This article recounts a 2011 interview — five years before his death — in which prog-rock keyboardist Keith Emerson explained why his 1960s band The Nice burned the American flag on stage and how it affected their career. The band's confrontational 1968 reworking of Leonard Bernstein's *America* is presented as what Emerson called the first instrumental protest song, born from his anger at political violence in the United States. The episode matters as a landmark moment in the early history of progressive rock and of protest through instrumental music.

The Nice formed in 1967 as a backing band for American soul singer PP Arnold, comprising Emerson, guitarist Davy O'List, bassist Lee Jackson and drummer Ian Hague, before Brian Davidson replaced Hague and the group struck out on their own with the 1968 album *The Thoughts Of Emerlist Davjack*. Emerson said the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy — following the earlier killings of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King — convinced him that America was "ruled by the gun", prompting the darker reworking of *America*, which featured spoken words recited by PP Arnold's three-year-old son. When Emerson burned a US flag at an anti-apartheid concert at London's Royal Albert Hall, in the presence of the American ambassador, the band learnt on the radio journey home that they had been banned from the venue permanently.