Van Der Graaf Generator
Peter Hammill and Chris Judge Smith tell the story of the band’s debut album.
Like many of the great progressive rock stories, the Van der Graaf Generator saga began with a meeting of unsuspecting kindred spirits. Both arriving at Manchester University in the mid-60s, aspiring young musicians Peter Hammill and Chris Judge Smith could easily have never met, but fate had other ideas. A sign on the Students’ Union noticeboard asked whether anyone was interested in forming a rock band. Hammill had been writing songs and harbouring creative ambitions for years, while Smith had just returned from an enlightening trip to California at the height of the psychedelic movement. Forming a rock band was exactly what they both had in mind.
“About 30 people turned up in response to the ad,” Smith tells Prog. “Peter was there, on the floor, playing a guitar. I staggered over to listen and it was a good song but I didn’t recognise it. I asked him whose song it was and he said it was his. I said, ‘Blimey, got any more like that?’ [Laughs] He had 30 or 40, so I thought, ‘Ah ha, this guy’s good!’ That was how we got talking about maybe putting a band together.”
“There was a lot of fairly awful 12-bar blues jamming going, so at a certain point, Judge and I split off from everyone else,” explains Hammill, “along with a biker lead guitarist who came with us, but who didn’t stick around for long.
At that point, Judge and I became a unit and it carried on from there.
I think we both saw each other as kindred eccentrics.”
“The most impressive thing we ever saw was
Arthur Brown,”
With Van der Graaf Generator’s debut, The Aerosol Grey Machine, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, Prog discovers the story behind the album from fateful meetings to Arthur Brown worship and beyond…
“I didn’t think it was that eccentric to write songs about Vikings or whatever, because it was just the stuff that interested me. I had that youthful hubris.”
Peter Hammill
adds Smith. “Both Peter and I were completely knocked out by him and we were determined that if we started a band, it’d be organ-driven rather than a guitar band. And so it proved!”
With both men enthusiastically stockpiling material, a nascent Van der Graaf line-up was soon formed, now featuring organist Nick Pearne alongside Hammill on guitar and vocals and Smith on percussion. Although some of the material the trio were performing would end up on The Aerosol Grey Machine in one form or another, Hammill remembers this period as being noticeably weirder than anything that featured on the debut.
“The songs that ended up on The Aerosol Grey Machine were comparatively less far out than what Judge and I started doing,” Hammill notes. “There were various iterations of Van der Graaf in Manchester. There was the initial band period and it was already bonkers and theatrical, with flaming drumsticks and Judge emerging from behind the kit with a latex wolf mask! After that packed up we did quite a few shows just as a duo, where Judge was playing percussion on typewriter and ocarina so in a way it was wilder than the way The Aerosol
Grey Machine ended up.”
“When we were the duo, I was doing bits of percussion and some harmony vocals but not very well, I must admit,” says Smith. “It took a while to find my voice and learn to do it properly. But yeah, we played in various places. There was a club called The Magic Village and I think we supported Tyrannosaurus Rex there before they became T.Rex. Obviously Peter’s songs were wonderful, even then.”
Prog speaks to Hammill and Smith as they await the release of a deluxe, multi-disc reissue of The Aerosol Grey Machine, the first official Van der Graaf Generator album. Aside from a remastered version of the album (replete with versions of Ferret And Featherbird and Giant Squid that were not present on certain original pressings of the LP), fans will also be delighted to find the band’s early demos. Performed as a duo, these primitive but intriguing first efforts were recorded as an attempt to secure a record deal. Even by 1968 standards, the songs they were penning were nowhere near middle-of-the-road, and yet the plan worked.
“HB [Hugh Banton, Van der Graaf keyboardist] had joined by this time and he had contacts,” says Hammill. “We needed to find management, so with great naivety we decided to go and record 25 of the songs we had, just in duo form, and leave it up to Hugh to sort out a career for us. We were both a bit under the weather when we did it, actually, but that’s what got us the golden ticket, which was a deal with Mercury.” Going To, which was released, somewhat audaciously, by Polydor in January 1969.
“I quite liked People You Were Going To.
I actually did something useful on that,” says Smith. “I played a slide saxophone. It’s a remarkable instrument, actually, and that does sound quite good. I was quite happy about that, but less so about the b-side, Firebrand. Great songs, though, both of them.”
“I was contracted to Mercury at that point, so the single was out for about a week but then the injunctions started flying,” chuckles Hammill. “So then it wasn’t out, and now it has certain rarity value!”
Heading swiftly back to the drawing board, Hammill and a now five-piece Van der Graaf line-up (with Smith, Banton, drummer Guy Evans and bassist Keith Ellis) started rehearsing for a forthcoming tour. During the rehearsals it became apparent that Judge Smith was increasingly surplus to requirements and that Hammill’s songwriting talents were not to be denied.
“It was a painful period. We’d both left university and we’d been the duo and embarked on this course together,” says Hammill. “He wasn’t unemployed, but underemployed in the group.”
“I’d insisted on us getting a proper drummer, without really realising that if we got a proper drummer, what was I going to do?” Smith laughs. “I just wasn’t good enough a drummer for where the band was going, so they got Guy [Evans]. All I could do was shake a tambourine and sing backing vocals. I wasn’t much help on the songwriting front either, because Hammill was entering this incredibly fertile period. I thought, ‘Jump before you’re pushed!’ really.”
Pleasingly, Smith has no regrets about jumping ship at such a pivotal moment in the Van der Graaf story.
“Oh, I think I would’ve just embarrassed myself, if I’d stayed,” he sighs. “I had other things to try. I wanted my own songwriting
“What a wonderful time! You make a bizarre, crappy demo, you send it to a record company and they give you a contract! It was unbelievable.”
Chris Judge Smith
“The demos are pretty frightful,” chuckles Smith. “They’re awful. I was trying to sing like Arthur Brown… big mistake! But what a wonderful time! You make a bizarre, crappy demo, you send it to a record company and they give you a contract! It was unbelievable. We just thought, ‘Yeah, of course!’”
Now on the Mercury books, Van der Graaf also secured a manager: the legendary Tony Stratton-Smith, who was alerted to the band’s existence by the classified ads manager at the International Times, the bible of the flourishing late-60s cultural underground. Keen to get his new charges working, Stratton-Smith arranged for them to record a single, People You Were to push on, which it has done continually. Half a century later, I’m still at it. So no, I’m fine. I was delighted by the band’s success.”
As Hammill remembers it, Tony StrattonSmith somehow managed to persuade Mercury to release him from his “absolutely horrific contract” on the condition that an album would be recorded and released under the Van der Graaf name. The Aerosol Grey Machine was briskly recorded at Marquee and Trident Studios in London in the first half of 1969, with producer John Anthony overseeing the sessions. Although plainly less experimental and challenging than later records, The Aerosol Grey Machine fizzes with
youthful exuberance and wide-eyed wonder at the possibilities of recorded sound.
“Because budgets were so tight in those days, there was a lot of responsibility on the producer to bring something in under budget and on time,” Hammill explains. “But in terms of the music, John gave us an enormous amount of freedom. The reason why we all became so interested in the process and pushing the boundaries in the studio was because he was encouraging us to do that.”
From woozy opener Afterwards, the emotionally charged Running Back and revered live favourite Octopus through to skewed instrumental Black Smoke Yen (which, according to Hammill, was inspired by Keith Ellis’ love of Charles Mingus) and the title track’s quirky vignette, The Aerosol Grey Machine has aged remarkably well, sounding more substantial and daring than a lot of the music that was emerging from the psychedelic underground at that time. Back in 1969, the band were confident that their music had staying power, even if circumstances would force them to wait for any real commercial success.
“I didn’t actually think that my songs were that eccentric,” Hammill muses. “I didn’t think it was that eccentric to write songs about Vikings or whatever, because it was just the stuff that interested me. I had that youthful hubris. You have to remember that everything appeared to be open in 1968, 1969. It appeared to be possible to take stuff from everywhere and just have a go.”
The Aerosol Grey Machine was released in September 1969. Inexplicably, Mercury only released the album in America, “where we had absolutely no name whatsoever,” Hammill points out. “So of course, it tanked completely!”
Nonetheless, Van der Graaf Generator had their collective foot firmly wedged in the music industry door and The Aerosol Grey Machine remains a suitably idiosyncratic and imaginative launching pad, right down to its distinctly psychedelia-unfriendly title.
“That came from a joke about me!” says Smith. “When I was in San Francisco in ’67, I found that I was very, very sensitive to psychedelics. At that time, there were a lot of messianic people who wanted to turn on the world, and they’d spike drinks and drop acid into sugar bowls in restaurants. I was hearing that this was going on in London as well, so I was paranoid about that. So the joke was Peter suggesting I should have some kind of aerosol mist that acted against psychedelia and greyed everything out. So I was The Aerosol Grey Machine!”
Within a few months of their (sort of) debut’s release, Van der Graaf Generator would complete work on The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other, kicking off what is generally regarded as the first classic period in the band’s history. But even though The Aerosol Grey Machine is more standalone oddity than anything more easily defined, it does provide a glowing and glorious summary of the many wayward steps Hammill (and Smith) took to arrive at that point.
“In a way it is the first album, because it was the culmination of that pre-history of
Van der Graaf,” Hammill concludes. “I learned an incredible amount from that time. We were part of that whole underground world and it was a really broad church. That was wonderful.”
“I’m of a belief that good music doesn’t come from your brain. It comes from somewhere else,” Smith says. “We stick up an antenna and pick it up. Peter picked up magnificent tunes. He’s a clever fellow with a very interesting, poetic vision and gave them good lyrics, but it’s the tunes. Those tunes are just astonishing.”