Favourite VdGG Lyric

Generally speaking, I focus on the music rather than the lyrics. However, in the case of Van der Graaf Generator, the lyrics are an extra dimension to the music that I enjoy, and there are particular lyrics that I especially like.

My favourite VdGG lyric is my signature ("I was thinking about thinking but it really didn't get me very far."), which is the opening lyric of Blackroom (from Time Vaults - and hence a VdGG lyric and not just a Peter Hammill lyric).

Other favourite lyrics include:

"I run because I don't know where the prison lies."

"You'll begin to wonder if the points of all the ancients myths are solemnly directed straight at you."

"Ghosts betray you, ghosts betray you, in the night they steal your eye from its socket and the ball hangs fallen on your cheek."

"It's far too late to turn, unless it's to stone."

"Alone, he opens to the world... but it's much too late. He's been left, in the end, without a face."

"She's into lizards, she's into snakes, he's into trauma - still got the shakes from a lady who only talked dogs and cats making love in the alley - she thought like that."

"Living, if you claim that all that entails is breathing, eating, defecating, screwing, drinking, spewing, sleeping, sinking ever down and down and ultimately passing away time which no longer has any meaning."

What are your favourite VdGG lyrics?

 

 

 

Hi,

These days I mainly just talk to plants and dogs
All human contact seems painful, risky, odd
So I stay acting god in my own universe
Where I trade cigarettes in return for songs

Stub towers in the distance
Riders cross the blasted moor
Against the horizon
Fickle promises of treaty
Fatal harbingers of war, futile orisons
Swirl as one in this flight, this mad chase
This surge across the marshy mud landscape
Until the meaning is forgotten
Hood masks the eager face, skin stretched and sallow
Headlong into the chilling night, as swift as any arrow

Feet against the flagstones
Fingers scrabbling at the lock
Craving protection
'Sanctuary!' croaks a voice
Half-strangled by the shock of its rejection
Shot the bolt in the wall, rusted the key;
Now the echoes of all frightful memory
Intrude in the silence
What a crawl against the slope - dark loom the gallows
One touch to the chapel door, how swiftly comes the arrow

"Compassion" you plead
As though they kept it in a box -
That's long since been empty
I'd like to help you somehow
But I'm in the self-same spot:
My condition exempts me
We are all on the run, on our knees;
The sundial draws a line upon eternity
Across every number
How long the time seems, how dark the shadow
How straight the eagle flies, how straight towards his arrow
How long the night is - why is this passage so narrow?
How strange my body feels, impaled upon the arrow

Not many artists where the answer could be the entire lyric to a song. In VdGG's case there are multiple songs I could have chosen for the same treatment. I think Hammill has few peers as a lyricist - in their different ways Becker/Fagen and Cohen, but who else, really?

Edited by Mascodagama - July 30 2018 at 12:28

I prophesy disaster wrote: My favourite VdGG lyric is my signature ("I was thinking about thinking but it really didn't get me very far.")

So I thought I'd throw a Tarot but I only got the Priestess and the Star...

-needs to be added imo. Don't really have a favorite but I think his songwriting skills peaked lyrically ca. 1973-1975 but but he's great both before and after of course. 

Saperlipopette! wrote: I prophesy disaster wrote: My favourite VdGG lyric is my signature ("I was thinking about thinking but it really didn't get me very far.") So I thought I'd throw a Tarot but I only got the Priestess and the Star... -needs to be added imo.

For me personally, no, because I've actually tried to think about thinking and it really didn't get me very far.

"The killer lives inside me: I can feel him move"

Most of my lyrical favourites written by Peter Hammill are on the two strongest in between VdGG 1 & 2 era solo albums The Silent Corner And The Empty Stage and In Camera... I have no problem with his earlier lyrics but still think he grew immensely from 1971 to 1974... so anything on Godbluff comes closest. I don't really have an absolute favorite though. Its more of an approach. 

VdGG : Undercover Man (Godbluff)