Five Bridges is a live and studio album and fourth overall by English progressive rock band The Nice, released in June 1970 by Charisma Records.
The album's centrepiece is "The Five Bridges Suite", a five-part composition about Newcastle upon Tyne that features the group performing with the Sinfonia of London session orchestra conducted by Joseph Eger.
[4] Emerson credits Friedrich Gulda for inspiring the High Level Fugue, which uses jazz figures in the strict classical form.
Also included on the Five Bridges album were live performances from the same Fairfield Hall concert of the Sibelius Intermezzo and a movement from Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony.
Paul Stump's 1997 History of Progressive Rock called the album "ill-conceived", commenting that the orchestrated pieces are poorly meshed, with the rock band and orchestra playing either separately (as on the first few movements of "The Five Bridges Suite") or such that "The textures of neither genre are properly utilized; it is like listening to two transistor radios simultaneously playing ..." However, he cited the final two tracks as among the Nice's best works, elaborating that "['One of Those People'] perhaps illustrates the Nice's real gift: to reduce pop forms to their constituent parts, alter their horizontal profile by cutting down paragraphs and overturning expected progression of chords and rhythm, which gives Emerson just as much of a chance to display his considerable technique without recourse to braggadocio.