Peter Blegvad
“Peter Blegvad is one of my biggest influences as a lyricist. A songwriter, playwright, artist/cartoonist and even a filmmaker, he sings perfectly formed short stories of love and hate, construction and destruction, strangeness and charm – bringing them to life by showing ordinary things from the strangest angles, or extraordinary things described in the most mundane style.
“Blegvad was born in America, but his family moved to England when he was 14 years old. He met Anthony Moore at school, and they later formed the group Slapp Happy with singer
Dagmar Krause. The band recorded two albums and then merged with
RIO originators Henry Cow for two albums, Desperate Straights and In Praise of Learning.
“His natural flippancy was, however, directly opposed to the seriousness of Henry Cow, and he was asked to leave after one particular set of lyrics. The band wanted hard-hitting political commentary… Peter wrote about a woman throwing raisins at a pile of bones.
“It’s Blegvad’s sly whimsy and wordplay that first attracted me to his work, plus the fact that his songs are deceptively simple and amazingly catchy. Blegvad confided that his musical abilities weren’t up to playing the complex music of Henry Cow, and I’m sure that this contributed to the straightforward nature of much of his solo albums.
“Before you dismiss him as ‘not prog’, however, much of his collaborative work has been extraordinarily progressive. In 1977 he and John Greaves made an album called Kew. Rhone. Blegvad described Greaves’ music as: ‘Intricate, unpredictable, like show music from a parallel world’ and his own lyrics as concerning ‘unlikely subjects and unlikelier objects’. His wordplay was at its densest on this album, like a series of ambiguous puzzles to be solved, and still today it has the kind of depth that distinguishes many albums considered truly progressive.
“Ambiguity and meaning are central themes for Blegvad. In a spoof essay, Amateur, he talks about ‘numinousity’ which he says is energy, but really, he’s talking about objects which are charged with both meaning and the tension created by the ambiguity of that meaning, just as the Surrealists would take an object and change its meaning by putting it in an unfamiliar context. Making gold worthless, for example: ‘Well sometimes I dream that the world is reversed / I dream that accountants are rarer than poets / That things’ll get better / They can’t get any worse / And a rich man has nothing but dirt in his purse.’”