A Pilgrim’s Progress
Maverick. Visionary. Prog’s perennial Renaissance Man. Punk-approved eccentric. After more than 50 years of active service in progressive music, Peter Hammill has earned all these titles and more. Always positioned to the left of the prog mainstream and seemingly impervious to the passing of time and trend, he’s amassed an extraordinary catalogue of music, both as a solo artist (36 studio albums and counting!) and with the legendary Van der Graaf Generator: the band he co-founded in 1967 and that currently exists as a trio, with Hammill alongside Hugh Banton and Guy Evans. By any sane reckoning, he’s one of the most important and influential figures in the history of prog. But what’s less frequently acknowledged is that Peter Hammill’s music, whether solo or with Van der Graaf, sounds like absolutely nothing and nobody else. In fact, it never has.
“To be honest, I’ve never been much of a listener to other people’s music.”
After a comparatively long gap between solo records, Hammill is to release his first ever covers album, In Translation, in May. It’s a highly revealing piece of work: a collection of mostly European songs, including works by Mahler and Rodgers and Hammerstein, translated by the man himself and reimagined with his customary skewed flair. Both a selfevident love letter to Europe and a wide-eyed experiment in dismantling and reconstructing other’s work, In Translation sounds entirely unlike anything else one might hear in 2021. And that’s exactly how Hammill likes it.
“Although it had a connection to Van der Graaf, Fool’s Mate was obviously not remotely in Van der Graaf territory, even though the guys were playing on lots of it.”
“I’m completely comfortable with that,” he tells Prog. “I’ve never really wanted to join in. I suppose the entire career has really been about trying to do something and getting it slightly, wonkily wrong. When I started writing proper tunes, I guess the subjects of the songs were a little bit out of the ordinary, and I didn’t want to repeat things, so very early on I veered away from verse, chorus, verse, chorus. I can’t explain why, but from a very early stage I was taking a few turns to the left, away from the main drag.”
One of the great joys of Peter Hammill’s music is how relentlessly inventive and unpredictable its creator has been over the last five decades. Having applied his singular vision to everything from tear-jerking ballads to abstract blaring from the family record player and that “it must have seeped in somewhere”. But the real starting point for his fantastic musical voyage came when Hammill was packed off to boarding school as a child, ended up singing in the choir and had a moment of revelation that set his artistic wheels in motion.
