UTOPIA

About

Also known as: Todd Rundgren's Utopia, Utopia Todd Rundgren

Formed in 1973 by Todd Rundgren, Utopia started life as a sprawling progressive rock outfit before shedding members and complexity alike. The early version, Todd Rundgren's Utopia, put out dense, ambitious records where a single track could stretch past thirty minutes. By 1976 the band had trimmed down to a tight four piece with Rundgren, Kasim Sulton, Roger Powell and John Wilcox, and the music shifted toward sharper, more accessible rock and pop. All four members wrote, sang, produced and performed on their albums, which made them genuinely collaborative in a way that bands fronted by a single personality rarely are. Their 1980 top 40 hit Set Me Free was actually sung by Sulton, not Rundgren, which says a lot about how the group operated. The band broke up in 1986 and had a brief reunion in 1992. The earlier prog incarnation was revived for live shows in 2011, and in 2018 Rundgren, Sulton and Wilcox hit the road again with new keyboardist Gil Assayas under the Todd Rundgren's Utopia name. They also left behind some genuinely odd footnotes, including a shelved disco album from 1976 that included a disco arrangement of the Star Trek theme and finally saw release in 2012.