACULA FISH MAKE AN OLD PROG FAN RATHER HAPPY

I am a child of the 1970s. I may have been born in 1959, but my earliest memories aren't until disoined ones in about 1961 and 1962, and I don't really remember much in a linear form until about 1964. The young people of my acquaintaince, including those in my extended family all believe that because Corinna and I were alive through the 1960s that we hung out at Carnaby Street, and drove around in minis with Union Jacks painted on the roof.

Well, I certainly didn't and if my darling wife (who is only a couple of years older than me - three in fact) did such a thing, she certainly has never told me about it. Nope, both of us first became the people we are in the decade that taste forgot. One of the first things that attracted us to each other was that we both had listened to a lot of prog rock at one time (even if these days Corinna listens to Scandinavian folk metal, and I listen to the artier end of indie), and both of us remember the days when a poster showing the back cover of Roger Dean's illustration for the Yes album Tales from Topographic Oceans was the coolest thing that you could have on your bedroom wall.

I am listening to the album now. It is pretty cool if you like that sort of thing.
The lyrics are impenetrable bollocks which are allegedly based upon bits of Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda. They made no sense in 1974, and they make no sense now, even by the standards of Yes lyrics, but if you ignore the words and treat Jon Anderson's voice as an instrument in its own right, the album flows nicely and has many rewarding moments.

But the best thing about it is the cover, and the best thing about the cover is the back, which features a small shoal of strange fish that look like an unholy hybrid between perch and salmon swimming over a futuristic landscape (or planetscape). But jsut below them, peeking out of a rocky cave just like the oriental weatherfish in my Hong Kong coldwater biotope tank, is a placoderm - a strange armoured fish from a family which died out about 359 million years ago. One of the strangest thing about these primitive fish was that they had biting plates - pointed extensions of the jawbone that perform the function of teeth. They have not been seen in any vertyebrates since.
Until now, that is.

A month or so, all the crypto websites including us, carried the story of a new species of the danionella family which has just been discovered in Burma. Everyone, including us noted that it had strange, teethlike extensions to its jaws, giving it the specific name of D.dracula, but it wasn't until today I realised that my prog rock fantasies have come true....

Read all about it..