The Lens

Located in Southampton (England) and active during the second half of the 1970s, the Lens served as a laboratory for Mike Holmes, Peter Nicholls, and Martin Orford. After the group stopped its activities in 1981, the three of them would form IQ, with Marillion the best outfit of the neo-prog wave.

Holmes, a self-taught guitarist, art student Nicholls, and drummer Niall Hayden allegedly met in a ticket stand line for a Genesis concert in 1976. The teenagers decided on the strength of their common tastes in music to form a group. First called the Giln, then the Lens, they recruited bass player Rob Thompson and keyboardist Pete Blackler and started to perform at local colleges sometime in 1977. Holmes, being located in Manchester, missed many concerts and attended to a few only as master of ceremonies, forcing the group to concentrate on instrumental material. In the early days, Brian Marshall would replace or even second Hayden. The music followed a vein of progressive rock more trippy than symphonic, closer to Hawkwind and Ash Ra Tempel than Genesis or Yes.

By September 1977, Thompson and Blackler were out and Orford had joined. A few months later, Hayden quit, leaving Marshall in control of the drums. His brother, Les Marshall, who had never touched a bass guitar, was hired nonetheless for that position. The "classic" lineup of the Lens had been reached. Kevin Sharp joined briefly, trying to assume a Brian Eno-like role that quickly became unfit as the music evolved toward more straight-forward prog rock. But he appears on No TV Tonite, the group's sole recording, a cassette that sold a few hundred copies following some accounts.

The group continued to perform, mostly in Southampton and Bournemouth, and enjoyed the encouragement of the music magazine Musicians Only. But things were beginning to fall apart, mostly on the count of brothers Brian and Les Marshall's endless fighting (the latter became a sort of mythical figure in the history of IQ). Following a short replacement by drummer Mark Ridout (of Saruman Grass, a proto-version of Jadis), the group disbanded in early 1981.

In late 2001, Holmes and Orford entered the studio to re-record the bulk of the Lens' repertoire (released on Giant Electric Pea as A Word in Your Eye) and occasionally performed together under that name, mostly opening for IQ. ~ François Couture, Rovi