PETER HAMMILL - In Translation

So you'll only read this review starting from the score, right? Fine, it's 100. Though I'm well aware that this review will be part of a retrospective of some sixty releases in which the highest rating ever given, even to masterpieces, has been an 8.5 with a "recommended listen" — and so no, it can't get 100, but that remains, deep down, my true verdict.

No Peter Hammill album has been more anticipated in a full 50 years of solo career, at least in Italy, because this is a "covers" record (sort of) drawn mostly from songwriters of our Bel Paese as it once was (and is no longer). And it really is a great record, one that leads Hammill into a Brechtian tavern to raise a glass with young Baal, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, the Gavin Friday of "Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves" (1989), and the ghosts of the French chansonniers maudits.

While almost every track is praiseworthy, with the exception of the overly ragged or martial "Oblivion," sung rather poorly, and Gabriel Fauré's "Après un Rêve Op. 7 n. 1" (originally set to words by an anonymous Tuscan poet and here titled "After A Dream," complete with piano and electric guitar seeking a unison that only ever finds irritating counter-phases), it's clear that the record's most convincing tracks also happen to be of Italian origin in sound. "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 too for "Ballad For my Death" ("Balada para mi Muerte," or "Suoneranno le sei" in its Italian version) by Astor Piazzolla/Horacio Ferrer.

The lyricism of Gustav Mahler and of musical-theatre classics performed with grace (the touching and perfectly calibrated "This Nearly Was Mine" here) round out a tribute to Latin and European culture that is absolutely noteworthy at a time of a Brexit disowned by someone — the composer and performer here — who feels "profoundly European."

A "nocturnal" record, one to be remembered for a long time by anyone who loves that voice-as-theatre style now fallen out of fashion but among the noblest expressions of Mitteleuropean culture. The arrangements are extremely measured, like delicate tapestries dotted with pointed touches (the synth organ on "Il vino") amid the acoustic warmth of piano, restrained electric guitars, and digital sounds out of an orchestral home recording. Crowning it all is the restless, unsettling close of the already-praised Piazzolla track, and a music box that transfigures Tenco's song into dream/surrender. Here a refrain slowly shifts key from major to minor, much as Franco Battiato did (an artist Hammill admits he knows only superficially, as he told Fabio Zuffanti in his interview for Rolling Stone Italy last April 20) in his own arrangement of the same song for the voice of Giuni Russo on "Signorina Romeo live," an absolute masterpiece from 2002. A refrain (sung in Italian, since "Ciao" in English can't be translated in any convincing way) worn down by relentless repetition, the vocal honeyed and subtly anguished, while in the verses the British artist instead declaims it like the most harrowing of omens.

Echoes of dark cabaret and freak-show circus linger in the brilliantly grotesque derailment that scrapes the voice against the bottom of a barrel on "Il Vino" — echoes that haunted, ghost-like, the composer's work "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 utter grace, seems to inhabit a suspended dimension, where space and time hold no value beyond a single name: "uncertainty."

The choral arrangements are precious, often verging on dark forewarnings where the lead voice is just one of many instruments in an extended vocal piece that here forgoes the usual formal perfection (still celebrated on “Driftin Through… Washed Up” and “Alien Clock” from the recent “…All That Might Have Been…” Cinè version from 2014, disproving those who consider Hammill vocally - and not only vocally - finished since the start of his career) in favour of pure emotion, with the occasional rough edge that adds “colour” rather than doing harm, as in Nina Simone's “And Piano!” (1969).

It's remarkable, for instance, how the British singer's male contralto delivery still stands immaculate and unsettling in its femininity, so unlike the usual falsetto, acting as a counterpoint alongside light-baritone countermelodies (almost tenor, as in the ancient tradition of “belting” tackled by the bard with as much grace as venom in an unmatched vocal polymorphism) to grotesque, blazing transfigurations of the register down into deep bass, reaching an A1 here for the first time.

The adaptations of the lyrics preserve their original literary imagery and assonances, without ever being didactic, instead finding grace and musicality befitting the pen of a man who is as much a poet as the British singer, and who also curated the English version of the lyrics (anything but a straight translation) for Orme's “Felona e Sorona”, whose title he partly suggested himself, starting from the word “sorrow/Sorona” (grief, sadness).

Well done, Mr. Hammill, for a tribute to an entire culture, even if it comes with a less-than-memorable cover - the fruit of a gift (a hoodie in which some have seen populist overtones) received from the man who, since 2003, has looked after his battered but magnificent heart (the Italian Emilio Maestri). It is the Italian Peter Hammill & VDGG Study Group, embodied by the aforementioned Maestri and by Paolo Carnelli (biographer of the British composer), that clearly played a key role in supporting the choice of tracks included here, tracks that, as Hammill himself has admitted, were largely unfamiliar to him before this experience. Choices that in some cases are easy to understand, given the Ciampi Award (18 February 2021) and the Tenco Award (28 October 2004) he received for his career.

More emerges in the interviews with La Stampa (14 March 2021) and Secolo XIX (7 May 2021), these too made possible thanks to the support of the aforementioned “Italian study group”, which curates a private audio-video archive of his work and is responsible for his tours in our country, as well as for valuable editorial publications. In these interviews Hammill talks about the long periods he spent in Italy, the first country to give him the chance to live off music with his “Sound Generator”, even though he often received a very poor welcome as a supporting act for Orme (and in nearly all his solo performances), from choruses of jeers to violent verbal attacks during the dates supporting Peter Tosh. During those long journeys (often in the “Alfa Berlina” belonging to his manager Maurizio Salvadori, later sung about in “Do Not Disturb” from 2016) came his growing familiarity with the work of De André, at a time when the Genoese songwriter's records were in our charts. The choice of “Hotel Supramonte” stems from the story behind it, just as with “Ciao amore”, tied to an episode “on the margins”. Two pivotal songs, defining just how everything is impermanent and can change in an instant, turning life into death, freedom into imprisonment, and vice versa.

Of “Après un Rève” (1878) he recounts how it was Alice who introduced him, via her “Mélodie Passagère” (1988), to the French composer's lied, and to the version by our great author and cultured-pop contralto, to whom he lent his pen and voice on her “Now And Forever” (1989); Hammill keeps the more accelerated pace compared to the “classic” versions of the romance. Not only that: it's well known that Piazzolla, alongside the Beatles, Mahler, Jimi Hendrix and the Elizabethan composer William Byrd (whose “Three Masses” is acknowledged as an obsession of his) is among the key reference points of Hammill's own much “broader” vision. In La Stampa, however, he recalls how the composer's lieder were completely unknown to him, and how he came to appreciate them partly thanks to the interpretations of Milva, to whom he dedicates some important words. And Donida/Mogol? Hammill came to know their song through the versions by Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones, though it's also true that the singer had already crossed paths with a Mogol lyric, having performed live his own version of “September Impressions” with Pfm.

A fully Italian record, then, just like the Italian national rugby team hoodie worn on the cover, and like the blue colour of the disc itself, visible once the digipak is opened, pending a vinyl pressing. A (near?) masterpiece, as “Consequences” was (with which it shares a sense of more aching, contrite unease) and as “From The Trees” (2017) was too - certainly not as formally flawless as “In Amazonia” with Isildurs Bane, whose follow-up “In Disequilibrium” is expected by the end of this year, but one of those records that can't be filed away among the wrinkles of time as an “almost” achieved milestone. Because here it's the emotional legacy, rather than purely the formal one, that matters most - even in moments like the moving version of Mahler/Rückert's “Lost To The World” (1901), where a few wavering, “drunken” notes creep in, landing like a playful nudge to the ear, right before a high-baritone note of twenty-year-old freshness reminds us that no, the man who gave us so much perfection, so dense with expressiveness, sparing nothing of himself, has not disappeared - quite the opposite.

A treasure chest in which a handful of universal themes are gathered and transfigured, with just enough respect, turning them into a portrait of an era in the name of a personality that has no equal and can have no imitators. This is an old man - a brilliant one, though - able like no one else to convey unease, isolation whether forced or sought, the estrangement of our times, and a death that feels like a cramp in the throat and stomach. A record close to the heart. One to own and cherish jealously.

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29/08/2021