Peter Hammill - The Bard of Stars and Solitude

Preface

Can one be an openly acknowledged cultural reference point for Peter Gabriel and Nick Cave, Marc Almond and David Bowie, Mark E. Smith of The Fall and Johnny Rotten, Julian Cope, Robert Fripp and Fish, Lady Starlight (whose own compositions have been used as soundtracks for pre-Gaga concert performances) and David Thomas, among others, and still remain almost entirely unknown? Can one earn the admiration of Scott Walker, Laurie Anderson, Damon Albarn, Bruce Dickinson, Mikael Akerfeldt of Opeth, and be cited with admiration by the entire global avant-rock scene, all the more so as the years go by, and yet have already been considered dead on arrival at the very start of one's career? Can one debut as the foremost pioneer of art-rock and end up pre-empting the explosion of punk? Become a vocal reference point for the heavy metal scene while simultaneously weaving the plots of the most cerebral darkwave? Be considered the Jimi Hendrix of the voice and hailed as a dramatic, virtuosic interpreter of the vocal cords (completing the epic begun by Tim Buckley, with almost five octaves at one's disposal), while being judged mercilessly by some as simply a "tone-deaf drunk"? Write the most convoluted and verbose sonic architectures in the history of rock and (only) sometimes fail to hit two right notes in a row over the course of a two-and-a-half-hour concert? (Our friend Max Marchini knows something about this: having invited him to Piacenza a month or so ago, he first found him, surprisingly, giving a composition lesson, in Italian, to students at the Conservatorio Nicolini, and then watched him scramble like a panicked cat across the ivory keys in search of half a right note, before landing, without batting an eyelid, a perfect and moving "House With No Door"…). And then there's also the exquisitely refined and raw poet in love with Dante (a daughter named Beatrice) and Shakespeare, a standard-bearer in verse for theoretical philosophy, a producer, a singer-songwriter afflicted with bulimic productivity, with at least fifty releases behind him, including those with Van Der Graaf Generator (though only about thirty are officially acknowledged, depending on the day), but also simply "cultured"; author of rock operas, ballet scores and soundtracks never used because they were deemed "terrifying" ("Eyewitness", in Italian, "Il Ragazzo ha visto l'assassino e deve morire"), an extreme sonic researcher and a mediocre multi-instrumentalist, a workaholic and unpredictable performer with thousands of shows behind him (even three a day from 1967 to the present) and stages trodden the world over, armed with nothing but a voice, a piano (or keyboard) and a guitar, or else with the most improbable, borderline bizarre line-ups?
This is only possible if you are Peter Hammill.

A hallucination, the most elusive and controversial of rock metaphors. A schizophrenic, gaunt gentleman, gentle and with a gaze that every so often freezes, as if to arrest some dark premonition in the void, Hammill is a crossroads of antitheses, well expressed in every aspect of his art. A voice that can be angelic to the point of the feminine and violently demonic, a songwriting style that caresses the notes only to plunge, in a split second, into a tremendous abyss. A man as funny and talkative as he is barricaded within his own world, accessible to no one but himself (his own Terra Incognita, out there in Bath). The realization of a dichotomy that asserts itself and denies itself a moment later, only to relaunch itself along an arduous and unpredictable path. In light of a creative vein all the more reinvigorated and projected into a distant future with the recent albums that have unmistakably reignited his star (at least) since 2006's "Singularity", here is a portrait of the artist and the man, one that tries to escape both the dismissiveness of those who wanted to write him off at his first misstep, and the idolatry of those who considered any utterance of his a priori genius, amassing an unprecedented archive while abstaining from any critical assessment of his trajectory.
In fact, both attitudes have helped to undermine any real interest on the part of an audience not made up of insiders.
Hammill's is a story told in music and a 47-year human journey, one in which I will consider not only his official output but also the immense wealth of bootlegs, anecdotes, unpublished documents and collaborations. A history and a cult that, one day, not too far off, will surely become legend.

Chapter I: 1971-1979 – Creative Fury

1971: Van Der Graaf Generator are about to release "Pawn Hearts" (October), heading toward the peak of acclaim they would receive from audiences and critics alike, curiously concentrated exclusively in a handful of European countries, Italy chief among them, even though they received little attention back home. Hammill decides to release a solo album ahead of the masterpiece by the band he fronts. At the time it was fairly common practice among musicians to treat their solo career as a much more modest sideline to their work with their main group. No one could have imagined what was about to happen. It's in July of that year that the hallucinated British bard gives voice and shape to a handful of songs that had been sitting in a drawer for several years by then. The album cover is by Paul Whitehead, the same artist who had turned the sound of the previous VDGG album into metaphorical visions, and, even better, that of Genesis's "Nursery Cryme", the work that would make his name as a surrealist illustrator. A chessboard, a recurring symbol in the singer's poetics, surrounded by little airplanes and a myriad of assorted objects, dominates the sleeve of the LP Fool's Mate (Scacco Matto). Although Hammill's entire band and several friends, including Robert Fripp of King Crimson (already a guest on "H to He" and later on "Pawn Hearts"), appear on the album, there isn't the faintest trace here of the violently psychotropic sound the author had accustomed listeners to up to that point. It's a pastoral sound, with a few well-aimed lyrical flights ("Summer Song" – "In The Autumn"), two ballads that would remain among the finest short pieces of his entire career to come ("Vision", celebrated at its best live in Los Angeles on July 14, 1986, and "The Birds"), some harmonically open, classily arranged moments ("Viking"), curious baroque flourishes in a chamber folk vein ("Happy"), and a minimal dramatic surge that hints at strange omens ("I once wrote some Poems", a foretaste of the long series to come of tracks whose endings feel restless, almost like a warning).
As the years went by, live staples such as "Candle" – magnificently performed in Bern this past May as the opener for VDGG – and "Solitude" would find new heights in inspired versions. A sun-drenched album, then, enjoyable, at times even fun, the offspring of a crooked kind of singer-songwriter craft, one that would in fact remain a one-off among the productions to follow. Yes, because Fool's Mate would not be followed by any solo tour, but rather by an exhausting tour with VDGG that lasted until the end of '72, draining the band's finances but above all its mental energy, reducing it to the risk of shared estrangement. Hence the decision to disband, which – bizarrely, yet a testament to the human bond between its members – would never actually be fully carried out, given the ongoing participation of all the group's past and present members in Hammill's solo productions.

Meanwhile, after appearing as a guest on the crowded, but only recently rediscovered, debut album by Colin Scott (the self-titled 1971 record), the author leaps forward by at least a decade. So it goes for Chameleon In The Shadows Of The Night, from 1973, again for Charisma. Production, as with the previous album, is handled by John Anthony, who also produced the by-then-ex-VDGG and Genesis. But much has changed. With this album, the British bard fully reaches his maturity, finding in extremely stripped-down arrangements – like a Brechtian recital steeped in heavy drama, bordering on lament – a catharsis for his own inner torments.
The Van-Der-Graaf-ian form resurfaces on this record, particularly in the closing "(In The) Black Room/The Tower", a suite that had in fact been written for the parent band, but the emphasis here shifts to a more pronounced lyricism, with the main focus on an unparalleled vocal expressionism. While up to the previous record Hammill had never recorded using a naturally "distorted" vocal sound, here, thanks to the use of false vocal cords (vocal frei), simultaneously or alternating with his true voice, and with lightning-fast leaps between an immaculate countertenor sound, at times almost mezzo-soprano (practically a pushed contralto, given the unsettling amount of overtones), to a veritable heir of Arthur Brown (with whom he would in fact share a stage and musicians in Rome on May 27 of that same year) transfigured by a vocoder.
With this record, more than with its predecessors, the singer establishes himself as a timbral virtuoso of the voice as instrument and as an interpreter of the highest order, ranging, as mentioned, across more than four octaves, following in the path laid down by Tim Buckley and already explored on the last few VDGG records, but pushed here to its most extreme expressive consequences. "In The End" and "Easy To Slip Away" (a conceptual follow-up to the famous "Refugees") are contemporary romances subject to continuous tremors of the soul, expressed through rhythmic and harmonic fragmentation; "German Overalls" is the explosion of a deeply acidic progressive folk ballad that manages to unsettle even in the complete absence of sonic excess. Hammill needs very little: a piano on the verge of going out of tune, struck with open sadism, a guitar that's now acoustic, as in the album's sketches (the splendid "What Is Worth?", "Slender Threads"), now electric, as in the jazzy, psychedelic hard-rock of "Rock And Rôle", a fantastic track that opens up his more abrasive side. Even the album's outtake, "Rain 3Am", later unveiled on the (inglorious) compilation The Calm (Before The Storm), is nothing less than a genuine gem.

We're just a step away from the masterpiece that would be fully realized on the following album, The Silent Corner And The Empty Stage from 1974, an authentic landmark of learned rock, a work that (together with the one that followed, released only a short time later) turns forty this very year. Here nothing is out of place, everything brushes perfection, with richer arrangements courtesy of VDGG at full strength throughout the record, without giving up the foregrounded storytelling of voices and lyrics that are ever more carefully crafted and rich with literary, artistic and historical references. "Modern" is sandpaper, with arrangements that are truly improbable, pioneering, yet in fact never emulated except in some garage-psych offshoot of Chrome; "Red Shift" (a track with simply sensational lyrics, featuring Randy California of Spirit on guitar) glides between jazz-rock and acid psychedelia; "The Lie" is an Ossianic sketch tackling religious themes with an almost demonic air ("genuflection, erection in church"), anticipating the poetics of Diamanda Galás.
The closing "A Louse Is Not A Home" is a perfect synthesis of everything the author has said so far, with a truly inimitable vocal performance, thrilling in the way it scales and descends octaves with fury, and with textbook overdubs that many will later borrow, though none with the same unmatched emotional intensity. A clot of blood and nerves. Hammill is, as noted, a declared dichotomy — angel and demon, woman (in the Dantean sense of the term) and ogre — opening onto paradises and tearing open terrifying space-time rifts. In the closing part of the track, there's even a first glimpse of a drum machine, testament to his insatiable, obsessive and wide-ranging quest for new textures.
Still, it's the Hammill/Jackson pairing (with the singer producing Jackson's modest "Fractal Bridge" in 1996) that remains the high point of the sonic amalgam, both suspended with apnea-proof lung capacity between lightness and pure distortion, locked in open and hysterically amused competition, each mimicking the other's registers and tones. There's also room for the sublime romantic surge of "Forsaken Gardens".

Just a few months later and it's already time for a new album, titled In Camera. A rough, jagged diamond. Many things change. First and foremost the production, for the first time entirely in Hammill's own hands; but while the compositional substance remains largely unchanged, what does change is the sound, which moves in a far more extreme direction. Hammill abandons the guitar/piano/voice setup to fully embrace analogue sounds and tape manipulation. Even the voice sounds pushed to extremes, often over the top, even in the most lyrical moments. From the cover art onward, the author comes across as a kind of restless dark prince. There are a full six noteworthy tracks on the record. First of all the incredible "Gog", demonic to say the least, which in its coda ("Magog – In Bromine Chambers") derails into a sonic magma very close to Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète. Then the two splendid "(No More) The Submariner" and "Faint-Heart And The Sermon", which however would find their truest dimension live, stripped of the myriad studio sounds — though the elegiac elevation of the second is more than remarkable. The same goes for "The Comet, The Course, The Tail", a track with exceptional lyrics, here hampered by an overly heavy arrangement. Only live, and particularly from the mid-80s onward, would the song take on the proportions of a true classic. Slightly better served in the studio is the beautiful ballad "Again", accompanied by an arrangement that's chamber-pop avant la lettre. The exasperatingly noisy "Tapeworm" — also infinitely better in the sparse, rare live versions from the 70s — is an early example of proto-punk, with a madrigal-like interlude in its central section.
In short, a record of great substance that nonetheless immediately reveals a Hammill limitation/virtue: that of anticipating sonic trends (treating the recording studio as an instrument in its own right, though handled as a mediocre multi-instrumentalist working almost entirely alone) without fully nailing the role of good producer, performer and arranger of his own material. In Camera remains to this day a strange object, an ambiguous cult item for fans of retro sound, irredeemably "old" in many moments (though absolutely not in toto) for those whose ears haven't stayed fixed on the prog epic — but it's precisely its ambiguity that makes it simply exceptional.

In this luminous year, Hammill also publishes the book "Killers, Angels, Refugees" (Charisma Books, London), a beautiful collection of lyrics, poems and short stories, later reprinted in the years to come. Between '73 and '74 his live activity would also be particularly intense, showing, especially in some very fortunate BBC sessions, the best of him (an ultra-lyrical "Easy To Slip Away" with unsettling high notes and an ultra-theatrical "German Overalls", both a cut above the studio versions, would be the summa of the '73 shows), with a few exceptional dates (RTL Grand Studio Paris 1973, Hec Paris 1974, Basel 1973, Teatro Corso – Padova 1973, Genova – Teatro Alcione 1973, Bologna – Palazzetto dello Sport 1973, Novellara Ritz Club 1973, Roma – Charisma Festival 1973, Delémont 1973, the two Montreal dates in 1974, just to name a few).
The audience would not always prove receptive to the English artist's output, so exasperatingly dry yet complex and aggressively emotional (Hammill is no Nick Drake: when he whispers, the crowd murmurs impatiently, when he screams, the audience applauds), often accompanied by vocal performances equal to real tours de force but by modest instrumental technique, in an era obsessed with "showing off at all costs". Most of the people who came to his shows were hoping to catch some VDGG classic, or to hear the bands he was opening for. The Italian tour supporting Le Orme (a band for whom he handled the translation and adaptation of the lyrics for the English version of "Felona e Sorona", thanks to a good knowledge of Italian, as well as French, German and Spanish) in particular would be an outright disaster, amid insults and threats, though the tour supporting Genesis wouldn't go much better, openly booed (and note that on the April 21st date, Hammill immortalizes "The Birds" in a version where the voice soars to unforgettable interpretive heights).

Although the author's artistic vision is perfectly focused and has produced music of the very highest order — music that would go on to influence an entire lineage of singers working in vocal theatre close to rock's avant-garde — many moons would have to pass before his name stopped being seen as a bogeyman. Hammill is aware of this and decides to reconnect with his old VDGG bandmates. The pretext is a handful of short, direct songs, mostly written between 1967 and 1968. The rediscovered will to play together expresses itself in the pursuit of an aggressive, noisy sound, made of clearly readable riffs and screamed-to-the-limit vocals. The result is an album, not perfect, but historically essential as few others are: Nadir's Big Chance, which would largely shift course from his codified style of songwriting. Three tracks – "Birthday Special" (which is "God Save The Queen" by the Sex Pistols, hear it and believe it), the title track, and "Nobody's Business" – are punk, or one step away from it. A curious arc for an artist who up to that point had been filed under the progressive universe, and who suddenly finds himself on the front line (ideologically too, given the anarchic political content of the lyrics) anticipating the musical revolution that some of his own creations would later try to disown, only to eventually recognize them as their own forebears.
Ballads are certainly not lacking — "Shingle Song" and "Been Alone So Long", the latter by his friend Chris Judge Smith (co-founder of VDGG in 1967, who would go on to support him, taking part in all his recordings between operetta and musical theatre of a bizarre bent) — above all, sung in a reinforced, masked falsetto, frighteningly asexual. Also beautiful are the guitar progression and vocal line of "The Institute Of Mental Health, Burning", caught between Bowie-esque glam and minimal psychedelia, but it's the whole record that fascinates.
Splendidly played and better arranged, incisive, as fresh as it is abrasive in its lyrics, Nadir's Big Chance, in its reduction of structures to the bare minimum yet with a sophisticated sound, is avant-garde dated 1975 and still sounds utterly current today. Judging it purely on historical value rather than actual execution, "Nadir's" stands, alongside "Chameleon", "The Future Now" and "And Close As This", as an absolute Hammill landmark. It would only have needed, like the other records mentioned, a good producer and a bit more money to invest (but considering what it could have been, with different care given to sound and arrangements, perhaps leaving out one or two tracks, the same could be said of "In Camera", "Over", "A Black Box", "Patience", "Out Of Water", "Consequences" and so… in part, the decade). Certainly, no other songwriter, excepting Nick Cave and Tom Waits, can boast such a rich and rewarding songbook. What follows is the reunion of the parent band (though, as noted, there had never really been a true breakup, also bearing in mind the 1973 instrumental outing "The Long Hello", with its Canterbury-scented flavour, featuring Jackson, Evans, Banton, Potter, Italian guitarist Pietro Messina and Ced Curtis), with three far more down-to-earth albums, written in quick succession one after another — two of them successful, "Still Life" in particular (1976) and "Godbluff" (1975), one slightly less so, "World Record" (1976). On an intense and beautiful two-year tour, the band would also reach the New World, and alongside new material and repertoire classics, the quartet would also add Hammill solo tracks, in more or less convincing versions.

It would be in 1976 — a year in which the singer released a total of three albums — that Hammill, having ended a relationship in nothing short of traumatic fashion, would feel the need to return to the studio, this time with the support of violinist Graham Smith (String Driven Thing). The album born from this is Over, and once again we are a step away from a masterpiece. The epic of separation is tackled by Hammill with resigned, anguished singing, sustained by arrangements balanced between simplicity and real complexity, giving rise to genuine gems: "Betrayed", "Alice (Letting Go)", "(On Tuesday She Used To Do) Yoga", "Time Heals", "(This Side Of) The Looking Glass", "Autumn" — which live, except for the first three, would move listeners even more deeply ("Time Heals" would even be superb; just listen, among others, to the San Francisco version from February 13, 1978, afternoon show). An authentic, raw confession, with words so direct they could provoke embarrassment. An unforgettable diary, echoed by a single solo date (in which the author would have the courage to play the entire "Meurglys III" for just guitar and voice), before plunging into a new abyss.

Aware of having reached certain objective evolutionary limits in his own songwriting, Hammill chooses to re-found VDGG with a different line-up, swapping Jackson's horns for Graham Smith, bringing back the bassist from "The Least We Can Do" and "H To He", Nic Potter, and pushing the accelerator on a punk that in his mind had already become "post". The result is the fresh "The Quiet Zone/The Pleasure Dome", immediately followed by a solo album with the telling title The Future Now. The record would long remain Hammill's last great fully-realized flash of inspiration, and although not perfect due to production issues, it carries immeasurable historical value for its ability — then and now — to influence an entire generation of extreme musical explorers.
As with "In Camera", there's a return to the studio in near-solitude (with only Jackson and Smith alongside him), the use of magnetic tape and of equipment futuristic for its time, deployed in a minimal yet incisive way. The artist draws on the paths of Berlin-era Bowie and his collaborator Brian Eno, but goes one step further, into the New York avant-garde scene, with which he establishes a kind of exchange of sonic approaches (Tuxedomoon and Talking Heads above all), and returns to themes (anathemas) of violent social, political and religious critique. In the African obsession of "A Motor-Bike in Afrika" (later reinterpreted in extraordinary fashion by The Ex on their 1988 album "Aural Guerrilla") he finds a chillingly early anticipation of Peter Gabriel's ethno leanings and of Talking Heads' "I Zimbra", but also of certain speed/thrash metal, in the markedly hyper-accelerated, pneumatic percussion. A striking and unrepeatable flash of insight. He reduces his voice to an almost psychotic declamation, propped up by gothic choirs ("Mediaevil"), manipulates tapes in a restless, wavering way ("The Cut"), attacks with "Energy Vampires", stunning live, and enthralls with "The Second Hand" and the reversed choirs of "Trappings". The track that moves and wounds, however, is the Shakespearean "The Mousetrap (Caught In)". The only track sunk by the production — the synths propping up the piano are genuinely ugly. Live, this song would become a classic, well into the late 80s, so poignant it could bring listeners to tears.

Hammill's "canonization" comes courtesy of Johnny Rotten, during a radio broadcast, but the tributes that would reach him from Bowie, Gabriel, the Stranglers, and later over the years from Almond and dozens of musicians from the new music scene, would finally earn him deserved live attention, particularly in the New World, while his recorded output would be celebrated both by fans of progressive rock and by those of new wave.
It's time for a fine first collection, Vision, nicely supported by the idea of releasing remixes and alternate takes. Not only that — behind the cover of the original vinyl edition (never reissued on CD) is an unreleased version of the poem, "Vision" itself, which in this form doesn't appear in either of the two poetry books written and published by Hammill.

With PH7, the production is markedly superior, but the substance alternates between highlights and lowlights. Absolutely fa-bu-lous are the tracks marked by a post-punk syntax, "Porton Down" and "Carrering", which with screamed vocals and sax/violin solos (it's hard at times not to think of what Tuxedomoon and Contortions would do shortly afterward) slightly anticipate no wave, running alongside a stripped-down prog syntax steeped in acid sounds ("Mr X"/"Faculty X"), plus ballads that would tower live but sound thin in the studio ("Mirror Images" and the live classic "Time For A Change", once again penned by Chris Judge Smith). No less than magnificent is "Not For Keith", dedicated to the late Keith Ellis, bassist in the VDGG lineup of "The Aerosol Grey Machine", a long-underrated 1969 album, featuring a genuinely notable piano arrangement and a vocal delivery that feels truly "alive".
His vocal texture appears greatly changed, deeply roughened by alcohol and tobacco, violently expressionist and prone to guttural screaming — an anticipation of early Nick Cave and of the Tom Waits of "Rain Dogs" and "Swordfishtrombones" — yet still capable of extended, magnificent excursions into a luminous falsetto and crystal-clear tenor high notes. More an aesthetic choice, then, than a fallback, this "bogeyman" vocal style, which would accompany the musician through a long, triumphant tour across 1978-1979, but in fact, from then on, permanently. Both solo and with Graham Smith, Hammill would lay bare an extreme and intriguing Beckettian vocal theatre, before a return to executional precision and a less compressed vocal style in the early 80s. Memorable are the American and Canadian dates at the Troubadour; at the Unitarian Church; at the Cinema Cartier; Bookies Club 870, in Detroit, February 24, 1979; Cellar Door, in Washington, February 13, 1979; Old Waldorf, in San Francisco, March 16, 1979. But there's barely half a concert from that era that doesn't deserve praise. The most famous, without doubt, but by no means the best, is the one captured on the bootleg "Skeletons of Songs", recorded at the All Souls Unitarian Church, Kansas City, on February 16, 1978. Worth hearing, if nothing else, for the perfect sound quality and spine-chilling versions of "In The End", in a medley with "A Plague Of Sleepwalkers" (!), "The Lie" and "The Mousetrap". The rest serves largely as a counterweight, with Hammill chasing notes on a piano and a guitar.

At the same time, VDGG would crash to a halt with the tour preceding the release of the rough but fascinating epitaph "Vital", with a band increasingly an extension of the leader's genuinely progressive visions and his sonic choices, by then wedded to the coming decade. In 1979 Hammill took part, alongside Brian Eno, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Tony Levin, Jerry Marotta, Terre Roche and Daryl Hall, in Fripp's solo debut, "Exposure", delivering among others two masterpiece performances: the thrash-metal scream of "Disengage", a track he also co-wrote, and the strange blues of "Chicago", with its unimaginably irregular yet fluid rhythm, which he caresses vocally like a blade, starting from the depths and rising to mezzo-soprano hysterics on acid (Acid King?). Not only that — in 1980 he was among the guests at the Stranglers' Rainbow concert, lending his voice, alongside Fripp himself (on guitar), to an inspired version of "Tank" and a somewhat paler one of "The Raven". Shortly after, Hammill would write some lyrics for Miguel Bosé's attempt at an art-pop turn ("Bandido", 1984), for which Hammill penned the lyrics to "South Of The Sahara" and "Domine Mundi", earning thanks in the liner notes. Bosé, by then far removed from his teen idol days and devoted to a rather interesting brand of electro pop, would knowingly (just read what's written in the album's liner notes) pave his own way to commercial suicide. Not only that — Hammill would also try his hand as a producer, with the excellent sole album by Random Hold, "Etceteraville" (Passport Records – 1979), a cult new wave band born out of the brief but significant experience of 801 (the cult band founded by Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera), featuring David Rhodes, David Ferguson and Bill MacCormick.

Chapter II: 1980-1991 – From new wave to literate songwriting, in search of new formulas

On record, the 80s open with A Black Box, an album with very few weak moments, whose only objective flaw — needless to say, a production issue (something the author himself would later admit in the 90s) — is Hammill's decision to also take on drumming duties. The result is sometimes curious and at other times, were it not propped up by so much genuine inspired grace, simply dreadful. There are two must-hears on the record, authentically avant, where "the drums don't hurt" and where there's an increasingly refined use of electric instrumentation to note: "Fogwalking", mesmerizing, with Jackson's treated horns, a track that could have come from a Gabriel devoted to gothic music, and "In Slow Time", built on a cut-up of guitar loops, sketching Lynchian soundscapes with a voice that seems to come from another planet. Then… the long suite "Flight", composed in the late 70s and a worthy successor to VDGG's "A Plague", of which it seems an 80s update, complete with obsessive, reiterated, witchy riffs paired with vocals over ever-shifting dynamics. Its only handicap, and no small one as noted, is Hammill on drums. A very 80s sound, mechanical for sure, but capable of killing every dynamic shift in the track. A piece that live, until the middle of the decade, would shine remarkably in its many shapeshifting evolutions, in breathtaking solo and full-band performances alike. Also successful is "Losing Faith In Words", an austere new wave track with a truly fascinating odd-time section. Interesting too is "The Jargon King", with sampled, sped-up drums, a track that live would take on the proportions it deserves, abandoning the idea of "white noise" to embrace a more inspired industrial noise.
A good record, then, a fine omen for the start of the decade. Live, Hammill returns to Italy as a solo artist after seven years, only to face another unfortunate tour opening for Peter Tosh. The managers' bizarre idea would bring no luck to the inspired performances of the shows, which would be irremediably interrupted and booed by reggae fans waiting for rhythms and good vibrations. At one famous date, July 19th, at the Teatro Comunale in Turin, Hammill, furious with the crowd, delivers a rendition of the parent band's "Man Erg" in an expressionist performance without a single flaw, with a chilling punk-wave cruelty. The famous Italian magazine Ciao 2001, which aside from its very earliest-70s articles had always been rather ambivalent towards the English singer, commenting on the episode, declares flatly: "Peter Hammill is dead".

In '81, the author goes back to using a full band, and the result is Sitting Targets — pleasant enough in form but thin in substance. In this case the production is superb, but the extreme formal reduction doesn't yield the same results as Nadir's Big Chance. There are certainly good moments: the gothic, suspended, dissonant drift of "Breakthrough", which melts into a highly singable hook, and the splendid, needless to say obsessive riff of the experimental "Empress's Clothes", with a great Jackson on horns, are the key tracks, but also worth noting are the more granite-like riff of "Central Hotel", backed by delayed drums and a free-sax explosion, and the nicely elaborate rhythmic riff of the title track, which lands even better live, including solo. A track apart is the very linear, alienated "Ophelia", marked by an anesthetized pace, like pain numbed by morphine, cut off brutally and unsettlingly in its final section. A live classic for breathtaking high notes held to the limit.
Likewise "Stranger Still" would, from the late 80s onward, be transfigured live with an expressionist delivery and dizzying vocal excursions. The rest is pleasant, nothing more. Live, a date on August 28th in Kansas comes close to performative and interpretive perfection, standing as one of the most vivid memories of the artist's repertoire, preserved on the bootleg "More Skeletons Complete"; but that same year Hammill would also perform alongside Sparks at the Rock & Classic Festival in Germany, with an improbable jam on "Give Peace A Chance" bordering on hysteria.

Meanwhile, the idea of forming a stable band takes shape with the K Group, where "K" is Hammill, "Brain" is Guy Evans wrestling with drums and a pile of electronic spells, "Fury" is John Ellis, the noble guitarist from the Charisma stable, touring with Gabriel in the early 80s but also guitarist on "IV" (the album known as "Security", on which Hammill contributes backing vocals to "The Family And The Fishing Net", "Shock The Monkey" and "Lay Your Hands On Me"), and "Mozart" is Nic Potter, with his extremely minimal basslines. With three members of the last VDGG lineup in the band, the project enjoys great visibility and the chance to play widely across Europe (including a live broadcast on RAI in Italy, and Rockpalast in Germany) and North America.

The recording debut comes with Enter K, a widely overrated record, even in Italy, where a dry, minimal, typically wave-ish sound isn't matched by equally satisfying songwriting. Two tracks are truly exceptional: the ultra-experimental "Accidents", a full compendium of the saga begun with "The Future Now", and the mini-suite "The Unconscious Life", a sensational track that cracks open suddenly before returning to its main theme, with not the slightest hint of mannerism. These are isolated moments, however; alongside them, of some interest, one might place the single "Paradox Drive" for its claustrophobic chorus (though with a verse that's too "lightweight"), the multi-layered "Happy Hour", which nonetheless doesn't fully convince, and the dark ballad "Don't Tell Me", which would become a live classic.

Meanwhile, while the author publishes another beautiful book titled "Mirrors, Dreams, Miracles" in his role as poet, he takes a step forward with Patience from 1983, where (in the studio), aside from the excellent "Now More Than Ever" — beautiful too in its single version — no track quite earns the title of masterpiece, yet live almost every song on the record would become a true classic, testament to the strength of the material. The sudden ripples of the title track and of "Labour Of Love", the rhythmic obsession of "Traintime", the wonderfully catchy riff of "Jeunesse Dorée", the elaborate structure of "Comfortable", the simplicity of the beautiful ballad "Just Good Friends" (reinterpreted together with "Vision" by Marc Almond) would, over time, become among the most beloved tracks in the former VDGG singer's discography.

The album is essentially what VDGG could have produced had they survived into the new decade. Driven by a restless urge to mix different cards, Hammill would release, on cassette only, a strange project of elusive, dark sonic layering, fittingly titled Loops & Reels, later also pressed on CD in 1993 by popular demand. Fascinating, if ultimately self-referential, the album also features some early previews of the "Usher" project, in the works since the early 1970s, as well as a curious song built on a hypnotic kora ethno-riff, "A Ritual Mask", performed at the "Womad Festival" (the charity world music festival organised by Gabriel) with L. Shankar, Larry Fast, David Rhodes and Stewart Copeland of The Police. "My Pulse" and "In Slow Time" were composed for a choreography by Nikolas Dixon (the latter also exists as a rare video clip, with the choreographer present). Meanwhile, on dates with the K Group, Hammill alternates solo performances, duo shows (with Guy Evans or John Ellis) and trio shows (with Evans and Ellis together), drawing a strong audience almost everywhere, with the exception of the unfortunate dates supporting Marillion and Siouxsie & The Banshees, which confirm one thing: Hammill simply cannot be paired profitably with any other musician, let alone as a support act.

A second collection followed in 1984, titled The Love Songs. All the tracks are re-recorded or re-mixed (with the sole exception of "Been Alone So Long"). A pleasant compilation, featuring a highly emotional version of "(This Side Of) The Looking Glass", where the stentorian 1976 vocal carries the weight of an even richer orchestration, growing both more powerful and more lyrical.

In 1985, a double live vinyl, stripped of applause, was released to mark the end of the partnership with the K Group, and finally returns to quality levels not heard in a few years. While the recordings included here aren't necessarily among the best from the quartet's lifetime (the album was recorded over just three dates, in Glasgow, Edinburgh and London in December 1983, and was reissued in 2002 with the addition of the bootleg "The Secret Asteroid Jungle") and some, ultimately rather trivial, criticism has been levelled at its lo-fi sound, there isn't a single track on The Margin Live that doesn't deserve praise.
Several versions find a truly satisfying dimension live, from "Flight" and "Labour Of Love" to "The Jargon King" (both genuinely unsettling) and a beautiful "The Second Hand", later dropped from the CD reissue. But the whole record is the perfect squaring of the circle for a well-chosen setlist. What's missing – and this is a mortal sin – are "Accidents", "Modern" and "The Unconscious Life", songs that were delivered at their best live during this period. The 2002 CD reissue would include "Modern" and an alternate version of "The Second Hand", though not exactly a must have, given the rather poor audio quality compared to radio recordings from the same era (the Arnhem 1981 and Amsterdam – Carré 1984 broadcasts are masterful). The cover photo, whose scream would become a symbol of Hammill the singer, is the work of the great Anton Corbijn.

The return to the studio is a rather unhappy one, with Hammill now infatuated with midi technology and, for the first time, chasing commercial appeal. Needless to say, the idea produces an album that borders on insignificant, Skin. There are three decent ballads, "Four Pails" (again credited to Chris Judge Smith), "Shell" and "After The Show", but only live would these songs gain their proper lyrical and dramatic momentum. The same goes for the long closing track, "Now Lover". The rest of the album is unlistenable.

A compilation titled The Essential Collection was also released, really nothing more than a rather arbitrary mix (how else to explain the absence of "Traintime" alongside the presence of "She Wraps It Up" and "The Great Experiment"?), though not unpleasant, drawing from "Enter K" and "Patience". Curiously, that same year (1986), Hammill released the brightest jewel of his 80s output, And Close As This. Corbijn once again provides the cover art for a white vinyl release. This time, the artist returns to the path of his early career, but even more radically, an album for voice and piano/keyboards alone, much like many of his live shows. The melodies are genuinely beautiful, from the memorable hook of the aching "Too Many Of My Yesterdays" to the devilish masterpiece "Silver", where what would later become Diamanda Galás's voice-and-piano style is already openly foreshadowed, to the aching "Sleep Now", the romanticism of "Beside The One You Love", the major-to-minor modulations that turn a simple song into an abyss, as in "Other Old Clichés", and the delicately sung harmonies, with the chivalrous flavour of "Empire Of Delight", another masterpiece, co-written with Keith Emerson. A truly wonderful record, initially overlooked by critics, later rediscovered over the years, helped also by fine live reprises of some of its most beautiful themes.

The artist also began the most prolific of his studio collaborations, with Japanese musician Ayuo, singing lead vocals on some fine songs on "Nova Carmina". Meanwhile, another collaboration, this time with the much closer Guy Evans, gave rise in 1988 to the bloodless Spur Of The Moment, which draws inspiration from minimalist repetition but only finds its proper dimension live (London, 14 February 1988), while in the studio it falls flat.

The last chapter of the 1980s is In A Foreign Town, which returns to flirting with electronics, coming across overall as more enjoyable than Skin, but with few genuinely good moments, once again best delivered live: "The Plays The Thing" and "There Goes The Daylight" above all (the latter also originally recorded in a BBC session by the late-period VDGG), but also "Hemlock" and "Time To Burn". A 1989 cameo saw him feature on the masterpiece album by our own Alice, "Sun in the rain", with the beautiful "Now And Forever".

It should be said that, despite an uneven studio output, the years between 1985 and 1989 were among the most mature for Hammill as a performer, buoyed by a vocal range and tonal versatility that he'd fully recovered and pushed to their furthest extremes, to the point that certain live shows from the era – above all the beautiful Philadelphia date of 24 April 1985, the Amsterdam dates of 1 and 3 June 1988 (the latter featuring, in succession, the finest "Refugees" ever performed, exceptional renditions of "After The Show" in a medley with "The Mousetrap", and visceral versions of "Still Life" and "Stranger Still") and many 1989 shows with John Ellis on guitar (Glasgow, London – Royalty Theatre, and Coventry) – are simply priceless.

His relationship with Italy was also healed, after earlier, not-so-distant frictions, with memorable dates at the Conservatorio Verdi in Milan on 8 November 1987 (Hammill was among the first "popular" artists granted access to the foremost Italian conservatory, and he delivers here the finest rendition of "Too Many Of My Yesterdays" and a deeply moving "Sleep Now") and in Bologna on 10 July. A curious episode occurred in Mezzago, at the Bloom, on 28 April 1998, when organisers expected only a modest turnout and instead found themselves facing an impatient crowd, much of which had to listen to the fine show from outside the venue. Equally unexpected was the response in Pisa on the preceding 24 April, when, in a highly charged show, the singer, carried away by enthusiasm, reworked "Time For A Change" with the line "Hey presidente when you'll grow, what you want to be?". For Hammill, it was by now clear: the stage is an arena, where every night an irrepressible need to communicate is turned into catharsis. There isn't a single show where the same song is performed the same way twice; the only code is the telling of a moment, which finds its magnetic force in vocal and instrumental improvisation around a theme.

The 1990s saw the formation of a peculiar trio bringing together Hammill with the incredible violinist Stuart Gordon, a wizard with pedals and effects applied to his bowed instrument, and Nic Potter on bass, handling a skeletal rhythmic framework. The decade opens with Out Of Water, a noble, mature set of songs that easily surpasses the previous electronic-leaning works, aided by the contributions of Gordon, Ellis, Jackson and Potter. The album's absolute masterpiece is the minimalist, deeply dark "On The Surface", which anticipates the atmospheres of the forthcoming "Usher" project, but also splendid are the drawn-out, moving ballad "A Way Out", dedicated to his brother who died by suicide, the theatrical declamation of "Something About Ysabel's Dance" with a pyrotechnic Stuart Gordon, and the lovely melody of "Our Oyster". Also worth noting is the opening track "Evidently Goldfish", one of the few rock songs by the artist to come off completely successful.

Next came the double live trio album Roomtemperature live. The record would have been perfect had it lasted half as long. It's surprising that the chosen tracks come from nights when the singer was in less than his best voice, almost recalling the guttural approach of the late 1970s, and above all surprising is the choice of pieces with alarming performance errors (the album was recorded, as usual, across scattered dates in the US and Canada in February and March 1990, but if you want the definitive documents of the trio, you need to seek out the bootlegs "The Marginal Vox" – Vienna, 18 October 1990, with a sensational "Modern" – San Francisco, 21 March 1990, Brussels' Botanique, 10 July 1990, and La Stampa Vpro, 20 October 1990 – and you'll get a very different idea of the band's work). Still, underneath it all, this is a record with astonishing, at times frightening versions, almost a faint echo of the phenomenal (and far superior) 1978 Montreal show with the same Potter and Graham Smith standing in for Gordon. "Modern", "Traintime", "The Future Now", "The Comet, The Course, The Tail" and "Cat's Eye Yellow Fever (Running)" are goosebump-inducing, but it's a shame not to hear one of the trio's wonderful versions of "The Wave" (mangled here) and "Our Oyster".

Next came the long-announced work The Fall Of The House Of Usher, with a libretto by Chris Judge Smith, inspired by the famous E.A. Poe story, featuring among its voices Sarah Jane Morris, Lene Lovich and Andy Bell of Erasure. Marc Almond, initially invited to take part and then "forgotten", would later have some fiery words for Hammill in his autobiography. The idea is truly intriguing, the concept more than welcome, though the goal is only partly achieved. Certainly the sound isn't the best, with an electronic drum machine as crude as they come, but it must be said that the album's high points are genuinely high.
The reworkings of the poems "The Sleeper" and "The Haunted Palace", along with the movements immediately following ("I Shun The Light" above all), rank among the darkest material the singer has produced to date, alongside "(In The) Black Room", "The Lie", "Gog", "Silver" and "On The Surface". Together with "She Is Dead", these sections would form the focus of the "Usher Suite", which live would sound utterly annihilating, to the ears of an audience stunned by so much performative violence. The only other noteworthy moment on the album is "Architecture", a remarkable a cappella piece with Hammill overdubbing himself across his entire vocal range. The work would be reissued with revised and corrected arrangements in 1999, without the electronic drums, with electric guitars underscoring the atmospheres, resulting in a rendition that is certainly more pleasant, but also more mannered.

Chapter III: 1992-2001 – The founding of the Fie! label and the difficult years of maturity

With the founding of his own label, Fie!, which immediately set about reissuing Enter K and Patience on CD, the 1990s got off to a good start with Fireships, an extremely elegant album of ballads, arranged with the welcome support of David Lord (who also worked with Peter Gabriel, Jean-Michel Jarre, John Renbourn, Tori Amos, Tears For Fears, Icicle Works, The Pretenders and Echo and the Bunnymen). Among the tracks, "Curtains" stands out, a dark tale drawn from the news and a new classic, carried by an aching string arrangement. Just as striking is the elegant "Gaia", with a beautiful alto sax line from Jackson, and the suspended "His Best Girl". "Oasis" is seductive, and even more enchanting live. Not quite a masterpiece, but a very fine record indeed.
On 6 June 1991, with Stuart Gordon and David Jackson, Hammill gave one of the finest shows of his life in his home town of Bath. Chamber-like string and wind arrangements clothed songs such as "Ophelia", "Patience", "Out Of My Book" and "Something About Ysabel's Dance" in a wonder at once ancient and thoroughly contemporary, transfiguring them completely. The fact that only a bootleg of it survives is a mortal shame. Equally regrettable is the lack of an official recording of the live show at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 15 November of that same year, when an ecstatic audience watched the artist deliver some of the most beautiful renditions ever, in piano-and-voice form, of immortal masterpieces such as "Darkness" and "The Sleepwalkers" from the VDGG catalogue, as well as a fabulous "Usher Suite".

In 1992, the only official video document of the musician, "In The Passionkirke", directed by Stephan Guntli, was released, originally on VHS and later reissued in 2009 (as a double CD + DVD). A charming account of one evening's show, featuring some fine performances ("The Future Now" above all) and the only official record of the "Usher Suite", in a version that, from "She Is Dead" onward, takes off into a harrowing frenzy, helped also by the filming among the Gothic architecture of a deconsecrated church. In truth, good-quality (unofficial) video documents do exist, and in excellent form at that. A monumental DVD of the K Group in Hamburg, Rockpalast, from 26 November 1981, for instance, but also one with the quartet for Moscow television on 15 May 1995, the Frankfurt live show at the Bockenheim Music Hall on 7 April 1992, and the one for Spanish TV from 5 June 2002. Recently discovered too is a fabulous video document for RockEnStock, filmed in Paris in 1973, featuring "In the End" and "German Overalls", as well as one with Graham Smith (14 May 1979, French TV, Chorus, sur la scène du Théâtre de l'Empire à Paris, broadcast on 24 June 1979 and briefly available as a free download on www.ina.fr) featuring a version of "Energy Vampires", at the end of which one has to wonder what's left of the piano and of the audience's hands, which erupt into a roar.

Up to this point (if we exclude the embarrassing 1992 EP "A Fix On The Mix") the chamber-style singer-songwriter craft and its operatic variations had announced a thoroughly respectable decade. Hammill also takes part in Peter Gabriel's "Us", singing on "Digging In The Dirt", but a general decline is about to overtake his creative vein. The Noise, from 1993, is a dreadful record. The stubborn insistence on a chilly, self-referential electronic sound persists, barely allowing glimpses of the positive results found in the fine tracks "Primo On The Parapet" and "Planet Coventry" - needless to say, excellent live, but barely listenable in the studio.
In the wake of Gabriel's German-language album, an equally pointless German-language Hammill album is released, Offensichtlich Goldfisch. Not only that, but Virgin Records, sensing the fatigue in the air, decides to release two mediocre anthology albums, The Calm (After The Storm) and The Storm (Before The Calm). An embarrassing run of flops, matched by the subsequent live album There Goes The Daylight, recorded live on a single date, 29 April 1993 at London's Grand Theatre, which announces the birth of a new four-piece lineup for the years to come, with Jackson on winds, Gordon on electric violin, and newcomer Manny Elias, ex-Tears for Fears, on drums. The latter's arrival proves unfortunate, as he fails to carry the musical weight, except on record and in a handful of scattered concerts. For anyone interested in a solid "audio" document of this lineup, I'd point to the remarkable Utrecht show of 1 November 1994.

The combo's debut album is Roaring Forties, from the year just mentioned, originally released on the Italian label Mellow Records, run by Mauro "Faraone" Moroni. A record that sounds good, but has precious little worthwhile substance. The opening "Sharply Unclear" is excellent - just four chords, a wall of vocal sound, a rock-solid rhythm section, a chilling violin break and an unexpected coda. Of the suite that fills the entire second side, "A Headlong Stretch", only the more unsettled moments stand out: "The Twelve - Long Light".

In July of the same year, at the Barbican in London, Hammill serves as reader (though "speak-singer" might be more apt) in a quite exceptional capacity for the theatrical-musical piece "The Music Of Eric Zann", based on the text by H.P. Lovecraft, alongside the Kronos Quartet. This collaboration, though never released on record and available only as a bootleg, remains a genuine feather in the artist's cap. Not only that - as a singer, he will also take part in Moondog's "Sax Pax For A Sax", and on 29 May he'll give a trio concert with David Jackson and Stuart Gordon in his hometown of Bath, where, even if the voice doesn't quite reach its usual standards of the time, the arrangements on "Again" and "Something About Ysabel's Dance" are breathtaking.

Nonetheless, one gets the sense that Hammill is now working just to produce one album a year with two or three worthwhile songs. In 1995, a thoroughly precious album of BBC sessions is released. Hammill had always been one of the favourites of the late John Peel, and had recorded dozens of live sessions at the radio studios the legendary DJ and talent scout championed. The Peel Sessions includes only three sessions, sadly leaving out the magnificent 1973 one, one from '74, the 1979 live session with Jackson, and the mid-80s and 90s sessions - all absolutely deserving of inclusion in a far more extensive collection. Here, "(No More) The Submariner" and "Faint-Heart And The Sermon" shine as never before, along with an exceptional piano-and-voice version of VDGG's "The Emperor In His War Room", the precious "Autumn" and "Afterwards" with Graham Smith on violin; and far more compelling versions, compared to the studio ones, of "Time For A Change" and "The Play's The Thing". Essential - but if you've never heard the other live-in-studio sessions circulating online, seek them out, they're truly worth it.

X My Heart, much appreciated in England thanks to a certain attention to Irish folk tradition, but ignored elsewhere, is, among the studio productions of the period, the least ambitious work, yet also the most focused. Worth noting is Hammill's only truly fine sunny ballad, "A Better Time", in its non-a-cappella version, and "Earthbound", unsettling and dark, plus the lovely "Material Possession", with a fabulous instrumental break from Jackson/Gordon. Live, "Amnesiac" also becomes a standard in which both Hammill and Gordon display an uncontainable energy. A new chapter follows along similar lines with Loops & Reels, which also includes compositions written for ballets and films. Here the sound grows more refined, thanks to the use of "warm" computers. There's nothing really worth flagging, though, aside from a few moments in the very long suite "Labyrinthine Dreams" (almost twenty-seven minutes) - just a few pleasant atmospheres, nothing more.
A live album is also released that the artist firmly disowns, because it's actually a bootleg (later made official), well-produced since it was recorded from the mixing desk, but with erroneous titles on the cover. It's called Tides and refers to a solo piano-and-voice date recorded at the Lanzarote Festival in 1989. A generally decent performance and nothing more, certainly, but the peaks are unforgettable and worth the purchase/listen - "My Room" above all, in the most beautiful version ever performed (the ending, from a reinforced falsetto of caressing grace, explodes into a continuous rise and fall of registers and timbres, before launching into a long high note. One to frame and play for people while saying "this is Hammill the singer"). This version is only slightly better than the ones from the Teatro Nobel in Milan (14 December 1994, a tremendous concert overall) and the one recorded for the BBC, live with David Jackson in 1979. But "Four Pails" is also priceless here - the only version that can rival it is the historic one in Berlin, 26 November 1986 (or the one in Zurich from 2004) - and "Shell" is also splendid.

Virgin Records seizes on the general lull to release another cheap compilation, After The Show, no less dreadful than the rest.
Back in the studio, it's a free fall with Everyone You Hold, a thoroughly patchy album that nonetheless offers up a gem in "Bubble", a grisly track with voices in madrigal-like flight, Hugh Banton's organ and reversed guitars. Priceless - but... there's nothing else here, apart from the ballad "Nothing Comes". Pretty slim pickings, then, especially when we consider the equally pale collaboration with Saro Cosentino (an artist more successful in duo with Franco Battiato) on "Ones And Zero", and the writing of the lyrics for "Open Your Eyes", intended for - though largely failing to achieve - a commercial relaunch of Alice, with Skye of Morcheeba.

There's also, with far better luck, his participation in David Cross's "Exiles", on which, alongside Fripp, he delivers an absolute gem, "Tonk" - essentially Hammill at the court of the new Crimson King. A hard, highly strung sound capable of great sonic openings that find their natural outlet in Hammill's scream. But it's also the year of an unworthy live album credited with Guy Evans: The Union Chapel Concert, which is in truth nothing more than a single-track audience-recording bootleg of poor sound quality, notable for bringing together, for the first time in years, the entire classic VDGG lineup on the same stage for a decidedly imprecise but electrifying version of "Lemmings", plus an austere, solemn organ transcription, by Hugh Banton alone, of Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" (we're a long way from the theatrics of Emerson and Wakeman, but also from the Banks produced by Deutsche Grammophon - further proof of which will come with the fine organ adaptations of Bach's "Goldberg Variations" in 2003 and Holst's "The Planets" in 2009).

Not content with that, Hammill also releases, through Fie!, in an exhausting parade of output that would test the patience of even the most tolerant critic, yet another compilation, Past Go: Collected, of little interest. A new collaboration as lead vocalist with Ayuo follows, on "Songs From A Eurasian Journey", from which something is salvageable, though here too the expressive urgency of the first step has faded. So what keeps even the Hammill faithful attached to his output? Simple: the hope of a "resurrection" (which will arrive, as in every story with a happy ending, even if we'll have to wait... a bit), but above all the exceptional live form which, in these years, and at least until 2004, will reach a precious peak. Hammill now has a vast songbook to draw on and isn't even fifty yet. His voice, despite peaks and dips, holds up miraculously intact, in both scream and whisper, and shows in these years a breath control never heard before. Not only that - the artist turns every evening into an enigma, as no one can predict which setlist will be performed or which songs he'll draw from, between his solo repertoire and that of VDGG. On some nights, he asks the audience to choose, performing guitar songs on piano and vice versa, or a cappella pieces. During a memorable Australian tour in 1997, he'll run through, over four nights in Melbourne and Sydney, an unbroken army of songs in succession, dusting off his entire career with surprising clarity and intensity (a superlative "Central Hotel" in Melbourne, unbeatable renditions of "The Comet", "Ophelia", "Out Of My Book" and "Easy To Slip Away" in Sydney). Despite this, critics begin to abandon him - Scaruffi first, followed soon after by Bertoncelli and all the Italian and foreign magazines that "matter". A few years later, Blow Up, through the pens of Diego Palazzo and Piergiorgio Pardo, will claim that after The Future Now Hammill would fail to move any soul, "not even his own"... only to later rehabilitate him, in Pardo's solo byline, from Singularity onward.

The long-awaited miracle of a resurrection doesn't happen with This. While tracks like "Unrehearsed", "Since The Kids" and "Nightman" aren't without interest here (mainly live - hear the second one recorded in Freiburg, 15 December 1998, to believe it), the studio setting makes the songs too tied to their bombastic form, with cloying vocal overdubs. The closing "The Light Continent", immersed in ambient depths, would have been a gem, had it lasted half as long. In the same year, the artist takes part in David Thomas's Pale Orchestra's lovely Mirror Man Act 1: Jack & The General, playing harmonium, electric guitar and keyboards, and records, together with Midge Ure, ex-Ultravox, a fun version of Samuele Bersani's "Siamo Gatti", titled "I'm So Happy To Be A Cat", for the English version of "La Gabbianella e il Gatto". However, an embarrassingly flimsy work is also released, The Appointed Hour, a duo with Roger Eno, brother of the far better-known Brian. The two decide to arrange to meet remotely at a set hour and record improvisations in their respective studios, which Hammill would then mix together, giving the whole thing a semblance of continuity. The idea is fascinating, the result is laughable. In a paradox that stands alone, what follows is the release of a live album that amounts to the sum total of the Hammill aesthetic, a genuine landmark of learned singer-songwriter craft and of the possibility of being a characterful, virtuosic and theatrical performer, yet with a naturalness and simplicity that have no equal.

The album is the double Typical, collecting performances (including a recording made in Rovereto) captured around Europe during the distant and fortunate 1992 tour. There isn't a single version here that's anything less than interesting, and in some cases one simply has to call it a masterpiece. "Traintime" is a scorcher, as is a "Modern" on electric guitar that creates an absurd, saturated short-circuit in the instrumental section. And what can be said of the opening sequence running from "My Room" to "Vision", passing through the beautiful "Curtains", "Just Good Friends" and "Too Many Of My Yesterdays", other than "sen-sa-tion-al"? Equally fine are "Stranger Still", "Shell", "The Future Now", and even "Given Time" - certainly not one of the must-haves in his songbook, yet still manages to charm - and whenever the usual instrumental quirks crop up ("Patience") it's the emotion that immediately takes over, aggressively, turning poison into medicine. Even the three ghost tracks that close things out, with "Afterwards" above all (though still unable to dethrone the version performed in Amsterdam on 1 June 1988), demonstrate the ability to reinterpret the past in ever new, if not better, ways. For anyone for whom this document isn't enough, I'd recommend getting hold of the bootleg known as "Stations Of A Lonesome Trip - Live In Europe". Here "Curtains" reaches absolute interpretive heights, but no less remarkable are an endless, aching, electric "Patience", preceded by a Middle Eastern-flavoured a cappella vocal intro, "Stranger Still", "His Best Girl" in German, and a curious yet compelling "The Future Now".

1999 is also the year of his contribution to the tribute album for French singer-songwriter Michel Polnareff, with a version of "Jour Après Jour" that's vocally intense but less convincing in its arrangement. The return to the studio with None Of The Above has to contend with an unhappy present and a dried-up pen. Things sink even lower than with "Everyone You Hold". Just two melodically appealing songs, "Touch And Go" and "Tango For One", the rest is negligible. The only surprise is how "Like Veronica", truly ugly in the studio, can become exceptional live. Hammillian miracles. "Naming The Rose", on the other hand, remains pure form, cloying in its harmonic twists and madrigal-style vocal interweavings (his love for Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa comes up often in interviews from this period).
The third and, to date, final collaboration with Ayuo, on 1000 Springs And Other Stories, doesn't raise the stakes one bit, dishing out mannerism by the shovelful. The decline continues unabated with What, Now?, an album of songs from which nothing is worth saving, apart from the lovely "Far-Flung (Across The Sky)", the fact that, in a medley with Faculty X, "Edge Of The Roads" shines rather brightly (London, 15 June 2002, afternoon show), and that the mannered "The American Girl", with its endless modulations, hints at a theme of some charm.

As if that weren't enough, yet another, increasingly insubstantial album of supposed ambient/new age "experiments" is released, Unsung, along with a compilation, The Thin Man Sings Ballads, which it would be flattering to call "easy listening". For the little-seen film "Nos hacemos falta" by director Juanjo Giménez, Hammill records a magnificent studio version of "Refugees", and this is the year's chief legacy.

At this point, were it not for the fact that his live performances move in inverse proportion to his studio output, delivering epic concerts (Archa Theatre, Prague, 12 December 1998; Rome Air Terminal, 12 February 1998; Ottawa, 29 October 1999; Cambridge, 1 November 1999; Darmstadt Centralstation, 29 January 2003, with the finest ever version of "Patience"; Karlsruhe Tollhaus, 27 January 2003, with an unsurpassable version of "Stranger Still" followed by five minutes of standing ovation for Stuart Gordon; Mantua, 14 October 2000; Karlsruhe, 28 November 2004; Hamburg, 10 January 2001; Guastalla, 4 April 2001; Tivoli, 18 January 2003; Halle Objekt, 28 January 2003), now regularly performed as a duo with his trusty collaborator Gordon, Hammill would seem an artist with very little left to say except as a live performer beyond compare, but...

Chapter IV: 2002-2014 - The rebirth

The spark arrives with Clutch.
Right in the middle of the nu-folk era, Hammill abandons the exhausted sonic exploration, rich in "Frippian" soundscapes and sweetened ambient textures, that began with Everyone You Hold, turning back instead, quite far back, to his first two solo albums and to a roots aesthetic.
An album for guitar and voice, with the valuable contribution of Jackson and Gordon, and nothing else. From the very first notes, this Clutch feels like a debut record, remarkably fresh - just a few lingering notes of preciousness in the arrangements and guitar tone to quibble with, but otherwise, there isn't a melody that doesn't land perfectly. There's one sure masterpiece, that "This Is The Fall", which seems to come straight out of Chameleon, extremely dark, enriched by delayed flute, violin and a voice brought right to the fore. But "Driven" is also lovely, destined to become a live mega-classic. The opening "Crossed Wires" and "We Are Written" are wonderful, reviving a folk tradition with energy and conviction, with delightful modulations, soaring vocals and blistering solos from Gordon. Virtually every track will be revisited live, often with an energy and approach even more compelling than the studio recordings, including the long closing track "Barenuckle Trade".

Hammill is the special guest on the sole studio track of the Premiata Forneria Marconi's "Live in Japan", the lovely "Sea Of Memory", which he co-wrote and performs with easy confidence. Meanwhile, on February 20, 2003, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, something happens that leaves everyone present speechless. True, something similar had already occurred in 1997 at the Union Chapel, but this time, this reunion with his full VDGG bandmates, plus Stuart Gordon on violin, for a superb version of "Still Life", carries the flavour of a premonition. Because "the future now", invoked in that extraordinary 1978 album, now seems to have to settle accounts with the past in order to find new life. Continuing his backward journey, Hammill decides to devote an entire suite/concept album to the theme of language, even citing the Epimenides Paradox, "All Cretans are liars": Incoherence, which he himself describes as patchy at times, but which nonetheless proves (almost) always worthy of interest. "A shimmering record, of undeniable expressive and musical richness, combining the urgency and dryness of a certain existential new wave, the refinement of progressive, and the intensity of a Tim Buckley," in the words of Michele Chiusi, with which I agree, as well as the rating he gave the album, and then... "Not a masterpiece, but a small gem of emotional sensitivity in times of great aridity."
In fact, there are few overlong moments ("Cretans Always Lie" could have been a great track had it lasted half as long, given also the heavily retro nature of the arrangements); in particular, the quiet sections are the least effective, but the internal mini-suite joining the movements "Call That A Conversation? – The Meanings Changed – Converse" is rather beautiful. In particular, the Piazzolla-esque instrumental theme "Converse" (Piazzolla being one of Hammill's declared loves, alongside Ligeti, Messiaen, Penderecki, the Beatles, Coltrane, Mingus, the Who and Bjork) is an absolute gem. The pivotal theme "When Language Corrodes" is of great value and becomes even more beautiful in the mournful coda "If Languages Explode". "Gone Ahead" becomes a live classic thanks to its harmonic mastery. The album was released at the same time as the news broke of a serious health episode suffered by its author, a heart attack that would irrevocably mark his creative path. This made the album's distribution easier, to the point that it even turned up in the meagre audio/video sections of big supermarket chains.

That same year, Hammill was awarded the Tenco Prize for lifetime achievement, and the live album Veracious was released, a collection of performances with Stuart Gordon recorded between 1999 and 2004 (The Recher Theatre, Towson, USA, November 7, 1999; The Noga Theatre, Jaffa, Israel, March 30, 2001; The Patronaat, Haarlem, Netherlands, December 8, 2004). As is now well established, these are not the best possible versions produced by the duo — quite the opposite, in fact — but it's a delightful snapshot of a journey featuring a genuinely enchanting "Like Veronica" (even if inferior to the Karlsruhe 2003 version and the January 10, 2001 one in Hamburg with a blazing Stuart Gordon) and "Nothing Comes". The cleanliness of the performances is particularly notable (barring a few truly embarrassing mistakes on a handful of tracks, "A Way Out" being the prime example). Some versions are rather polite, "Gone Ahead", "A Better Time", and rarely genuinely creative (a curious "Bubble"). A snapshot that arrives almost like flipping through photos of a recent past after such a dramatic event as the heart attack.

The sense of proximity to a theme sung about so many times before, death, leads the author "to take greater care of his own time." Hammill chooses to reconstitute VDGG, "before it's too late," as he puts it. It will not be a nostalgic exercise. Four studio albums follow, three good ones ("Present", "Trisector" and above all "A Grounding In Numbers"), one extremely modest ("Alt", with far loftier ambitions), and three live albums. Two questionable ones (the self-celebratory "Real Time" and the overly ragged "At Paradiso"), and one truly fine one on DVD (later also DVD + double CD), "At Metropolis", the only official video document of the band, along with "Godbluff Live", that deserves attention. A whole slew of reissues is also released, complete with a handful of bonus tracks already well known to fans, with the exception of the demo tapes for "Fool's Mate". The only albums to genuinely benefit from this are Chameleon, The Future Now and A Black Box. For the most part, however, the heavy compression applied strips the other albums of warmth and dynamics, driving some audiophiles to exhausting lossless vinyl-transfer projects in order to get versions of the works with a genuinely warm sound.

While the parent band, buoyed by a relationship of genuine mutual esteem and collaboration spanning more than a decade, moves between past and present, "progressive" mannerism/complexity and modern urgency (occasionally, or rather rarely, even ultra-modern), exploring every possible formula around a nonetheless "codified" synthesis, the path taken by Hammill's recent solo work is different. The post-heart-attack trilogy of Singularity, Thin Air and Consequences is genuinely frightening. The author dissects reality with a clinical, and at times cynically cruel and disillusioned, eye, rediscovering the brutal (and minimal) electronic cut-up of the late '70s, updated through laptop manipulations of recent years, complete with a newly acquired passion for glitch aesthetics and drones. Having gone through, not without trauma, the stormy split from David Jackson (who had actually shown himself all too tired and triumphalist during the live shows following the "Present" reunion), the author returns to recording in complete solitude.

Singularity is the most direct of the three works; there is, within its grooves, an urgency to say things "right now". "White Dot" is the masterpiece, voices and instruments in a filtered magma, now forward, now in reverse, incandescent lava that projects light years ahead, and thus beyond the present, the pioneering sound of "Bromine Chambers". But every track is shot through with a subtle unease, manifested through the sound itself, not just the voice. The drone that builds up in the central section of "Event Horizon" is a black, frightening nebula; "Naked To The Flame" is an acoustic ballad (a lovely one), but it's pierced by estranging sounds that pull it into an entirely different dimension. "Famous Last Words" opens with a witchy choir that gives way to an infinity guitar, before returning to being a progressive romance — perhaps not perfectly crafted, but sincerely moving. "Friday Afternoon", live, becomes a markedly theatrical, raw and naked, interpretive arena.

The following album, Thin Air, is more accomplished in form, but slightly weaker in substance. Still, its "big" tracks are instant classics. "The Mercy" is true minimalism, in the classic Riley tradition, unfolding into astonishing vocal harmonisations, twisting in on itself through rhythmic suspensions riddled with dissonances and malevolent sounds, before coming back to itself. "Ghost Of Planes", inspired by the tragedy of the Twin Towers, sounds as if it came straight out of the Samadhisound stable, yet it's deeply steeped in Ossianic mist. "Undone" is among the finest ballads in the singer's entire songbook, riding a perfect melody with dizzying harmonic modulations, both singable and complex. A gem. The closing "The Top Of The World Club" is a psychodrama that moves in slow motion through minimal variations, only to implode at the end and leave listeners stunned by the sound of a piano pedal forcefully held down to seal the "end". Human, inhumanly human. "Stumbled" becomes a live classic for guitar and voice, charged with passion. The same year, Hammill sings on David Rhodes' "Bittersweet".

It's time for a very long tour, which in 2010 reaches its peak with dates such as Hamburg, January 14; Berlin, January 15 (with a stunning "Time Heals", among other highlights); Frankfurt, January 24; Paris, January 25 (perhaps the best date of all); London, Cadogan Hall, January 31; Leamington, February 2; Cambridge, May 19; Salford, May 23 (an excellent show), featuring a hugely impactful version of "Driven". The tour would yield, in 2011, a double album, Pno, Gtr, Vox, in which — and by now the whole thing is taking on almost absurd (and also somewhat tedious) proportions — versions appear that aren't always up to the best material produced on the tour; quite the opposite, in fact. The first disc suffers the most, for piano and voice, violently expressionistic in flavour but too imprecise, where the only things that shine are fine versions of "Friday Afternoon" and "Gone Ahead", plus an intensely gripping "Time Heals". The second disc, for guitar and voice, is less sparing and altogether rather enjoyable and well achieved, which can fairly be considered a kind of joyful summary of his musical history for guitar and voice. "I Will Find You", "Central Hotel", "Driven", "Shingle Song", "Amnesiac" and "Stumbled", in particular, shine brightly.

Limited to 2,000 copies, a box set of no fewer than seven CDs and 84 performances ("Comfortable" from disc 7 above all, with the voice plunging into the depths of a free-vocal passage modulated like Tibetan kargyraa throat singing) captures, in a moving and emotionally charged, if not always lucid, way, his entire personal epic, from the VDGG beginnings to recent days. Of course, it's another missed opportunity to present the best of his live work "in just two, but perfect, CDs", but it is also yet another testament to an infinite humanity, laid bare for what it is, warts and all. A snapshot whose edges aren't always in focus, but which is moving in its own way, and a kind of honest gift of himself to an audience, old and new, now clearly growing since the parent band's rebirth.

At the same time as the live release, Hammill withdraws Typical from the market, stating that he considers the latest live snapshots to be the only truly representative ones of the direct relationship between his voice and instrument, with no other musicians along for the ride. Consequences, from 2012, pushes further still into avant territory, but it's also the darkest album of his entire career. The sounds are pared down to the bare essentials, letting the silences speak too, along with the atmosphere of the studio, the vocal whispers, the sulphurous gusts dispensed by electronics never so frighteningly existentialist. The connection to late-period Scott Walker grows strong, and there are many moments that, after all these years, make this album a perfect introduction to Hammill the man and musician, even for newcomers. "That Wasn't What I Said" is nervy, stripped-down yet complex in its unpredictable harmonic developments and choirs, truly close to a Macbeth-like ideal. "All The Tiredness" is hallucinogenic, "Perfect Pose" disintegrates the song form into a toxic, unbreathable sonic nebula, "Scissors" primes an explosion of tension like a horror dirge in slow motion and then shatters into shards of hysterical electric guitars and tinkling pianos, "A Run Of Luck" is a merciless requiem for himself (at the Zurich concert on January 31 of the following year, after three fabulous dates in Vienna, Prague and Schio in 2012, the tears never stop tracing his wrinkles, in memory of the recent passing of his friend Nic Potter). Truly, imagining a new album after this one seemed impossible.

Meanwhile, the British composer receives tributes of every kind, from the Times to the most important British newspapers, as a "national treasure". But it's the entire music world that suddenly rediscovers him. He receives the Progressive Music Awards' "visionary artist" title, presented to him, not by chance, by Mikael Akerfeldt of Opeth. The shows on Lady Gaga's world tour open with his music and that of VDGG, alongside that of the Scorpions, in front of a bewildered audience. Van Der Graaf launch their most ambitious and accomplished tour since 1976, the "A Plague Tour", which will soon be followed by a live release (hopefully, or rather, pleadingly, with a well-judged choice of songs, seeking not just emotion but also technical precision, which fortunately remains fairly solid from the halfway point of the dates onward).

Not only that, Gary Lucas, the longtime collaborator of Captain Beefheart and Jeff Buckley, gets in touch with him, and a collaboration is born that yields an album in February 2014. Its emblematic title is Other World. A record of deep sonic exploration, between psychedelia, ambient and the avant-garde (The Wire covers it with interest), but also an album of songs, one that reaches its peak when the two elements — form (more or less canonical) and sound (more or less extreme and elaborate) — merge to create a single, strange but pleasant substance, at times effervescent, at others darker, but almost never terrifying. "Black Ice", built on an acid-grunge riff evidently courtesy of Lucas, features, in its middle section, a layering of guitar loops/drones stirred up by laptops hungry for glitch hiccups, which is spine-chilling; "Cash" and "This Is Showbiz" display genuine harmonic mastery married to airy, well-handled sounds led mostly by a crooner's voice. There's no rhythm section at all, and it's not missed in the slightest. "Reeboot" has a mesmerising voice before collapsing into the pitch-black of Lucas's sounds; "Spinning Coins" and "Of Kith & Kin" are simple ballads that are also "simply delightful", thanks to cascades of bright, crystalline sounds, like a shower of light at dawn.
Only the instrumental episodes come across at times (or entirely) as redundant, with the exception of the closing "Slippery Slope". The great interest surrounding the album is mainly due to its more pleasing sonic packaging and the presence of a "real" instrumentalist alongside the voice, compared to previous works, but the substance is weaker. Meanwhile, in the only duo date staged so far, this past February 21 at the Union Chapel, the two triumph, performing the entire album, plus a magnificent "Primo On The Parapet" and, above all, a wonderful Hammill-esque rendition of Lucas's "The Lady Of Shalott", an Elizabethan ballad that seems to spring straight from a Renaissance songbook, enriched by the singer in a state of thoughtful grace. Not only that, there's also room for a citation of "The Light Continent" in a more concise version.

Chapter V: The Future... Now

After years during which a new solo studio album had quietly been in the works, deeply considered and without any advance announcement, Peter Hammill returns to the scene at the end of 2017 with From The Trees. The leader of Van Der Graaf Generator doesn't seem to be surrendering to advancing time; on the contrary, he takes advantage of it to compose an album that, rather than a moment of resignation — as he has explained — aims to be a decisive act of awareness. Hammill's thirty-fifth solo instalment therefore sets out to examine, with touching honesty, the various facets of old age. Compared to previous albums, in which death was only an abstraction, From The Trees instead finds him reflecting nostalgically on the changes of recent days, questioning lost youth and all the paths that were (or weren't) taken.
From a purely musical standpoint, the new solo album marks a return to a more intimate style, with the voice gently advancing to the fore, counterpointed only by piano and guitar, leaving the other overdubbed instruments in the background. This choice results in a set of ten exquisitely simple songs, bringing to mind the title's trees, ageing with dignified naturalness. When he began working on the album, Peter later tried performing some of the songs at his own concerts, accompanying himself on piano or guitar. Each of these tracks thus remains tied to its own noumenon, to that original state of mind: Hammill makes only a few small adjustments along the way, through a handful of other instruments and the use of choirs, which nonetheless don't upend the overall colour palette, only illuminating a few significant details. In doing so, Hammill moves well away from his most recent solo albums and chooses instead to return to the era of And Close As This.
His voice is still the driving force of this emotional journey made up of unsent acoustic letters ("My Unintended"), unanswered requests ("Deaf Ears") and private heartaches ("Charm Alone"). A track like "What Lies Ahead" perfectly exemplifies how piano alone is capable of bringing out the track's full meaning, with bass, choirs and synth lending the lyrics further depth, contributing to the development of a genuine instrumental narrative, while Hammill reflects in the first person on past failures and those yet to come. Uncertainty, in all its humanity, also permeates the crepuscular "Anagnorisis" and, above all, the inescapable melancholy of "Torpor", in which the songwriter exorcises his submission to a body that no longer responds to its basic functions, even though Hammill's vocal performance on this song is paradoxically the most powerful on the entire record (“trovo difficile respirare/ non riesco a tenere il passo/ sento come se stessi rallentando irreversibilmente e non si sa dove questo possa portarmi”).
Between sardonic waltzes ("Reputation") and wreckage from the past resurfacing ("Miked"), Hammill also finds time to revisit his folk beginnings on "Girl To The North Country", with the acoustic guitar becoming the weapon with which the songwriter confronts himself, subverting in the lyrics the cliché of the man reflecting on youthful loves. To close, the cyclical piano notes and orchestral winds of "The Descent" finally seem to dissolve somewhere between past and future, with the choirs serving as the perfect soundtrack to the fateful descent of the human soul.

In 2019, Hammill returns for an ambitious and fascinating project. The rhythmic minimalism of the historic avant-garde via King Crimson ("Discipline", as much as the four chapters titled "Lark's Tongues In Aspic"), the cultivated orchestrations of Frank Zappa ("Peaches en Regalia", "Little Umbrellas"), the spatial and tonal (sometimes atonal) organisation of sound as practised by Samla Mammas Manna, Thinking Plague and Yugen, the Stravinsky-derived lineage of Yes's "Close To The Edge", cinematic suggestions dear to Ornette Coleman, the full-blooded, lyrical passion of an extended vocal style capable of reviving the theatre-voice tradition from Artaud onward, and exotic touches dear to Debussy and Satie. All wrapped in a sound that feels frighteningly contemporary. This is the art-rock of In Amazonia, credited to Isildurs Bane and Peter Hammill, but which, given the scale of their contributions, rightfully belongs also to Pat Mastelotto and the magnificent Karin Nakagawa, player of the 25-string koto as well as an acclaimed singer, actress and visual artist. An album destined to remain a landmark of a "non-genre" that is increasingly becoming a sought-after destination for those wishing to break free from easy pigeonholing.

In Amazonia cannot be considered a mere album; it's a project. Funded by the municipality of Gouveia and by that Portuguese town's Art Rock Fest. This also explains the richness of its palette, certainly unusual both for the Swedish band and, even more so, for the enlightened bard of Bath.
The album's six tracks were mixed by Charlie Storm, well known for his production work with Roxette, In Flames and Steve Jansen. The compositions are credited solely to Mats Johansson, Isildurs Bane's keyboardist and the record's producer (pressed on CD and on green or black vinyl), and Peter Hammill, who is mainly responsible for the vocal lines and lyrics, but who also played a role in shaping the tracks' structures and arrangements.
The music has an imposing, symphonic character from a strictly contemporary standpoint, yet it's at the same time perfectly focused and lean; there's no trace of "technical showing-off", despite the considerable demands placed on all the musicians and the entire percussion section.
The voice of the singer of "extended voice" par excellence (and rightly also an "interpreter" in the oldest, most passionate sense of the term, alongside Tim Buckley and Diamanda Galás) has truly fresh, lush overtones. It finds its finest moments in the higher registers and in passages through a meticulously crafted, reinforced falsetto, settling into rougher but full-blooded tones in the low and mid register, yet it's capable of hyperbolic command of intervals, and when it turns into "choir", it becomes "a thousand of itself".
There are two masterpieces: "Before You Know It" and "The Day Is Done".
The first opens with rumbling electronic sounds and precious soundscapes, immediately followed by a scampering of marimba (Klas Assarsson is superb throughout the record) and koto (the aforementioned Nakagawa). Hammill himself seems to be conjuring something from somewhere else entirely. At the two-minute mark the track explodes into a wall of sound well acquainted with the Crimson of "The Power To Believe", but also with Tool and that absolute gem "Tonk" from David Cross's fourth album (not coincidentally featuring Fripp and Mr. Hammill). Axel Croné's bass is pure granite. The voice meets a slight vocoder and a magnificent choir sustaining high tones that soon turn tenor-like, direct, violent. The keyboard electronics become central in their ability to sketch out otherworldly sonorities, the percussion moves through a profusion of assorted polyrhythms. The guitars trace lateral geometries. A brief pause with mellotron to the fore, the rhythmic march starting up again while the choirs hover menacingly, until it all grinds to a halt on a lightning-fast koto arpeggio crashing into a gong, then didgeridoo, with the strings of Nakagawa's Asian instrument literally razored along their entire length. A nearly eight-minute marvel that feels like the usual 3-4 minutes of a radio single, an indescribable power born of Scandinavia, a Euro-erudite vocabulary, but also of the Far East. The most direct rock vocabulary meeting the most virulent sonic avant-garde. Magnificent.
"The Day Is Done" is a pure gem of avant songwriting, built on piano/keyboards, imposing electronics just short of grandiosity, percussion embroidery used as colour. The absolute protagonist is the voice, never more inspired. A ballad with a crystalline melody, recognisable among a thousand others, with harmonies that are forbidding yet never create any discomfort for the listener. Johansson's work is enchanting. The keyboardist, true to form, offers continual suspensions, a surprising spatial opening at the 3'30" mark that heralds a kind of sorrowful waltz.
Among the other tracks, "Under The Current" is certainly priceless. Why? Here the instrumental mosaic becomes truly choral. The track is also the most distinctly "avant" one and is unquestionably praiseworthy. The opening is entrusted to Samuel Hällkvist's guitars, in a classical-minimalist vein closely recalling Stick Men as much as the League of Crafty Guitarists. The swarming is soon handed over to the koto, and then Hammill's voice enters, here rhythmic and mystery-laden, engaged in arduous cross-rhythms delivered with enormous naturalness. At the 2'11" mark, the usual phase-shifts the singer uses as a signature device appear, creating a beautiful hall-of-mirrors effect onto which, immediately and with split-second timing, Mastelotto's unmistakable drumming locks in with lightning-fast quadruplets like the rhythm of a train rolling along its tracks.
Luca Calabrese's trumpet (previously heard with Steve Jansen and Terry Bozzio) sketches wonderful scenarios recalling Miles's "Amandla" and that soundtrack delight "The Naked Lunch", credited to Howard Shore/Ornette Coleman with the London Philharmonic Orchestra (1992). The strings (Liesbeth Lambrecht foremost among them) shriek in closing groans that, astride assorted soundscapes, come very close to "Neuköln" (Eno/Bowie).
The ten minutes of "This Is Where" present the boldest exercise in orchestral layering and go on to sketch out several more or less complete tableaux, woven together nonetheless into a highly effective fabric. The opening seems to come straight out of Crimson's "Discipline", and here that's more than a mere citation. Guiding the guitars, the swarming percussion and koto is Hammill's voice, which becomes pure rhythm. Then an opening in perfect Zappa-esque style, a genuine marvel of "chamber rock", where strings and winds overlap and alternate in a spatial organisation that is certainly geometric, but also quite lyrical. The percussion jams at the 2'22" mark in a violent rhythmic fracture, underscored theatrically by the singer with absolute mastery, "back in the daylight", heralding the citation of the album's title in tight counterpoint from Axel Croné on bass clarinet. From here springs a genuine jungle-prog-mantra, driven by every instrument turned electronic (voice included), with the exception of the koto. The guitar sounds come close to the best of Trey Gunn in his broken, strangled phrasing, almost emulating bird sounds, all set across whole-tone scales. The constant tempo changes represent, for Hammill — engaged from the fifth minute onward in a genuine game of intervals in perfect zeuhl style (Magma, but also and above all the great Dagmar Krause on "Living In The Heart Of The Beast") — a device no less unsettling, with continuous octave leaps, hyper-low and contralto choirs. Pure chills.
The momentum halts, everything turns quiet and lyrical, while at the same time rich with ethnic touches and gusts of mellotron sketching out Nordic landscapes. The tension begins to build again, though less convincingly. The track finally regains altitude with a tightly woven dialogue between saxophones on two channels, masterfully revealing their inner workings (who remembers Mats Gustafsson on "Hydros One"?).
Also worth noting (I'll still mention "Aguirre", as the slightly weakest track of the bunch, though with lovely melodies and an exceedingly elegant, more "pop-oriented" vocal) is the closing crescendo of "This Bird Has Flown", which revisits, as if in a kind of nightmare, the main section of the album's opening track and pushes it to extremes with Calabrese's splendid trumpet flourishes (here in a free-jazz vein straight out of the ESP-Disk tradition). All while Hammill's possessed choirs (touching an uneasy high C), the electronics, pulsing and here genuinely tribal rhythms, didgeridoo, and strings scraped at the bridge sketch out a kind of monstrous déjà vu, a sort of small universal totemic altar.
This is In Amazonia, an eccentric, cosmopolitan, lyrical fresco of countless colours, painted by mind and body alike.

In 2021 Hammill returns with a covers album, largely dusting off songs by authors from our own Bel Paese. And it really is a fine record, one that leads Hammill into a Brechtian tavern to raise a toast with the young Baal, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, the Gavin Friday of “Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves” (1989), and the ghosts of the maudit French singers.
Almost every track on In Traslation deserves praise, with the exception of the overly ragged or martial “Oblivion” — sung, frankly, rather badly — and Gabriel Fauré's “Après un Rêve” Op. 7 No. 1 (originally set to the words of an anonymous Tuscan poet and here titled “After A Dream”, complete with piano and electric guitar seeking a unison that only results in irritating counter-phases). What's certain is that the album's most convincing tracks are also, sonically, the ones of Italian provenance. “Il Vino” by Piero Ciampi and “Hotel Supramonte” by Fabrizio De André/Massimo Bubola stand out above all, followed by... the poetic and at times metaphysical “Ciao amore” by Luigi Tenco; the dark, almost menacing “I Who Have Nothing” (“Uno dei tanti”) by Donida/Mogol, here however with the English lyrics by Leiber/Stoller. Absolute praise is also due for “Ballad For My Death” (“Balada para mi Muerte”, or “Suoneranno le Sei” in the Italian version) by Astor Piazzolla/Horacio Ferrer. The lyricism of Gustav Mahler and of musical-theatre classics performed with grace (the touching, finely calibrated “This Nearly Was Mine” here) round out a tribute to Latin and European culture that is thoroughly noteworthy at a time when Brexit is being disowned by the very man — the composer and performer here — who feels “deeply European”.
A “nocturnal” record, one to be long remembered by anyone who loves that theatrical-vocal art form now out of fashion but among the noblest expressions of Mitteleuropean culture. The arrangements are extremely measured, like delicate tapestries studded with incisive touches (the synthetic organ on “Il Vino”) between acoustic piano, restrained electric guitars and digital sounds worthy of an orchestral home recording. Crowning it all is the restless, unsettling close of the already-praised Piazzolla piece, and a music box that transfigures Tenco's song into dream/surrender. Echoes of dark cabaret, of the freak-show circus, inhabit the brilliantly grotesque derailment that scrapes the voice against the bottom of a barrel in “Il Vino” — the kind of ghosts that haunted the composer's work on “The Fall Of The House Of Usher” (1991) and his hungry declamation on “The Music Of Eric Zann” (1994) with the Kronos Quartet. “Hotel Supramonte”, in its lightness, seems to exist in a suspended dimension, where space and time hold no value beyond a single name: “uncertainty”. The choral parts are precious, often close to dark warnings in which the lead voice is just one of many instruments in an extended vocal piece that here forgoes the usual formal perfection in favour of pure emotion — albeit with the odd rough edge that adds “colour” rather than doing harm, as in Nina Simone's “And Piano!” (1969).
The lyric adaptations preserve the original literary imagery and assonances, yet without being merely illustrative, instead finding grace and musicality befitting the pen of a man who is himself a poet, as the British singer is — the same man who also crafted the English lyrics (far from a straight translation) for Le Orme's “Felona e Sorona”, whose title he partly suggested, starting from the word “sorrow/Sorona” (pain, sadness).
A thoroughly Italian record, then, just like the Italian rugby team's jersey worn on the cover, and like the blue colour of the disc itself once you open the jewel box, pending a vinyl pressing. One to own and treasure.

In 2023, Enigma Records, which holds the rights to three Peter Hammill albums (In A Foreign Town, Out Of Water and Roometamperaturelive), is unable to locate the old contracts, and the artist decides to revise and re-record the studio albums in question, as he had already done in the past with the Opera “The Fall Of The House Of Usher”. But the result, In A Foreign Town/Out Of Water 2023, is truly disappointing: Hammill hands us a double album that is frankly pointless, barring a handful of tracks that come across as somewhat more engaging, often simply due to the mixing. All the more pointless given that his last solo studio effort of new material dates back to 2017, with one of the most brilliant records of an inhumanly prolific career: From The Trees. Meanwhile, the British composer has put his guitars up for auction. Having just turned seventy-five, with at least 58 of those years spent in the music industry that “matters”, one would expect a man of such stature to show a far higher level of critical awareness and self-knowledge of his own limits. Rough patch, Mr Hammill.

A note on the leg(end): All albums that display a greater degree of aesthetic/content achievement and/or that found an adequate historical/cultural resonance within their own era are marked here. For those wishing to dig deeper, every release scored 6.5 or above rewards repeated listening. That said, reading the monograph in full is advisable, since some of the artist's most representative songs are not infrequently found on albums rated less favourably.

(12 March 2014)

For an in-depth look at the lyrics, the volume “Fogwalking – Tutti i testi 1971-1980”, edited by the PH and VDGG Study Group, is highly recommended: http://www.phvdggstudygroup.it/home_ita.htm

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