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It wasn't easy to happen across Van der Graaf Generator.
They had no champions on the NME (Geoff
Barton of Sounds and Alan
'Fluff' Freeman seemed, in their different ways, rather alarming
standard-bearers). So I never lingered over the band's name until, belatedly,
in some listless moment I happened to flick through that unpromising
publication, the Times Educational Supplement - it was my dad's copy. I was 15 - it was 1973. In
those days it was a matter of principle that the quality press never
mentioned rock music; in their world, music meant Sadlers Wells and
occasionally a bit of jazz. (This would all change a few years later, when
Channel 4 had come along, and journalists who had cut their teeth on the NME
went on to write for The Independent.) Well, VDGG got a full page write-up in the TES
- this was because of 'Plague of
Lighthouse Keepers', of course. It was probably the first piece of rock music
that English teachers recognized as offering the same sort of spiritual
nourishment to our tender minds as Heart of Darkness.
This was an impressive testament, at the
same time a disquieting one. The British (or rather, English) progressive
rock movement had no first-hand contact with modern art, it didn't have those
sexy links to the real art world that rock was managing to forge in other
countries (I mean like Andy Warhol's Velvet Underground, or Can with their
much-publicized Stockhausen connections). Its social bedrock lay quite
clearly in the middle-class, Anglican world of the home counties - as others
have since pointed out, a lot of this generation of progressive rock
musicians came straight out of the choir and the organ-loft. They inherited
the essentially un-modernist aesthetic of the cantata (that beloved English
form), and with a bit of Pomp and Circumstance for good measure. This
background was dragged into a bizarre hybrid with rock, which then seemed so
limitless, and the results were generally dire, or at any rate quite beyond
my narrow powers of empathy, which were even narrower in those days.
Beat music aside, the transatlantic form that penetrated furthest into
middle-class consciousness was the musical. This was the era of 'rock operas'
and the formative days of Andrew Lloyd Webber. I know that VDGG were much
better than that, but that's why, I think, you're intended to listen to every
word, respond to the puns and internal rhymes, appreciate the cleverness of
Peter Hammill putting on a loony voice to sing the word 'madness', or a Black
Riders voice to sing the word 'death', or the music dropping out completely
while he sings the word 'silence'. It's hugely zestful and confident, but it
takes a bit of gritting your teeth now. Some fucking hippie on
Glastonbury Tor yodelling to his hippie friends.... this is doing my head in
.... absolute shite... it's giving me a headache. Thus, variously, a few instant responses to my trying out these
re-mastered CDs on a new generation. But Peter Hammill's cracked-actor
delivery had always been divisive, one reason why the band never made much of
a splash in the English-speaking world.
Anyhow, that's my sociological account of British 'progressive rock' in
general; not art-rock, but cod-art-rock, a pastiche of the manner of art as
it filtered through, with the usual distancing effects, to the class
mentality that is so hard to detach from someone's individual mentality. But
then, British rock music always did verge on being cod, or camp, or
clod-hopping, a necessary consequence of the crude aping of American forms
detached from their cultural origins. It didn't necessarily achieve more when
it learnt the moves, learnt to be ashamed. (I'm thinking of The Fall as the
essential test case here.)
As a matter of fact, if Hugh Banton was a (very talented) church organist and
Peter Hammill (vocals) a science graduate belatedly preaching secular
humanism, on the other hand Guy Evans (drums) and David Jackson (saxophones)
were at least serious modern-jazz-ophiles. The creative talent on display was
impressive, but the question of whether anything worthwhile could come out of
this improbable backwater remains anguished and ever-present in the music;
they were having a lot of fun, but if there's a well-merited sense of triumph
arising from all this fervent creativity there's also a sense of rage.
However, if the English mode of progressive rock could ever transcend its
dubious pedigree, then it seemed to me that this was the band. This was the
crucible.
The Least We Can Do was the
band's second album, their first for Charisma - in the light of what followed
it sounds a bit pallid. Things get going with H to He, which it so happens I never got to hear at the
time. Listening to it now is a timely reminder of what a new VDGG album used
to sound like back then: loud, dissonant, inventive and flamboyant, harsh,
ugly, then painfully beautiful in a way you couldn't often share. You wanted
to play it alone in your room, and that was in fact the only place you could
rely on the audience allowing you to hear the whole song, but you kept
worrying about the neighbours. A couple of years later we played punk records
and we wanted to annoy the
neighbours; British music suddenly became community-aware again. Even if at
first that mainly meant shock and offensiveness, it nevertheless showed that
we'd become sensitized to where we were living.
By contrast VDGG were unconscious of the details of our grey 1970s world.
This was very directly and unmessily about Man in the long marches of
Eternity, or perhaps me alone in the lighthouse of my student bedsit. Here, beset
by the existential doubts stimulated by a dog-eared Penguin Modern Classic I
subsisted off my grant - it wasn't a loan in those days - and thought about
the BIG questions (I mean the ones that preoccupy bright teenagers who don't
have to work). Peter Hammill dealt with all of them.
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What was the meaning of existence? ('Childlike Faith in
Childhood's End') If no-one knows you exist, do you exist? ('Pioneers over
C') Was it worth being alive at all? ('Lemmings') What if you could live for
ever? ('Still Life') What would you feel at the moment of death? (Godbluff, passim)
If you seemed to be flooded with love-hormones, why did you so often behave
hatefully? ('Killer', 'Man-Erg') What would it mean to have sex? ('La Rossa')
What would happen if you really had no friends? ('A Plague of Lighthouse
Keepers').
Pawn Hearts, the band thought
at the time, was their definitive record. It still sounds magical - the
fearsome machinery of 'Cog', the dead and deader modulations that are finally
stamped on at the end of 'Lemmings', the part of 'Man-Erg' when the killer
and the angels amaze you by careering around together in celestial/infernal
harmony. The whole of side 2 was devoted to 'A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers',
an impossibly rich piece of musical narrative. It's a work of the purely
English imagination, which means it harks back to the last time that
middle-class English culture was untouched by the modern world; this comes
from Kipling (pertinently, The Disturber of Traffic) and Vaughan Williams (5th symphony, Sea
Symphony). It's overwhelming. Who needs
modernism?
Perhaps this is where you should start if you don't know whether you're
interested in VDGG. Quite early on there's a sea-picture with foghorns that
should sort you out; or if not that, the wonderfully lonely organ-voluntary
with its swelling modulations that follows. The hardest thing, now, is to
tolerate lyrics that use sword-and-sorcery imagery of the 'camps of panoply
and majesty' type. We're basically uncomfortable with English allegory, though
we don't have a problem with the American book of legends ('Chestnut Mare',
'That Song About the Midway', 'King Harvest'...); the language of progressive
rock is somehow pre-cinematic. As it is we'd prefer 'Lemmings' to drop the crashing waves and be nakedly about
drug culture. That said, there's plenty of things in this magnificent
tapestry that do reach out and grab you, though no lower than the throat.
Mind and
machinery box-press our dreams
I've been the
witness, and the seal of death
lingers in
the molten wax that is my head
Locked in
silent monologue, in silent scream
Alone,
alone, the ghosts all call,
pinpoint me
in the light
Oceans
drifting sideways
Near the end there's an organ-note (or perhaps it's Fripp's guitar) that is
not so much a whinny as a racehorse in your face. This is over a whole-tone
sequence that is wakeful like a meadow thick with dew, and then the
percussion flakes into spume at dawn. To be strictly objective.
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Godbluff (1975)
is different, and it now strikes me as
even better. The band had split up, then reformed to do this. Much had
changed: the epic vertigo, the frank emotionalism had gone, the landscape
became flat and mocking. It's split into four tracks, but is clearly a single
drama, a Faust-story that, Peter Hammill claimed at the time, occupies about
two minutes of real time. There are fewer colours in this sound-world, and
compared to Pawn Hearts it
seems like chamber music. But it also transcends it. It's not that VDGG threw
away their past - in fact there are more hooves and medieval weaponry than
ever - but two things advance this music forward. The first is that Hammill
multi-layered the script; by inter-relating the songs so thoroughly, he
liberates an image which is not defined in any one of them - in fact, he
unexpectedly came up with a modernist form. The second is that during their
four-year recess someone in the band had learnt funkology. Like Marlowe when
he wrote his own Faust-story,
Hammill crammed the beginning and end with eloquence, and found himself with
a desolate gap in the middle; drama meets its limits in the tick of a clock
at one second per second. The interlude, in this case, is filled with a
compulsive (funk-based) essay on time and motion, both hyper-ventilating and
idling ('Scorched Earth' and 'Arrow' respectively). The album moves from 'you
still have time' to 'if I only had time'; the warmth is only in the
brilliance of execution, but listening to it you find yourself 'half in love
with easeful death'.
Still Life (1976) hasn't got
this concentration but all VDGG fans cherish it. In 'Childlike Faith' Hammill
ascends the secular pulpit for one last, crazy attempt to say everything
about the Life Force; he more or less succeeds. Hammill disposes of two
millennia of Christian apologetic in a couple of lines (characteristically
and elaborately rhymed):
Even if there
is a heaven when we die,
endless bliss
would be as meaningless as the lie
that always
comes as answer to the question why
do we see
through the eyes
of Creation?
Well, if you know how to make a song out of this, then shouldn't you?
But earlier on, body-centered concerns have started to bend this whole
awesome monument to left-brain rationalism out of shape, both in that fearful
hymn to eternity 'Still Life' ('to couple with her withered body') and in the
university-town lust-saga of 'La Rossa', which is very funny and thrilling.
I'm slightly disturbed that I still know all the words by heart. I haven't
listened to VDGG for 25 years plus. To go back has not felt nostalgic. In
Europe (above all in Italy, where neither theatre nor the language of
classical modulations have ever become detached from popular music) VDGG
never seemed a problem - just a fantastic, intriguing, intelligent,
life-enhancing band. Writing this from an English perspective I find I've
become waspish, bad-tempered, engaged in a critique of the inadequacies of my
own culture and my own past. I wish you could forget about that and just surrender
to the spectacular closing minutes of 'Scorched Earth' and 'La Rossa' - to
name but two.
These reissues (following the band's recent re-emergence) take us up to the
point in 1976 when VDGG suddenly became irrelevant to my life - or so I liked
to think. With that insistent zeitgeist in the offing, listening to VDGG,
even their masterpieces, seemed like a furtive pleasure, and I hardly noticed
World Record (1978) and what
followed it - I just remember it seemed to fit in with the judgments I then
wished to make: distended, ponderous, empty. By the time of World
Record the punk mantra of 'I don't care'
and 'I don't wanna' seemed a perfectly sufficient response to all those BIG
questions.
They've thrown in Peter Hammill's first solo album, Fool's Mate, which is a very inadequate guide to the wrenching
depths of his subsequent solo albums. In it, Peter and the other VDGG boys
exhumed some of his older, more poppy material. Inventiveness and skill are
plentiful, but in every time and place there have always been inventive and
skilful musicians. I can't think of a good reason for listening to this,
certainly not a socio-historical one - If you want to tune into Britain in
the early seventies, then Cat Stevens' Teaser and the Firecat now seems ten times more revelatory and
authoritative - for instance. If you're going to listen to VDGG at all, it's
better to go with them doing what they assumed they could do, merely to
assault the bounds of space and time.
© Michael
Peverett 2005
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