torsdag 11 Aug 2011, 2:00

"The music world has gone IKEA - one size,' he says. "And I'm a bespoke furniture-maker. Not selling many, and only to people who find me." - Peter Hammill, from an interview with Nick Hasted, in The Independent on Sunday newspaper, Sunday June 27th 2004.
The music business, such as it is in the year 2010, is a fragmented and at times incoherent shambles, the mainstream of which has struggled to come to terms with the fact that for years, it refined away the 'maverick' elements and idiosyncrasies of artists to fit an easily marketable template. Which has left scores of artists whose music makes demands of the listener forced to the margins of the independent sector, where they seemed doomed to the dreaded 'cult' following. When that array includes the likes of Mark E Smith of The Fall, Luke Haines of Black Box Recorder and The Auteurs, and even John Lydon - all of them acknowledged admirers of the subject of this CD / DVD package, Peter Hammill, then maybe that's not such a bad place to be.
Peter Hammill has charted a determinedly individual course through a career in music that's now well over four decades long. Having had something of a peripatetic childhood, and enduring the rigours of a Jesuit education, Hammill became enthused by the MOD scene in and around Derby in the mid-60s. He was enthused, like thousands of his contemporaries, by the Soul and rythm and blues sounds that held sway back then "The things that really fired me up were British beat groups, R&B and soul," he remembers. "It was a life-choice then to like that stuff. In the East Midlands triangle, that mod signification lasted longer than anywhere else, and had a particular dancehall relevance, and was about being… in with the in-crowd. So the Derby Meccano, the Clouds Club, the whole mod scene - I was there. The bloke who couldn't dance and talked funny. That was the exciting stuff. And that was what being in a group was all about."
By 1967 and into '68, however, the Mod scene had started to erode; some of 'em grew their hair (cf The Small Faces), started to smoke the ol' Jazz cigarettes, and some even started to get militant. "Che posters, clenched fists, but not much joined-up thought", as Hammill puts it. When Hammill formed Van Der Graaf Generator in 1968 with Chris Judge Smith, they were informed clearly by the changing times: "It was Judge Smith who was visionary about what a band could be. I just wanted to be a singer and have everyone love me. In '68, it was still a world of beat groups and pop hits. There wasn't anything else. The whole idea of doing music for more than three or four years was out of order. I had a vision of myself as a novelist, because that was where I could be serious. I couldn't with music. I don't know why I started writing about other things. There was a lot of science fiction involved, read in conjunction with dope and psychedelics. And then there was Hendrix. And that was like science fiction and social excitement and drama. Everything was there - this is what's happening, in this hour, on stage! The exciting thing - this is happening now!"
Van Der Graaf eventually found themselves on the Charisma Records label, set up by the genial Tony Stratton-Smith, who had assembled an odd roster of talent that ranged from amiable good-timey Geordie folk-rockers Lindisfarne, through to prog rockers like The Nice and Rare Bird, and warped singer songwriter stuff such as Howard Werth's band, Audience. VDGG occupied a place in many an underground music fan similar to that of Pink Floyd or Soft Machine; ex-public school boys who'd been through the Beat Group mincer, learned their musical chops and were wanting to push the envelope a bit farther out.
VDGG split in August 1972, and Hammill struck out as a soloist. His 1975 album, Nadir's Big Chance anticipated some of the forthcoming seismic upheavals of Punk which would follow in '76 and '77, and its influence was cited by none other than John Lydon, vocalist / lyricist and front person of The Sex Pistols, of course. Hammill was, therefore, granted something of a kind of musical immunity from Prog Rock prosecution as a result.
After Hammill left the Charisma label in 1979, his music has been available on a variety of indie imprints, including his own Fie! Label. The themes of his work - religion, free will, the desire for change, are constants, but his ability to match his lyrical concerns with music that can range from simple, riff-based settings to passages of pastoral beauty and complexity makes Hammill one of the most compulsive and gripping of musicians, for whom the term 'singer-songwriter' doesn't seem quite enough.
Whether playing with a band, as he did in the early eighties with the K Group, or performing solo, Peter Hammill still retains a strong and loyal following, with that following being particularly fervent in Europe. In 1991 Hammill released the album Fall Of The House Of Usher based around the story of the same name by Edgar Allen Poe. The album has never been performed live in its entirety however, during solo concerts in late 1991 and 1992 Peter Hammill performed an edited suite of songs from the album.
One such concert took place at The Passionkirche in Berlin in April 1992. For many of Hammill's long time fans, this performance holds a special place, and bootleg copies have traded between fans for many years. The jewel for many is the Usher Suite, rendered here in a stark solo performance with Hammill alternating between piano and occasionally guitar, performing a number of songs from his long solo career. Material is drawn from previous albums including The Future Now (The Future Now), Fireships (I Will Find You, Curtains), Patience (Patient) and Peter also revisits the Van Der Graaf Generator song My Room which originally featured on the Still Life album. Hammill's music gains lustre and resonance in the surroundings of the Passionkirche, a suitable performance space for such engrossing, involving music.
Since then, Hammill has continued to pursue his own path; in 2003, he suffered a sudden heart attack: "I didn't have any conversion or recantation of the stuff I've been banging on about for years - religion, the wish to change things, free will, predestination. The values held. But of course, I didn't die. So I didn't reach the final test. If I had, I'd probably have been under too much morphine to know."
"Time does very, very funny things," he says. "You are acutely aware of now, and exactly how you feel. You know that time has gone fluid on you. And to be honest, it's still pretty fluid with me. I have a tendency to go off in a ruminative state. Drifting. It is good to just rest and take the longer view, without necessarily making that view cogent."
One of the most enduring and unusual of surviving talents to emerge from the late 1960s, Peter Hammill remains a vivid and unusual talent, and this CD/DVD set forms a fine point of entry for ther man's work.
ALAN ROBINSON,
September 2010