Peter Hammill
An archive chat with Peter Hammill about what drives his musical creativity.
Anderson regrets that he was unable to involve former Weather Report saxophonist Wayne Shorter, but Franklin got in Belgian vocal troupe Zap Mama, the Tower Of Power horn section and big name guests including guitarist Rick Derringer, Ian Anderson on flute, and Carmine Appice on drums. The title is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the number of guest musicians who play on the album.
The lengthy, complex 1000 Hands
(Come Up) features a virtual jazz fusion supergroup, which includes the late Larry Coryell on guitar, Chick Corea on piano, violinist Jean-Luc Ponty, and Billy Cobham on drums. Although the musicians weren’t in the same room at the time, “they were on the same planet” says Anderson. “And that’s all that matters.
“The track was there, the vocals sounded pretty good. I was mesmerised by Billy Cobham in the Mahavishnu Orchestra. I remember meeting him and he’s a really sweet guy. Then we got Chick Corea and Jean-Luc [Ponty] was the next one. I said, ‘There’s this track that has a section in the middle that’s dying for you to play on it.’ He said, ‘Send it to me’ and within two days he’d sent it back. They probably just listened to it once and said, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’ These guys don’t think about things too much, they just play.”
In these latter stages, new material was added. Anderson polished up a guitar tune Makes Me Happy, and sent some recordings of his daily vocal exercise – which he notes were inspired by pygmy chants – to Franklin, who arranged them in an electronic setting on Ramalama and WDMCF, the latter also featuring strings and flute.
The album includes western classical, country, Caribbean and Bollywood influences, and bursts of prog complexity. Despite its diversity, Anderson and Franklin have produced a coherent, remarkably uncluttered collection in which his sunny vocal melodies are complemented by these very inspired arrangements.
“I initially thought, ‘These are great sounds, but it could be much bigger,’” Anderson concurs. “And thank God it happened that way, as it has got a life of its own and I don’t hear anything wrong with it.”
When interviewed for Prog 91 back in October 2018, keyboard player Patrick Moraz described Anderson as “a musical genius”. When Prog reminds him of this he just laughs and replies, “I paid him handsomely.”
Although
Jon Anderson composes songs on guitar, his main strength is as an
ideas man.
He explains how this works on a practical level: “It’s what I did with Yes; it’s what I do if I have the right people around at the right time. I was the person who sat and listened as they practised a section of Heart Of The
Sunrise. It’s a natural for me to come up with ideas because I’m not practising the riff – while they are doing that I’m thinking about the next section.
“With Close To The Edge, for the introduction I said, ‘What we need to do is start off as if we’re halfway through a solo, with everybody charging away. But you’ve got to stop at some point.’ I’d tape what they were doing and say, ‘After Steve plays this guitar, we all stop and I go: “Aah!”’ Then we played it again and they all got it.
“I remember when we mixed the tracks for 1000 Hands we had Now, which was a three-minute song, but it didn’t seem to work, so we cut it into three separate sections. And at the end of what became Now And Again I said that it needed something else. I had just been in touch with Steve Howe a couple of months earlier and asked him if he would like to play on it. He owes me one because I sang Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands on his Bob Dylan album.”
Howe recorded some beautiful acoustic guitar for the song in December 2018.
“As soon as I heard him play the guitar I thought, ‘I’ve got to sing something here,’” Anderson recalls. “I was sitting in the studio, where I am now, and I just sang something about me and him. I thought it was a very fitting end to the album. I was really pleased.” In conversation, Anderson gives off a feeling of mental energy and unquenchable optimism. On the track Makes Me Happy, he uses two phrases that gained popularity in the 60s and 70s: “Make love not war” and a popular slogan on T-shirts and posters that adorned many a teenager’s bedroom wall in that era:
“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” Was this an acknowledgement of the hippyish milieu in which he first became active as a lyricist?
“Yeah. And ‘Whoever dreamed that peace would come to every city,’” he says, quoting another line.
“And it will happen when the orange man steps down and the right people get involved who believe in the future of this planet.
“Most of what’s happening now is our disregard for Mother Earth and our destruction of the rainforests without understanding what we are doing.
The only way forward is to get rid of corruption and greed and suffering. You’ve got to share the world. We’re all as one on the planet and we have figured that out from the virus. In that song I intertwine the idea that we’re going through some delicate moments, and a lot of the songs pertain to that.”
He adds, “On Twice In A Lifetime, after a lovely violin intro, I sing that there are planes coming in to feed the starving millions while there are planes bringing death and destruction. All these things have interwoven and it’s part of what I’ve been writing about since The Gates Of Delirium.”
Those earlier lyrics were more poetic and impressionistic, so does he feel that he needs to be more direct now?
“Probably, but there are a lot of metaphors within the framework of everything I’ve done,” he replies. “Like, ‘A seasoned witch could call you from the depths of your disgrace.’ It’s basically that your higher self will pull you out of your despair and wake you up to the spirits that are within you.”
If the three-decade story behind 1000 Hands feels rather bizarre, it’s as Anderson says, “Music generally stays with you forever if you’re a musician and a writer.” He also mentions that he has a large backlog of works-in-progress that he’s working on, including a musical about the artist Marc Chagall.
“I met him when he was 90, so I think that it will be produced when I’m 90. So I’ve got time,” he quips. Another project he’s been working on for 15 years, called Zamran, is about the son of Olias Of Sunhillow, the titular character of his first solo album, which was released in 1976. He explains that he was inspired by the find of musical instruments in a Chinese tomb that dated back 2,500 years and for some pieces he’s tried to imagine what that music might have sounded like. He points out a number of stringed instruments in his studio, including a koto and a harp and plays an extract. “I’ve written 15 pieces and even tried to sing in Chinese – terribly,” he says with a laugh. “It’s really hard.”
So when is it likely be ready? “I’ll call you,” he replies. “Like if people ask if
Yes will ever get back together, I say, ‘I’ll call you.’”
On that topic, earlier in the year, Trevor Rabin stated that Anderson, Rabin and Wakeman (ARW) has ceased to exist. Is that official now?
“It was just badly managed,” Anderson explains. “And I can’t keep touring if there’s no new music. I worked with Rick and Trevor under the assumption that there would be new music. I wrote some songs with them but I just couldn’t get it to happen. No matter.
“I had a dream that we all got together with Steve and everybody, just for the enjoyment of it, and that we would do Close To The Edge, Awaken and numerous other tracks that people love. We should all know that music is more important than ego and money.”
In the meantime, Anderson continues to give out positive messages, which feel particularly welcome in these difficult times.
“When I was on tour last year with 1000 Hands, we were playing music from the album and some classic Yes songs, and I said to the audience, ‘Next year, 2020, it’s going to be amazing.
You won’t believe what’s going to happen. It will be just like the 60s: peace, love and tourism!’ And here we are in the middle of this quandary.”
Maybe he was just one year out and 2021 will be amazing instead.
“Yes. We can dream that!”
1000 Hands: Chapter One is out now via Blue Élan. Visit www.jonanderson.com for more information.
“I’m thinking of asking [The Beach Boys] to sing on 1000 Hands: Chapter Two, which we are going to do next spring.”
From the dark, turbulent and challenging ways of early Van der Graaf Generator to, er, the same now. It an article from Prog 21, we look at how frontman Peter Hammill has tirelessly produced solo work that’s as uncompromising and distinctive as it is contemporary and pioneering.
“People who don’t know about me often think I’m a miserable bastard who moans on about dark stuff all the time, a bit of a toff and a bit prog and what have you. But for me, one of the functions of music is to be there and to be something that people can turn to when they need a bit of help. I listen to a lot of classical music and there’s a lot of excruciatingly sad music within that, but it can make you feel incredibly uplifted. In my own small way, that’s what I try to do.”
One barely needs to listen to more than a minute or two of Peter Hammill’s music – whether that be any of his 35 studio albums as a solo artist or any of the records made by the various incarnations of his band, Van der Graaf Generator – to learn the undeniable truth that he is one of the most unique and fascinating figures in modern music. That sonorous, multi-octave voice, that perennial air of impassioned intelligence, the vast spectrum of sounds and styles that he has joyfully employed for the past 40 years: Hammill is both the quintessential progressive rock musician and, with typical contrariness, a million miles away from anyone else the genre has ever claimed as its own.
Born in 1948, Hammill began writing what he describes as “attempts at blues songs” at the tender age of 15 (“Without any of the required life experience or musical ability,” he laughs today) before ending up at Manchester University where he joined forces with Judge Smith and formed the first version of Van der Graaf Generator. Signed to Mercury Records in 1968, both individually and as sole representative of his band, he took inspiration from the wild tangents pursued by contemporary visionaries like The Beatles, Ray Davies and Pete Townshend as they outgrew their beat group origins and started to plough newer, more adventurous furrows. It was clear from the start that Van der Graaf Generator were only nominally affiliated with the then-burgeoning progressive rock scene; their music was dark, turbulent and challenging; their performances wrought with an aggression and otherworldly perversity that their peers could only gawp at in envious horror. But it was when the band split (for the first time) in 1972, shortly after the release of their masterpiece Pawn Hearts, that Hammill’s career as a solo artist began to take shape and the idiosyncratic purity of his voice started to resound. His first solo album, Fool’s Mate, had emerged some time before as a clearing of the compositional decks, but it was his next three albums that marked the beginning of his remarkable artistic journey. Chameleon In The Shadow
“It’s all just music and you fiddle around with it until it feels right and then off you go.”
Peter Hammill
Of The Night, The Silent Corner And The Empty Stage (both 1973) and the stillastonishing In Camera (1974) took an ornately decorated hatchet to the singer songwriter blueprint and, thanks to Hammill’s devotion to recording his own material, bent the usual sonic rules briskly out of shape.
“Yes, it was all pretty out there, even for now!” he states, with evident amusement. “But it seemed possible to do anything. At different points in the intervening years I have done bits of what is known as ‘musique concrète’ and slabs of absolute noise, but at that time, with the hubris of youth, it seemed entirely reasonable to me to have a simple, almost country-like song like Ferret And Featherbird rammed up against something brutal and disturbing like Gog and Magog. In Camera is frankly bonkers and retrospectively I can understand the charges of eccentricity that have been laid against me at times! But it’s all just music and you fiddle around with it until it feels right and then off you go…”
Part of Hammill’s appeal has long been his fervent devotion to exploring new ideas and embracing new technologies. Perhaps this is why he remains one of the few prog alumni to be saluted by the likes of Sex Pistol John Lydon and indie guitar hero Graham Coxon among many other non-prog notables. In truth, albums like 1975’s Nadir’s Big Chance – which was a solo album that happened to feature the entire Van der Graaf Generator line-up – were startling in their musical prescience and yet remain curiously ageless and out of time. Often cited as the first album to feature the word “punk” in its liner notes, Nadir’s Big Chance was recorded shortly before the reunited Van der Graaf made the masterful Godbluff, but of the two records it was clearly the edgier and more pointedly difficult; a pre-emptive blowing away of pompous cobwebs before the punk and new wave onslaught began in earnest a brace of years later.
“The nature of those tunes meant that they had to be addressed with a certain energy,” Hammill explains. “For us, that connection with that energy, came from back with those beat group singles of the 60s, The Kinks, The Who, The Beatles and so on. Obviously, because punk is mentioned in the credits and because songs like Two Or Three Spectres and Birthday Special did have some sort of linearity with what was about to come, I am often credited with something I didn’t do. It was merely my interpretation of the old threechord tricks of the 60s and for me it’s a continuation. Effectively, what happened in ’77 was a reclamation of the energy that existed in the 60s. Punk re-established a connection. If Nadir… had a part to play in that reconnection then I’m happy to take that as a compliment, but I didn’t invent it!”
Something about Hammill’s approach to making music and his endearing disinterest in absorbing outside musical influences (“I think the only Floyd album I’ve ever listened to all the way through is A Saucerful Of Secrets, so that’s an indicator of how much attention I pay!” he breezily confesses) continues to make him appealing to people who demand a little more from their music than box-ticking dependability or lazily redecorated cliché. As the 70s ended and the 80s began to casually and irrevocably alter the sonic essence of all pop and rock music, Hammill could be witnessed beavering tirelessly away on the fringes of the mainstream, producing a relentless stream of albums that were always one or two steps ahead (or to the side) of the game, whether through deliberate intent or happy accident, and that always bore the mark of an artist with a worldview worth sharing.
“As far as the lyrics go, I only really find out what I’m going on about in retrospect,” he admits. “There is usually some kind of stuff that ties together the concerns and the style, whether observational or confessional, in any recording project. I hate to spend too long on a record. I like a six-month period because you’re the same person when you finish as when you started. If you do it over three years it’s hopeless, because nobody’s the same three years on, in their lives or interests or musical styles or anything. But when I finish I don’t have the ownership of the songs. In order to be a song it has to be something that gets outside me, something that escapes.”
Hammill’s output in the 80s bears the unmistakable hallmarks of that somewhat compromised time of fledgling technology and unrealsounding, reverb-drenched percussion, but even on sequencer-driven albums like 1986’s As Close As This, his ability to wring emotion and intrigue from that extraordinary trademark blend of simplicity and complexity remained firmly intact. By this point it was more than clear that to be a Peter Hammill fan demanded a certain open-minded outlook and desire to be plunged into fresh (and possibly frightening) waters with each successive creative step. Whether dabbling anew with the rock band format on Enter K and Patience
– the two albums he made with “traditional guitar, bass and drums” foursome The K Group in the early
80s – or confounding expectation by releasing 20-years-in-the-making quasi-opera The Fall Of The House Of Usher in 1991, Hammill has never allowed himself or his admirers to settle into a cosy rut.
“It’s all deadly serious but there is also an element of fun and exploration that’s gone on,” he states. “With an ongoing career, that should have a narrative arc, but I do tend to go off-piste at regular intervals! What it comes down to is I’ve tried really hard not to bore myself. If I start boring myself, it won’t be long before I start boring everybody else! It’s most unlikely now that whatever I come up with, that it won’t have elements of something that I’ve done in the past. I’m not going to come up with something completely new. The DNA is always there and obviously I have my musical tropes that I’ll fall into even if I’m trying not to, but I just try to come up with something else every time.”
Although he cheerfully insists that he has never strived to be a pioneer, Hammill’s decision to found his own record label, Fie!, in 1991 has proven to be one of the smartest moves of his career. As the record industry began to lose interest in long-term investments, and with the spectre of the internet
“I never regarded myself as being ahead of the game as far as the music business goes, but there has been synchronicity.”
Peter Hammill
and file-sharing looming over the horizon, he embraced independence with laudable eagerness and has since become a one-man cottage industry, pursuing both his own artistic path and keeping his hand firmly on the business tiller at the same time. Predating the now standard notion of a self-sufficient and effectively fanfinanced musical career by a decade or more, the extent and stature of Hammill’s post-independence catalogue speaks for itself. It also adds hugely to the experience of being one of his loyal fans; his is a world that exists outside of mainstream concerns and industry bullshit, and all are welcome to step inside.
“Having my own label has obviously meant complete control and complete responsibility as well,” he says. “I don’t really regard myself as having spent an entire career being ahead of the game as far as the music business goes, but there has been a certain synchronicity at times. I did start recording my own music very early. At the time, only Todd Rundgren and I were doing solo albums that way. And yes, I did set up the solo label, which has now become the norm for people. On the one hand it’s been liberating. On the other hand it means that I’ve been more conscious about what I’m doing with each record. My ‘record company man’ head doesn’t remotely intrude on me in the studio, but equally I don’t pull artistic wobblies on myself when I come out of the studio! I think that’s an honest way of working.”
Despite having suffered a heart attack in 2003, Hammill has scarcely slowed the remorseless forward trundle of his creative flow in recent years. The reunion of Van der Graaf Generator in 2005 has led to the establishment of a dual career that seems to defy all precedents for what is expected of a 71-year-old prog legend, not least because the band’s current incarnation as a trio has wholly redefined their sound and taken them into ever more inventive areas. Meanwhile, Hammill’s solo work has continued to delight and disarm. His contemporary albums, which include Singularity and Thin Air, are among the finest things he has ever released. As he continues to work on new solo material – there was much speculation that 2016’s Do Not Disturb was Van der Graaf’s final release – Hammill shows no signs of losing that vital spark of passion that has driven him through his gloriously fruitful career to date.
“I think songs are found and you only find them by sticking your hand up in the air and grabbing the thing as it drifts by you,” he muses. “And my hand is still up in the air! The biggest privilege is that I have spent 50 years doing whatever the hell I like. Wow. For that to have happened to that guy who signed up to Mercury Records in 1968, that’s an astonishing story, isn’t it?”
Van der Graaf Generator will tour the UK in 2021. See www.sofasound.com for more.