Credit: Far Out / YouTube Still / Gorupdebesanez
Sun 30 August 2026 3:30, UK
Ian Anderson once gave Keith Emerson one of the highest accolades in music, as he said the work he did with the band The Nice was what essentially led to the birth of prog rock.
“I suppose one of the precursors before it was really being called prog rock,” he said. “Probably at a time when maybe progressive rock had just being maybe mentioned for the first time in the British music press, it would be the band The Nice, which featured Keith Emerson, who went on to be in Emerson, Lake & Palmer, a true prog rock band years later. But yes, I would go with The Nice and their first major album, which… name escapes me. That was something that got me fired up.”
Most people today remember Emerson as being one of the titans of prog rock. Even though he was a classically trained pianist, his playing style contained multitudes and wasn’t just restricted to classical compositions. Emerson used his talent to push the creative boundaries of every single project he found himself on.
Throughout his career playing with different bands, Emerson was always able to get the most out of them, and the result was some of the most forward-thinking, exciting, and, some would even say, chaotic music to come from the 1960s and 1970s. This is a testament to how big his artistic brain was, as just when you think that he’s explored every kind of sound that could be stumbled upon on this big blue ball of a planet, he would push himself to discover something else.
How funny, then, that the one thing that Emerson seemed concerned about doing was something most other artists have certainly dabbled in: singing. That’s right, throughout his many bands, styles and creative directions, Emerson was never one for putting his voice through a microphone. He was happy just being an instrumentalist and didn’t tend to lend his vocals to any of the music that he was putting together. That was until, of course, he bumped into an unlikely actor who convinced him otherwise.
In the same way we know Emerson for his work within prog rock, we know Sylvester Stallone for the Rocky movies; however, he has done a lot more than that throughout his career. One film that he released in 1981 was Nighthawks, a gritty thriller that followed the hunting down of an international terrorist. Stallone was meeting a lot of great musicians to find the perfect person to take on the soundtrack, and after searching high and low, he wound up crossing paths with Emerson.
Emerson was flown out to meet with some of the producers for the film, along with Stallone, where he was asked to play some of the ideas he had come up with for the soundtrack. After listening, they knew they had found the right man for the job, and so asked Emerson if he would be interested in doing the entire score. Emerson agreed, and unlike a lot of Hollywood movies, he decided to put together every piece of music himself rather than outsourcing to other artists.
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
“I did the score entirely myself,” he said. “That’s not always the case these days. Someone like Hans Zimmer will do the main theme and then farm out the rest. But I didn’t want anyone else touching the music. What you find is that once you have the theme music done, then this can be adapted to suit different moods of the film, which is something I learnt back then.”
While the soundtrack worked well, there was something missing: a lead single. Stallone and the producers of the film decided it would be a good idea to release a new version of the song ‘I’m a Man’, and so started looking around for different vocalists. They finally persuaded Emerson to sing, and the final version of the song came out pretty damn good. Sure, he wasn’t a natural vocalist, but at least he could hold a tune well enough.
The track helped show Emerson in a new light, and the result was a solid boost to his solo career. The film wasn’t a success, and so neither was the soundtrack; however, it certainly had some positivity attached to it for Emerson.
