The following was nicked from the Sunday Times website, but I couldn’t figure out how to post the link here.:
In prog they trust
Van Der Graaf Generator are back — albeit after an excessive pause. Never mind the length, feel the quality, says Robin Eggar
The return of prog-rock is inevi- table at a time when bands are flourishing. There will always be musicians determined to show that they can play more than a pop song — and that means progressive rock is sure to follow. Radiohead, as in so many things, were the first of the new generation. Their more esoteric influences can be heard in emerging bands such as Secret Machines, Hope of the States, Pure Reason Revolution and Elbow. And they all owe more to Van Der Graaf Generator than they know.
The great days of British prog-rock were the early 1970s. Its excesses — triple concept albums, 20-minute drum solos and Roger Dean covers — make me wince.
However, the return of VDGG, 27 years after they broke up for the absolute final time, fills me with nostalgia mixed with awe. They are as uncompromising, bloody- minded and uncommercial as ever.
VDGG were the closest a British band came to the Velvet Underground. They didn’t sell many records, but their influence is pervasive. Marc Almond, Johnny Rotten, Bowie, Mark E Smith, Nick Cave, Graham Coxon, the Red Hot Chili Pepper John Frusciante, the director Anthony Minghella and the producer George Martin are all fans. On May 6, the band played at the Royal Festival Hall to a sellout multinational crowd. More shows are planned for the summer.
It is one of the ironies of the VDGG reunion that their new double album, Present (one disc of which is improvisations), is being stocked by Asda. The rerelease of their back catalogue may sell better than they did at their peak, when they were shifting 60,000 copies around the world. So are they, too, reforming for the money? “We’re really doing our best not to lose any money this time,” says their singer, Peter Hammill, with a wry laugh. “We never betrayed ourselves. We blew up several times, but we’re still really proud of what we did. We have remained friends throughout.”
Right from their early days at Manchester University, the melding of influences and instrumentation in VDGG was both unlikely and fundamentally unstable. Hammill was into blues, R&B, British pop groups and Rodgers and Hammerstein. Hugh Banton was a classical organ scholar and Hendrix obsessive. The drummer, Guy Evans, and the sax player and flautist, Dave Jackson, were into jazz. Jackson was also a soul boy, because, as he says: “Any sax player in the 1960s had to know In the Midnight Hour.”
“It was only four years since the Beatles,” says Hammill, “one year since Hendrix, a handful since Coltrane. Everything was possible. We thought, ‘Hang the future, because we won’t be doing this in five years.’”
VDGG’s albums were both of and out of their time. Some of their songs are histrionic workouts best forgotten. Others still sound as fresh and bizarre as they did 30 years ago. There is a mythic, hymnal quality to their sound, counterpointed by constant tension and crackling electricity. VDGG broke up “at least three times in eight years”. The first was before their debut album was released, when they had all their gear stolen. The second was after the release of Pawn Hearts, their third album in two years, a tortured almost-masterpiece.
“Supposedly,” says Hammill, “we were this deeply uncompromising group who would break up the moment the poisoned chalice of success was pushed across the table. Usually, we had no sight of the chalice, we hadn’t got any money and we were absolutely frazzled. Post-Pawn Hearts, we’d just blown up and gone mad — not for the first or last time. It was down to life pressures. Nothing interesting like drugs.”
In 1975, Banton quit for good to design and build church organs. Jackson left soon after. Following a spell as a teacher, he began working in the field of autism with a music system called Soundbeam. The final version of the band staggered to a halt in 1978. Evans became one of the founders of the art collective Echo City, which makes giant instruments out of heavy-duty industrial material and builds sonic playgrounds. Hammill has run a cottage industry for the past 20 years, touring all over the world and recording albums at his own studio to sell to a small but devoted audience.
In 2002, he played a solo show at Queen Elizabeth Hall and was joined on stage by his former bandmates. Nine months of e-mail communication about a possible reunion followed. In September 2003, the band met for dinner and arranged to go off in February and play for a week in Devon. Then Hammill had a heart attack while walking along the riverbank in Henley-on-Thames — “very rock’n’roll”. It was a wake-up call; the reunion was urgent.
“Nutter Alert was the first thing we actively tried to play,” says Hammill. “Within a nanosecond, we knew, this is Van Der Graaf Generator, this is what we’ve always done.”
So long…
A respectable prog-rock classic is at least 10 minutes long:
King Crimson: In the Court of the Crimson King (9 min 22 sec, 1969)
Soft Machine: Out-Bloody-Rageous (19 min 17 sec, 1970)
Van Der Graaf Generator: A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers (23 min 04 sec, 1971)
Amon Düül II: Syntelman’s March of the Roaring Seventies (15 min 50 sec, 1971)
Genesis: Supper’s Ready (22 min 52 sec, 1972)
Yes: Close to the Edge (18 min 50 sec, 1972)
Emerson, Lake & Palmer: Karn Evil 9 (29 min 01 sec, 1973)
Pink Floyd: Shine on You Crazy Diamond Part I (13 min 38 sec), Part II (12 min 28 sec, 1975)
Marillion: Script for a Jester’s Tear (8 min 39 sec, 1983)
Radiohead: Paranoid Android (6 min 23 sec, 1997) — the new generation, though some might say their songs are too short
VDGG’s back catalogue is released on Charisma tomorrow and June 20 Watch The Month DVD for videos and exclusive extras from the latest releases, including Gorillaz, Lisa Miskovsky, Turin Brakes and Elvis Presley