Electrostatic maelstrom
- garethsprogblog
- 4 hours ago
- 8 min read
It was the 20th anniversary of the live reunion of Van der Graaf Generator in May this year. I eventually secured my seat at the concert having only heard about the event a couple of weeks beforehand and when I checked for availability, the Royal Festival Hall had sold out. Fortunately, one of my work colleagues was something of an expert at getting seats for prestigious concerts with high public demand and advised me that the press were often allocated a job lot of tickets that they didn’t always use and that I should check for returns about 24 hours before the show. I ‘phoned the box office two days beforehand and to my surprise and delight, managed to procure a ticket.
I think it’s fair to say that Van der Graaf Generator is an acquired taste. From being intrigued by the track White Hammer from The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other that I first heard on the Charisma Keyboards sampler LP in 1974, a piece of music which I found to be intense and almost frightening, concerning the Spanish Inquisition, of all things, I’ve been a big fan. As much as I liked The Fountain of Salmacis, the Genesis offering on that compilation, it was the sheer force of VdGG that impressed me, blowing the twee Genesis track into the dust. My older brother, who had seen the subtly different beast Van der Graaf at Leeds University, thought that he should hear what the fuss was about and I directed him to Pawn Hearts as a good representation of the first incarnation and Godbluff from the 1975 formation. He wasn’t over keen and I think that VdGG inspires adoration and dislike in equal measure.
It’s widely known that when Johnny Rotten appeared on Tommy Vance’s Capital Radio show on 16th July 1977, playing music from his own collection, Peter Hammill was represented by The Institute of Mental Health, Burning and Nobody’s Business and Rotten, chatting to Vance, went on to praise Hammill as ‘a true original’, commenting “I’ve just liked him for years, if you listen to his solo albums, I’m damn sure Bowie has copied a lot out of that geezer, the credit he deserves has just not been given to him, I love all his stuff…. it is about punk, he didn’t mean it to be, but it is, it’s true, you’re nobody’s business…” Nic Potter managed to get Rotten into the Marquee in early June 1978 for one of Van der Graaf’s last performances in the UK, where he chatted to Hammill in the bar after the show… before calling the singer a ‘big mouth, middle-class cunt’!
Apart from some powerful music, one of the things that I like about VdGG is Hammill’s use of words. There can’t be any other lyricist who utilises the lexicon in the same way, something I put down to his education; from Jesuit public school to studying Liberal Studies in Science at Manchester University. He’s covered an immense range of material that reflected my interests in science and science fiction plus some deeper, philosophical thinking.
Commercially, VdGG were something of a second-division band. They may have been nurtured by Charisma Records owner Tony Stratton-Smith but they didn’t really get too much coverage in the music press at the time. However, I do remember being intrigued by adverts for World Record in Melody Maker when the album was released in 1976 and it was only much, much later that I discovered that they had been successful in Italy.
I bought my first VdGG album, Still Life, in 1981, from a sale bin in my local high street newsagent WH Smith. They also had a copy of Godbluff and not knowing which I’d like best I chose Still Life because I could see the intelligent, intriguing lyrics on the back of the sleeve. I proceeded to complete my collection, on vinyl and on cassette, in a random order whenever the opportunity presented itself. I included the out-take LP Time Vaults, a surprise find in a central London branch of Our Price, but I didn’t buy any of the compilation albums until I started to switch from vinyl to CD. I also embarked upon the acquisition of Peter Hammill solo albums, beginning with The Future Now and pH7 (both in a sale from Streatham WH Smith) before discovering the more proggy Chameleon in the Shadow of the Night and The Silent Corner and the Empty Stage.
My first live experience of Hammill was a solo performance at the Bloomsbury Theatre in Camden on 26th July 1984 and I was so impressed that I went to his concert at the same venue the following night, armed with a camera. I went to the first show not really knowing what to expect; it turned out to be almost entirely solo material but he did include Last Frame from The Quiet Zone/The Pleasure Dome. I seem to recall that, despite playing consecutive nights at the same theatre, he subtly altered the set list for the second gig.
Though I remained reluctant to spend a lot of money on music, I came across 4CD The Box (2000) on a trip home to Barrow. With its remastered tracks, bonus material from BBC sessions and unreleased live recordings, it seemed to me that VdGG were having something of a renaissance and I bought it without hesitation. On reflection, this heralded the remastered 2005 VdGG CDs which I began to acquire on a family trip to Venice that year but in the mean time, the band had remained friends and even played together at birthday parties and had reformed as the classic Van der Graaf Generator Hammill-Banton-Evans-Jackson line-up, releasing their first new music since Van der Graaf’s The Quiet Zone/The Pleasure Dome, under the title of Present in April 2005.
I’d had a couple of weeks to assimilate the new studio material before the reunion gig but they ended up only playing two new tracks. It remains the best concert I’ve ever attended. The Royal Festival Hall is comfortable and has amazing acoustics and my seat was in row H of the front stalls, a little way to the left of centre. The choice of material couldn’t really be bettered; I imagine that the assembled audience, boasting genuine global representation, were really there to hear some old classics but Every Bloody Emperor and Nutter Alert were seamlessly integrated into a set comprising the best of VdGG, captured for posterity on the brilliant subsequent release Real Time in 2007 (I’m somewhere on the cover photo.) The power of the quartet was almost overwhelming; the low-frequency punch of Hugh Banton’s bass pedals, the manic horns (and double horns) from David Jackson, Guy Evans’ fluid drums and the urgent vocals from Hammill, delivered with incredible feeling. I loved it all, even though I felt pinned to my chair by a brutal, sonic blitzkrieg, thinking that experiencing them live was a bit like battling the most extreme forces of nature.
Part of the reason for this reunion was that the band members had mainly been seeing each other at the funerals of friends and former roadies and, as Hammill had himself suffered a heart attack in 2003, if they were ever going to play together again, Hammill suggested that it seemed like a good time to start. Under these circumstances, his performance was truly outstanding but the whole band was on incredible form. Back in 1981 I couldn’t imagine that I’d ever hear VdGG music played live by the original ensemble and I think that’s why it was such a special occasion. Later in 2005 Jim Christopulos and Phil Smart released their excellent Van der Graaf Generator The Book, an in-depth biography of the band that concludes with the reunion. I pre-ordered my copy as soon as I’d heard it was being published but it is no longer available. However, I’ve just seen a second hand copy in very good condition on eBay for $300; mine cost £20 and the dust jacket is still fully intact.
I subsequently went to see the band, sans David Jackson at the Barbican during the Trisector tour in 2007 and again at the Barbican in June 2013, then in February 2022 at the London Palladium, a show rescheduled from May 2020 due to Covid restrictions. Losing the horn player made the performances more unbalanced, raw and awkward and when in full flow the band seemed to be teetering on the ragged edge, dangerous and brilliant. I thought the 64 year old Hammill looked slightly frail at the second of the Barbican concerts, but he proved he could still belt out songs and Hugh Banton somehow managed to mitigate the loss of saxophone and flute. Every Bloody Emperor was included in the Palladium set and while the song seems to concern the behaviour of Prime Minister at the time Tony Blair, the album having been released a couple of years after Blair signed up the UK to the illegal invasion of Iraq, the behaviour of Boris Johnson during the Covid pandemic, in his capacity as PM between November 2019 and September 2022, equally fitted the role as villain of the piece.
I continue to collect VdGG and Hammill solo releases but one of my favourites, bought around the time of its release in 1985 is The Margin Peter Hammill & The K Group Live, partly because some of the material was aired at the two solo gigs I’d seen the year before. This was supplemented with Peter Hammill & The K Group Live at Rockpalast 1981 on DVD/2CD in 2016 and I also added the limited edition 3LP Van der Graaf Generator Live at Rockpalast 2005 to my collection in 2020.
I was sorely tempted to attend an intimate evening with VdGG at Metropolis Studios in December 2010, part of a series of gigs by so-called ‘rock legends’. In the end I didn’t feel I could justify the cost (which included having your name included as a ‘guest’ inside the sleeve), so I made do with a DVD filmed at the event instead.
Van der Graaf Generator may now be achieving the acclaim they have long deserved but before they disbanded for the second time in 1978 (having dropped the ‘Generator’ from their name), the band was something of a cult classic, rather than mainstream prog and they took their music into some dark and challenging places. 20 years ago, VdGG reunited after a 27 year absence to rapturous acclaim. I still have some reservations about the post-2005 material even though Hammill’s writing is as clever as ever; I remain stuck in the past and a fan of long-form VdGG flights of fancy.
Postscript
I’ve had the pleasure of seeing David Jackson perform without VdGG on a few occasions, firstly in 2015 at The Bedford in Balham as a member of David Cross’ band for the album launch of Starless Starlight where, being an intimate venue, it became clear how innovative Jackson is. I wasn’t disappointed to see him bedecked his leather cap as he not only played saxes, flute and whistles, he also used the saxophone keys as a form of percussion instrument. The next time I saw him was for another David Cross gig, the album launch of Sign of the Crow at the Lexington in August 2016 where he performed a largely improvised set as a duo with Cross before joining the full band playing saxophone and keyboards. I managed to have a quick chat with him between the two sets, commenting on the complexity of the music and he hinted that they would be releasing an album of that material, having made some extensive recordings; that album would subsequently be released as Another Day in 2018. Jackson also formed a key member of the band performing ESP’s Invisible Din in November 2016, having provided flute and saxophone for the album.
