Van der Graaf Generator book - Progressive Rock Music Forum

The latest review, this one from The Wire:

VAN DER GRAAF GENERATOR:

THE BOOK

JIM CHRISTOPULOS

& PHIL SMART

PHIL AND JIM HBK £25

BY KEITH MOLINÉ

Peter Hammill’s effectiveness as a vocalist was dealt a killer blow in the 1980s when a certain Fish from Marillion — a group so musically moribund they probably turned more people off Prog rock than punk ever managed — co-opted his every last vocal mannerism and claimed them as his own. The Hammill style, which puts each image under the glare of the least forgiving of spotlights, works fine for Hammill songs, with their complex narratives and multiple perspectives. When heard after the inept doggerel produced by a lyricist like Fish or any of the other Hammill copyists that sprang up in his wake, however, it sounded horribly mannered and pretentious. The result is that Van Der Graaf Generator can seem impossibly overwrought and melodramatic to the casual listener, as guilty of empty, self-regarding bombast as the very worst of Prog rock.

But the fact is that the crashing enormity of he group’s performance style is the only way that justice could ever have been done to the vision of Hammill’s songs, and he should be applauded for developing an original form of epic songwriting that places him in a tradition closer to that of Nick Cave than Jon Anderson of Yes. Van Der Graaf’s music has a hideous beauty, or rather a beautiful ugliness, a bludgeoning lack of subtlety that places their songs on a different plane from the selfconsciously well-made pocket symphonies of Prog. Their agenda was far more interesting than that of the vast majority of their loon-panted British contemporaries.

Big, unwieldy and exhausting — that’s a description of Van Der Graaf Generator: The Book, though it could equally apply to the group themselves. Longtime fans Christopulos and Smart, the latter of whom runs the VDGG Website, have self-published an entertaining account of Hammill and co’s byzantine history. The Book affords equal weight to all four members of the classic VDGG quartet (the others being organist Hugh Banton, drummer Guy Evans and twin sax maestro Dave Jackson), relying heavily on their anecdotes for its substance. That’s not a bad thing for a fanboy book like this, though it means that the later New Wave-influenced line-up, along with contemporaneous Hammill solo albums like The Future Now, are somewhat glossed over.

For my money, this period saw VDGG and Hammill producing career-best work. Stories about Banton’s habit of deciding to rebuild his giant organ on the eve of every major tour, or the time Evans was presented with a new set of cymbals at a German festival, may be endlessly fascinating to hardcore followers, but their appeal starts to pall over the distance.

The book is chock full of photos, but while many of these are previously unpublished, a fair number of them are pictures of rare US promo acetates and the like. Nor is it an easy book to dip into, lacking an index. What The Book really needs is a critical voice, one that might begin to explain VDGG’s enduring popularity by examining more closely their artistic failures as well as successes. Dissent is limited to a handful of quotes from lukewarm reviews, to which the group were never exactly strangers, and the odd celebrity putdown such as Joe Strummer’s memorable definition of the group being “like Shakespeare crossed with Uriah Heep”. How exactly Hammill and his cohorts were able to find a fair degree of public favour with some of the most unremittingly dark and solipsistic songs ever written (see VDGG’s “The Emperor In His War Room”, from H To He Who Am The Only One, or Hammill’s “Gog”, from In Camera) doesn’t come close to being elucidated here, but as a group travelogue and potted history of the era, it’s a rollicking good read. 