So what exactly is a 'rock opera'?
And where does the 'rock opera' end and the common or garden 'concept album' begin? The answer to that is above my pay grade, but the phrase has become common parlance. With this in mind, we present the best rock operas, the proviso being that there may be a category error or two.
The term ‘rock opera’ was coined way back in the Sixties and, as we shall see, there’s some debate over the first example of the form. It would be wrong, however, to assume that the rock opera was killed off by those expectorating punk rockers. In mainland Europe and Scandinavia, in particular, the ambitious long-form piece of music has continued to flourish and has been championed by metal and prog bands who exist outside the mainstream.
The 16 greatest rock operas
16. Ayreon: 01011001 (2008)
Ayreon are not a band, rather a one-man musical project by Dutch musician Arjen Lucassen, who recruits some big names to perform his music, much of which falls into the high-concept, multi-character rock opera category. Arguably his best work, 01011001 is a massive, two-CD project telling the story of aliens who create humanity, only to endanger it by providing it with technology.
Some 17 singers were involved in its creation, ranging form Floor Jansen of Nightwish to Bob Catley of Magnum. It’s all fabulously OTT and best consumed in one extended listening session, before going on to experience the rest of the Ayreon catalogue.
15. Styx: Kilroy Was Here (1983)
Styx were always a band of factions. Crudely, Tommy Shaw was the rock guy, while Dennis DeYoung had one foot in musical theatre and wrote most of the hits. When they worked well together, the result was commercial kryptonite. 1983’s Kilroy Was Here was the band’s last big platinum-selling hit album, coming hard on the heels of the chart-topping concept piece ‘Paradise Theater.
It was also the final album released by the band’s ‘classic’ line-up, spawning two huge US hit singles, ‘Mr. Ronoto’ and ‘Don’t Let It End’ (both written by DeYoung). The album tells the hoary old story of a future world in which rock music is banned (see also Ben Elton’s stage musical We Will Rock You).
14. Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Greendale (2003)
Typically ornery Neil Young defied expectations by deciding that his 27th studio album would be a ten-song ‘musical novel’ set in a fictional Californian town. Released in 2003, Greendale tells the story of three generations of the Green family, tackling themes ranging from environmentalism to corruption along the way.
Young really threw himself into the project, overseeing a map of the fictional town, character biographies, a family tree and even a Super 8 movie in which friends and family members played key characters. Reviews were mixed, but Greendale certainly succeeded in firing up ol’ Neil’s creative juices.
13. Judas Priest: Nostradamus (2008)
Latecomers to the concept album game, Judas Priest were 16 albums into their career when they released the positively exhausting Nostradamus – their first double album, which also proved to be guitarist K.K. Downing’s last studio recording with the band. Based on an idea by manager Bill Curbishley, this epic recording saw Priest take a turn into dramatic symphonic metal territory as it explores the life and prophecies of the 16th-century astrologer and alleged 'seer'.
Frontman Rob Halford was the project’s great champion, but plans to perform the whole thing live were shelved after it received a decidedly mixed reception from critics and fans, despite being nominated for two Grammy Awards. Halford has, however, expressed the hope that the project will be reassessed in years to come.
12. Nirvana: The Story of Simon Simopath (1967)
No, not that Nirvana, but the British psychedelic prog band that pre-dated them by a couple of decades. 1967’s Simon Simopath was billed as a 'science faction pantomime’ but has also been claimed as the very first rock opera, with a narrative story linking the songs.
And the story? Well, it’s the somewhat twee tale of a lonely boy who dreams of having wings. As an adult, he suffers a mental breakdown and gets aboard a rocket where he falls for a tiny goddess named Magdalena. As you do. Musically, this is striking example of early baroque pop/prog rock, produced by Chris Blackwell, with a lovely opening track in the form of ‘Wings of Love’.
11. Pretty Things: S.F. Sorrow (1968)
A rather more high-profile release than ‘Simon Simopath’, ‘S.F. Sorrow’ is also often claimed as the first rock opera. Phil May’s psychedelic pop extravaganza was produced by Norman Smith, who later found fame for his work with early Pink Floyd. May denied having heard Simon Simopath (above) while creating his tale of Sebastian F. Sorrow, a lad from an English factory town who joins the army and witnesses horrific events.
He relocates to New York and sends his girlfriend a ticket to join him by airship. But the balloon explodes on arrival, leaving Sebastian in deep grief. The album received decidedly mixed reviews on release, but has subsequently been reassessed as an ahead-of-its-time classic.
10. Devin Townsend: Ziltoid the Omniscient (2007)
A concept album about an alien’s quest for the perfect cup of coffee? All in a day’s work (actually a few months’ work) for prolific Canadian musician Devin Townsend, who played all the instruments on this solo recording from 2007. ‘Webisodes’ of the story, featuring a Ziltoid puppet, were also produced and the whole thing became so unexpectedly popular that Devin recorded a sequel in 2014.
9. Pink Floyd: The Wall (1979)
Wait. The Wall: a rock opera? Well, its primary composer Roger Waters certainly thought so, adapting it to become Another Brick in the Wall: The Opera, which was premiered in 2017. Famously inspired by an incident in which Waters spat on a rowdy fan during a concert in Montreal, ‘The Wall’ is a concept album exploring rock star alienation.
It recounts the story of Pink – an amalgam of Waters and Floyd's long-gone original lodestar Syd Barrett – whose trauma begins with the death of his father in WWII and continues with an overbearing mother and abusive schoolteachers, during which he builds a metaphorical wall around himself. As an adult rock star, Pink revisits these experiences in his hotel room.
Some critics chose to sneer at all this, as was the fashion at the time, but in retrospect The Wall stands as arguably the last great Pink Floyd album, with an absolutely sublime guitar solo by David Gilmour on ‘Comfortably Numb’.
8. Queensrÿche: Operation: Mindcrime (1988)
In the early ‘80s, Queensrÿche were just another American heavy metal band – albeit one with considerably more ambition and talent then many of their rivals. 1986’s Rage for Order album pointed the way to a more progressive future, which was fully realised two years later with Operation: Mindcrime. The album was a major step up for the band and became a huge commercial and critical success. The song ‘I Don’t Believe in Love’ was even nominated for a Grammy.
Mindcrime's story was inspired by the experiences of vocalist Geoff Tate and follows Nikki, a junkie who becomes involved with a revolutionary group and is brainwashed to assassinate a political leader. The theatrical live performances were suitably dramatic.
7. Frank Zappa: Joe’s Garage (1979)
One of Uncle Frank’s finest achievements, the three-act, two hour Joe’s Garage was originally released as two separate albums in 1979. Narrated by the ‘Central Scrutiniser’, it tells the story of an ordinary Joe naned, er, Joe, who has the misfortune to form a band just as the government decides to criminalise music. Eventually, he is jailed and goes insane.
A potent, occasionally crude satire on organised religion, censorship and music journalism, Joe's Garage is also fabulously complex, spanning a variety of genres from reggae, blues and jazz to doo-wop, lounge and rock. And in the nine-minute masterpiece ‘Watermelon in Easter Hay’, it contains one of Zappa’s most sublime guitar solos.
6. The Kinks: Schoolboys in Disgrace (1975)
Coming at the end of The Kinks’ run of theatrical concept albums in the early seventies (Preservation, Soap Opera, etc), 1975’s Schoolboys in Disgrace has tended to be rather overlooked and is ripe for reappraisal (once you can get beyond the cover). The album had the misfortune to be released at a time when music journalists were looking for novelties to distract them, a function that would be fulfilled soon enough by punk rock.
Stylistically spanning the gulf between ‘50s doo-wop and hard rock, the album tells the origin story of Mr. Flash from Preservation, who was set on the road to villainy after being beaten in front of the entire school when caught in 'very serious trouble' with a naughty schoolgirl.
5. Nightwish: Endless Forms Most Beautiful (2015)
Finland’s Nightwish are generally classified as ‘symphonic metal’, though they were one of the first bands to be fronted by an actual opera singer. Tarja Turunen studied at the Sibelius Academy and brought a sense of drama to the music mostly composed by keyboard player Tuomas Holopainen. But she was fired from the band in 2001.
Nightwish eventually found a suitable frontwoman in the form of Floor Jansen of Dutch band After Forever. She arrived just in time for Holopainen’s masterpiece: a concept album about evolution, taking its title from a line in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, with narration from Darwin’s great modern champion Richard Dawkins. It’s a hugely impressive work, building towards the epic 24-minute climax, ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’.
4. Drive-By Truckers: Southern Rock Opera (2001)
Drinkin’, druggin’, brawlin’, dramatic premature death . . . The wonder is that it took so long for someone to come up with the idea of a rock opera about Lynyrd Skynyrd. It had to be by another Southern rock band to have any chance of authenticity, and fortunately Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers is one of the most gifted songwriters of his generation.
Hood’s plans for the album actually pre-dated the foundation of the Truckers, and it was eventually created under difficult circumstances in 2000, with additional material by Truckers guitarists Mike Cooley and Rob Malone. The evocative double album takes in not only the story of Skynyrd but also the broad sweep of Southern politics – and doesn’t shy away from tackling racism. It remains the band’s finest achievement.
3. Meat Loaf: Bat Out of Hell (1977)
Meat Loaf (Marvin Lee Aday to his mum and the taxman) and Jim Steinman were a match made in heaven . . . and hell. Jim wrote and produced the songs and Meat sang the hell out of them, until the sweat was dripping off his face. The result was Bat Out of Hell – one of the best selling albums of all time – which gave full rein to Steinman’s taste for the epic.
Although not traditionally thought of a rock opera, that’s effectively what it is, later finding further success as a stage musical. Alas, Meat and Jim fell out and lawsuits ensued. Jim recorded one solo concept album under the title Original Sin which was credited to Pandora’s Box and was something of a flop, and Bonnie Tyler’s hit album ‘Faster Than the Speed of Light’.
Meat recorded a string of albums without Jim, none of which were great successes. Little wonder they eventually got back together for Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell, which spawned the massive hit single ‘I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That)’, and Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose.
2. Therion: Beloved Antichrist (2018)
For modern metal bands, the concept of the ‘rock opera’ is the literal melding of rock music with opera. And no one does this better than Swedish symphonic metallers Therion. They’re little known in the UK, so on the rare occasions that they play here it tends to be in rather truncated form rather than with the full concert orchestras and choirs that fans elsewhere experience.
Therion started out as a death metal band in the late eighties, but founder/guitarist Christofer Johnsson always had greater ambitions for the band. Their breakthrough came with 2007’s Gothic Kabbalah album, which charted in 10 countries and was rightly acclaimed by Allmusic as 'the first truly great rock opera of the 21st century'. This acclaim clearly inspired Johnsson, and he was moved to come up with a grand concept in the form of Therion’s 16th studio album, 2018's Beloved Antichrist.
An innovative three-hours-plus triple album inspired by A Short Tale of the Antichrist (a dystopian novella by Russian philosopher Vladímir Soloviov), BA certainly placed great demands on the listener but was acclaimed as a triumph by many critics. Alas, the Covid pandemic put paid to plans to stage a live production. One can only hope that Johnsson will return to it at some point.
And the best rock opera of all time is...
1. The Who: Tommy (1969)
The past, as L.P. Hartley so memorably observed, is a foreign country.
In 1969, ambitious young rock musicians were encouraged to test the boundaries of the form, rather than sneered at for doing so, as became the norm later. Tommy was by no means the first 'rock opera'. It isn’t even the first rock opera by The Who. That would be 1966’s song suite A Quick One, While He’s Away.
But Tommy perfected the form and remains one of The Who’s best-known contributions to popular culture, thanks in part to Ken Russell’s film version (there was also a Broadway musical, an opera production and an orchestral version), with Tina Turner’s performance as the Acid Queen proving particularly memorable.
Inspired by his guru Meher Baba (everyone had a guru in the Sixties, it seems), Pete Townshend’s tale of a deaf, dumb and blind kid who becomes a messianic spiritual figure was a huge commercial and critical success that took The Who to new levels of popularity, although a minority of contemporary critics and DJs found it distasteful (particularly John Entwistle’s ‘Fiddle About’ – the first rock song to deal with child sexual abuse). These days, Tommy has earned a place on all self-respecting Greatest Albums of All Time’ lists.
