Peter Hammill

From “Terra Incognita”, the bard of stars and inner voids and his Italian tour

“Songs, to me, are just a pretext, a garment wrapped around the emotion I gather from the air and bring to people. I feel what my listeners need at a given moment, and I play that emotion; no interpretation of mine will ever be the same as another“.

At dinner, after the Trieste concert, these were the words of a Peter Hammill struggling to get through half a cutlet and a lettuce leaf.

A man of an elegance and courtesy foreign to a boisterous country like ours, which has nonetheless loved his music more than any other. Because it is theatrical, deeply manifested, like one of “our” rites, both Christian and pagan at once – among wailing yet pious women, their faces covered by a black veil, while flowers scatter a riot of colour and the sun sets the white of the houses ablaze.

Perpetually suspended between extreme vitality and a sense of death, drama in its most archaic meaning and grace, Hammill chose to dedicate three truly special Italian dates to presenting his new album Consequences, reviewed here not long ago.

An exceptional vocal instrument, capable of ever more terrifying depths with the passing years and peaks now screamed, now barely whispered in an anguished super-falsetto, reinforced by the Jesuit-trained countertenor technique (which he was) that ferries, in a split second, into a full-voiced roar.

The lasting image is that of a slight body twisting in continuous spasms over a harrowing guitar and piano. A man who has no need to dress in any particular way (a long white shirt and black tracksuit trousers for all three dates) and who can even afford indifference toward executional perfection, relegating it, as he himself says, to “connoisseurs of classical music“. An artist who has no need to be present on stage in any way other than through the staging of himself, of whatever is given to him in the moment, with an authenticity that has no equal past or present, but countless imitators, declared or otherwise.

Three different dates: the more measured one in Trieste; the inventive and, in its own way, “perfect” one in Schio, dispensing emotion without reservation alongside executional precision; and the extremely passionate one in Milan.

The Teatro Miela in Trieste is packed, and the organisation by Davide Casali and Musica Libera is flawless. Excellent sound, Yamaha grand piano, acoustic guitar, and a most welcome presence from the Peter Hammill & Van Der Graaf Generator Study Group, one of the world's foremost bodies dedicated to studying the English singer's music.

The opening is among the best, with a fervent, vocally pristine “The Siren Song”, the voice held high in the palate and “in the head” with a resonance, pathos and dynamic control that literally shakes the audience out of their seats. The best moments of the evening are the performances of “Bravest Face”, from the new album and far more compelling live, and of “A Better Time”, offered here in an unreleased, subdued version that builds to a liberating, long final high note. When at dinner I ask him why the performance was so different from the studio version and from previous live renditions I've come across, Hammill answers with certainty: “when I wrote the piece it was important to tell people there was no better time to wake up to one's own life, and the song was an anthem; today… every historical period deserves to be sung differently“. The opening seconds of “Shingle Song”, sung a cappella, are goosebump-inducing. Once again, the performance of “Patience” shows how this technically demanding piece is tackled with unreserved confidence and great emotional payoff: a masterpiece of compositional class and interpretative commitment that earns the audience's enthusiasm.

From a beautiful concert in Trieste to a wonderful one in Schio.

What makes the date special – happily organised by the ‘Schiolife’ association and Claudio Canova – is the choice to perform first on guitar and then on piano – an unusual digital Yamaha – through an unconventional format with no fewer than four different sets: guitar – piano – guitar and piano again, something unprecedented in this artist's performance history. Then, the introductory dedication to “Driven” and “Sitting targets”: chosen for “the country of the car”. Schio, indeed. Where, in 1892, Gaetano Rossi purchased the first Italian automobile.

But still… “Levitas”. This is the best way to describe Hammill's approach to the stage in Schio, at the Teatro Astra. Even when facing the “heavier” lyrics. Take the amused explanation offered as a preamble to the (dramatic) lines of “Close to me”. “It's not me who's in danger” – PH states – referring, with a smile, to the lyrics. Not everything is autobiographical, he adds, in Italian: “I write stories“. And immediately – warning us against the ever-present risk of misunderstanding, of being misread – he launches into an unforgettable “Losing faith in words”, an absolute gem of the concert. Its source: “A Black box”, 1980. The album that every follower of Thom Yorke “should” check out. The concert opens with a “Comet”, more magical than ever; on piano, meanwhile, it opens with a splendid “Easy to slip away” from his first true solo album, from 1973. There is magic too in the second guitar set: “Slender Threads” and “Yoga” alongside “Been alone so long” and the unexpected pairing of “Last Frame” and “The habit of the broken heart”, drawn from the last album by the “old” Van der Graaf.

Another surprise comes in the second piano set with the splendid “A run of luck”, before the closing, whispered “Stranger Still”, its final line – “A stranger, a wordly man” – addressed to the audience, sung without a microphone.

The sober, concise elegance of his gestures, his executive confidence – imperfections were rare, even considering the recent past – and his frequent smiles – including the usual farewell: "grazie per la sera" – captivated the more than two hundred people present for a hundred minutes. Right up to the final ovation. With Hammill – exhausted – forced to apologize for not granting a second encore, loudly requested after "Ophelia", on guitar, delivered with even more pathos. It's hard to express anything but superlatives. In Schio, Hammill confirmed he's in great vocal shape, but also added a care for instrumental execution in a gorgeous concert, with an absolutely unprecedented setlist that ranged across an important past as much as a present rendered with tremendous interpretive urgency.

A day's break, then Milan, at the Salumeria della Musica. One of the few surviving temples of music in a city that "was", among other things, a cultural cradle, and that has now become the epitome of neurotic survival, of people who "do" without knowing why.

A club far more intimate than the previous venues, which allows every minimal interpretive nuance of the voice of this bard of the stars and inner voids to be captured and amplified (thanks also to excellent sound direction), here often pushed into a dramatic guttural singing with prolonged kargyraa that convey with stark clarity the expressionist value of the songs. The theme of the evening, Hammill will say, is "The past and the present", and the setlist is built around that idea. The past is well represented by intense versions of "Last Frame", "Vision", "Modern" and "House With No Door", the latter two rightly greeted with standing ovations from a wonderfully warm crowd. In his own way, Hammill knew how to say thank you with an evening that will long remain etched in the collective memory. Belonging to the present were the versions of "That Wasn't What I Said" and "A Run Of Luck" from Consequences, "The Mercy" and "Stumbled" from Thin Air, and "Your Time Starts Now" from Van Der Graaf Generator's A Grounding in Numbers, which, for this writer, had never sounded so vibrant and crisp in a live performance.

As with the two previous dates, calling it a "concert" feels rather reductive. It's a recital that collapses the temporal dimension into a truly inscrutable fold, strips musical categories of meaning, and has the power to frighten, move, and disorient. The alien (to this world) Rikki Nadir of Nadir's Big Chance (the 1975 proto-punk concept album) wanted to say goodbye to Italy up close once again and, between a smile and a twitch of his increasingly gaunt face, returned to that "Terra Incognita" – the studio where his lucid, dramatic visions take shape – "to study the songs for the upcoming tour with Van Der Graaf Generator", as he tells us himself from the stage. The next chapter of a career that has, by now, become almost unbelievable is due out in June.

Contributions for Schio by Emilio Maestri (Peter Hammill and Van Der Graaf Generator Study Group) and Alberto Della Rovere. Photos and video by Massimiliano Cusano (rockprogressive.it)

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