Interview: Van Der Graaf Generator

Meeting Peter Hammill, renowned for his lyrical doom and gloom, I half expected a pasty, pale-skinned figure with fangs and a dark overcoat with exaggerated edges. Needless to say, this wasn’t the case. The only founding member of Van Der Graaf Generator remaining in the line-up, whose forming years include nine months at our own University of Manchester, held a slight figure and inner contentment as the co-members of his band’s current incarnation could be heard tuning up downstairs, before the opening night of a tour that marks the 40th anniversary since their first Owens Park gig.

“That was actually fairly dramatic – at Owens Park we had an interesting experience… There were a lot of drunk medics there and, not for the last time, but for the first time, we were bottled off the stage! I think they were just being a bit rowdy, and we were a bit strange, even then.”

‘A bit strange’ is what some may call an understatement. Then – like now, in some respect – popular culture had stifled experimentation in music. That was until Jimi Hendrix hit the UK in time for 1967 and the oft-romanticised ‘Summer of Love’, which Hammill recalls without the rose-tinted spectacles that others wear: “Hendrix was a big influence, but there was a lot of music around at that time. I was very hopeful, and I suppose naïve at the same time. Yeah, it was a very bright and nice summer in London in ’67, but pretty well divorced from any sense of reality! The other side of the ‘golden age’ is festivals with no loos or food or anything. The slogan, the attitudes, the… everything, you know? ‘Everything will be all right if we just love each other’… Yeah right!”

Hammill’s lyrics often delve into science and existential themes, so it was no surprise to learn that his year at university, apart from looking for band members, was spent studying Liberal Studies and Science. On the new record, Trisector, ‘Over The Hill’ and ‘Interference Patterns’ are the more obvious examples of a lasting fascination with scientific ideas. “It was the 60s of course so it was the start of lots of cross-discipline stuff, but I’d decided from way back that I wanted to form a band… One of the motivations for me in terms of writing songs is to find out what I think about things. I don’t start with the point of view of ‘I think this and therefore I’m going to write a song that says that’, I start from the point of view of ‘this interests me, if I could put it into a song…’ so I don’t have positions as such. It’s kind of the heritage from up here – I still find science interesting.”

When VdGG first started making music their contemporaries were Pink Floyd, Hendrix and Yes, but they have been named-dropped by more recent musicians, most notably The Sex Pistols’ John ‘Johnny Rotten’ Lydon: “Of course, he’s not the only one, although he’s the one that constantly gets brought up – in fact from that era Mark E Smith was also a fan… and The Chili Peppers, apparently John Frusciante is a fan. I think in general, when musicians name-check us, a lot of it is to do with this attitude that we’ve always had of doing music for its own sake – some of it is actually getting the essential spirit, which is quite robust and energetic for what can be complicated music, and I think that’s the thing that musicians can see through.”

It seems accepted by many journalists that in 1977 punk rock came along and knocked progressive rock off its, by then overly theatrical and extravagant mantle, and Hammill is quick to agree: “I think it did, you know, I think it is absolutely right. I didn’t have any problems in ’77, and actually we didn’t have any grief in ’77 either, particularly because the band line-up changed at that time and we were a guitar-based violin band; very, very strong and aggressive. So, no, I didn’t have any problem with that – I mean it is the fundamental principle that music had got overblown and the idea that you can only be a band if you’ve got six keyboards… well, it’s all right as an idea, but it’s not much help to a band who’re trying to rehearse in the bedroom, and that’s always something that’s got to be feeding into music. It’s just a question of evolution; when it was all six keyboards then you can’t see a way to get from the bedroom to the six keyboards. But anyone can say – like the Pistols – get a guitar, get a bass and there you go.”

The Pistols, incidentally, have picked up their guitars again for festivals this summer. Sometimes it’s easy to be cynical about ageing rockers, but Hammill offers a different explanation for the VdGG reformation in 2005: “Without being too flip, we’d been meeting up at the funerals of our road crew, so we came round and said, ‘well if we don’t do it now it might be too late’. We don’t work continuously, which is very healthy, but if we do little bursts of activity, and as long as there’s stuff to play, it’s still exciting, and we’re still healthy then I hope we’ll keep going.”