In 2019, King Crimson’s Jakko Jakzsyk told Prog about discovering Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf Generator in his schooldays, which launched a lifelong appreciation for an incompromising singer-songwriter he believes is underrated and misunderstood.
“I first heard Peter Hammill when I was at school. There was a kid whose dad was a farmer, and they used t go to this mysterious place called the cash-and-carry. It had everything from food to preserves to albums. One day he came back with this intriguing-looking record and said: ‘This is the weirdest shit I’ve ever heard. You might like it.’ And he gave me Van der Graaf Generator’s Pawn Hearts, which I absolutely fell in love with.
To this day it’s one of my favourite records. One of the main reasons I like it is Peter’s writing and his voice – they seemed to defy categorisation. It’s easy to plant the word ‘prog’ into all this stuff, but he was almost counter-intuitive to that.
He had that extraordinary voice, which could go from soft and luxurious to absolutely insane, screaming his lungs out; this operatic thing. And the lyrics defied the easy journalism of anti-prog. There was a lot of very personal, very raw stuff, and an amazing sense of drama. And in among all this dissonance would emerge these genuinely beautiful melodies.
Then I bought H To He, Who Am The Only One – the album before Pawn Hearts – and three of his solo records, which I used to play all the time: Chameleon In The Shadow Of The Night, The Silent Corner And The Empty Stage and In Camera.
One summer I played the first two records over and over again. Slowly you pick up on the references and learn who he’s singing about. They’re amazing personal diaries of incredible personal events, neuroses and angst. Peter Hammill certainly wears his heart on his sleeve.
He’s extraordinary and incredibly influential, but in quite a subtle way. He’s not lauded in the way he ought to be, and his influence isn’t well known, but it’s there if you go looking for it. There are many stories about David Bowie listening to his stuff, and there’s the post-punk thing, with Johnny Rotten retrospectively proclaiming himself a fan of what Hammill did.
There are Marmite voices like Geddy Lee, who has that squeaky, honky high-end kind of sound. But with Peter it’s not so much the sound of his voice as what he chooses to do with it. And there’s a bravery to that. He’s not prepared to compromise.
There’s the screaming, and the intensity he utilises to create that vast dynamic range, and sometimes it’s the phrasing, which is sometimes deliberately perverse, deliberately angular. He does that thing where there’s a question mark at the end of a line and his voice goes up. But on some of those beautiful ballads he’s comparable to any singer-songwriter with a beautiful baritone voice.
And if you see him live, it’s insane! He’s just ripping his heart out in front of you. My favourite shows were a small one at the ICA in London in 1983, and one at the Melkweg in Amsterdam. I also saw the re-formed Van der Graaf Generator at the Royal Festival Hall. It was really exciting to see those guys up there again.
There was a guy behind me whose voice was incredibly familiar. He was talking very knowledgeably about Van der Graaf Generator, so I turned around, and it was Matthew Corbett, who used to do Sooty and Sweep – that was very surreal!”
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