MIKE HOLMES

Every month we get inside the mind of one of the biggest names in music. This issue it’s Mike Holmes, IQ’s co-founding guitarist and the man behind their Giant Electric Pea label – now also home to Solstice, Rain and Damanek. “I really don’t have any regrets at all,” he tells Prog as he reflects on the band’s early years; their latest live album, The IQ Weekender 2024; and looks ahead to the long-awaited studio follow-up to 2019’s Resistance.

Words: Johnny Sharp

Baby faces! IQ in the early days.

PRESS/IQ ARCHIVES/GEP

Although the neoprogressive movement of the early 1980s didn’t produce any acts beyond Marillion that would break into the mainstream, its impact on a generation of fans and musicians too young for the golden age of progressive rock, and its influence on likeminded musicians that followed, shouldn’t be underestimated. One man has been a mainstay throughout IQ’s 40-plus years as a band, but Mike Holmes’s influence extends beyond that band, thanks to his role in building the band’s label Giant Electric Pea, which would go on to nurture the careers of rising stars of the genre including Big Big Train and Spock’s Beard.

Live albumThe IQ Weekender 2024.

Growing up in Southampton on England’s south coast, Holmes was a musical obsessive from an early age.

“The first toy I remember having as a kid was a record player,” he says. “We had a family Dansette-type thing, where you’d lift the lid up, and we had a box of 7” singles for the family.”

He subsequently begged his parents to buy him a guitar, something that coincided with a childhood illness.

“Around the time of my sixth birthday I got this disease called polyneuritis,” he tells Prog. “It stopped me from being able to feel things. I needed something to

help my fingers move, so I asked for a guitar for my birthday. I didn’t get one –instead, I got knitting needles! But eventually I did get my hands on one.”

At sixth-form college he formed The Lens, along with keyboard player Martin Orford, who would later join him in IQ, which came together in 1981 fronted by vocalist Peter Nicholls, a Mancunian whom Holmes had met in the queue for a Genesis gig.

They began life as regulars on neo-prog bills at London’s Marquee, and ever since, live shows have played a key role in IQ’s career, with their annual ‘legendary Christmas bash’ a regular fixture in their calendar as well as weekend residencies in the UK and Europe, shows from which feature on their latest release, The IQ Weekender 2024. All of which has helped them survive and thrive into a fifth decade, as Holmes explains.

By our reckoning, The IQ Weekender 2024 is the 12th live album the band have released – the same as the number of studio albums you’ve put out. What is it about live records that works for you?