The mid-’70s were the best of times for Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The progressive rock trio – keyboard player Keith Emerson, guitarist/bassist/vocalist Greg Lake and drummer Carl Palmer – performed to huge audiences and sold millions of albums.
In a new interview with MusicRadar, Carl Palmer recalls those golden years – a period celebrated on 24 July 2026 with the reissue of the trio’s classic live album Works Live.
“We had three years of being the biggest band you could ever imagine,” Palmer says. “We didn’t sustain it for long enough, but for three, maybe four years, the band was at an incredibly high level. There’s no doubt about that.”
The official announcement for the reissue of Works Live states: “Few bands defined the scale and ambition of progressive rock quite like Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The trio became one of the most commercially successful and influential acts of the era, pioneering a spectacular blend of virtuoso musicianship, classical reinterpretation and arena-scale rock performance.”
However, as Palmer readily admits, ELP’s music was routinely trashed by rock critics.
“We got slammed really hard,” he shrugs, “even though the music was good. The Americans didn’t hate us but we really got slammed in the UK. They said we were overblown, pretentious, sabre-rattling.”
In 1974, ELP co-headlined with Deep Purple at one of the biggest rock shows of all time, the California Jam at the Ontario Motor Speedway complex in Ontario, California. The bill also featured Black Sabbath and rising stars the Eagles.
Palmer recalls: “When we played California Jam, I think 120,000 people paid, and another 100,000 smashed down the fences and broke their way in.”
ELP played to another huge audience of 78,000 at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium on 26 August 1977. This performance was recorded and formed the bulk of the 1979 live album In Concert, which was expanded in 1993 under the new title Works Live.
In preparation for their 1977 North American tour, the trio had rehearsed in a basement area beneath the Olympic Stadium during the winter, as Montreal lay under heavy snow. This led to a novel idea for a video shoot to promote the hit single Fanfare For The Common Man.
“The video that was made for Fanfare was recorded in the winter before the concert in the summer,” Palmer says. “So the same venue, but different times of the year.
“We were rehearsing in Montreal and we got to know one of the people that represented the Olympic Stadium, and he was a big fan of ELP. We said, ‘Would it be at all possible if we could shoot a video in the stadium when there’s no one there and there’s six feet of snow?’ He said, ‘Well, we don’t get many requests like that. We’ll see what we can do for you.’ And in the end they said yes.”
He continues: “We didn’t actually play the song physically. It’s a mime. We had the song blasting through the speakers and we just played away as if we were doing it live. And we did it four times.
“We did it one time with the three cameras all on me all the way through. Then we did the same thing for Greg and for Keith, and then we played it all together.
“And we could only do it those four times because we were absolutely freezing. I think it was about 30 below at the time. We couldn’t take it anymore.”
Fanfare For The Common Man eventually reached No 2 on the UK chart.
“It became a big thing,” Palmer says. “And really it was one of the first classic rock ’n’ roll videos.”
Emerson, Lake & Palmer and BMG will release a new reissue of Works Live on 24 July. Pre-order your copy here: http://elp.lnk.to/WorksLive
