Peter Hammill
In The Passionskirche - Berlin MCMXCII [2CD/DVD]

Let's start by saying that I love Peter Hammill not only for his incredible voice or for the challenging, intense, existential, and visionary themes of his complex artistic and personal journey. What I love most about Hammill, due to a spiritual affinity with certain states of mind that I believe no one can avoid experiencing at certain moments in life, is the essential, indisputable, definitive solitude of his poetry, the inevitability yet despair and strength of the human condition, lived with blinding and painful awareness and yet always open to beauty, to the aesthetics of exploration, to the ultimate purpose of the journey not necessarily lying in the destination. A man deeply rooted yet striving to peel back humanity from the outside, an Artist who seems wound up in his own suffering but is reborn to the beauty of life with each of his songs and performances, armed only with the priceless weapon of his multifaceted voice and, from time to time, a keyboard or a guitar to craft enveloping and meditative harmonic spirals, absorbed and furious, engaging or irretrievably alien.

I love him most in this way: not in the seclusion of the recording studio surrounded by his musicians, but in the inner solitude of his anguished and solitary concerts, increasingly relying on the magmatic expressiveness of his many voices, which almost always, but not always, are accompanied by his stormy playing on the keys of an electric piano or a clear or distorted guitar: and sometimes not even those, because each magnificent voice of Peter's – from emphatic whisper to strangled cry, from prayer to existential invective – is an instrument and justification unto itself and needs no support. It is not even rarity as an expressive form, as in some suspended performances of the late John Martyn, but rather the right and natural cadence of its unique poetry, which cannot be consumed according to the audience's timing or manner. Every pause is an inner experience, Peter clearly sings for himself, and the concert is actually a peep show that the artist allows into his own drama, his own nightmares, and the strength that enables him to return home each night and start again; and the strength of the actor within him – an investigator, interpreter, and a mask for all of us dealing with the malaise of living – is precisely what prevents him from succumbing to the conclusions of his dramatic inner experiences, the same strength that ultimately failed Ian Curtis and Luigi Tenco.

The moment brilliantly captured here is the evening of April 11, 1992, in Berlin, in a silent theater aware of the usual need for Peter Hammill not to be, as far as possible, interrupted and distracted by applause and in any case from the celebratory atmosphere of the typical rock concert, completely out of place in this context. An hour and a half of recital in solitude, keyboard and guitar, and the vast repertoire of songs and emotions accumulated over twenty-five years of intense composition, with nearly twenty solo albums behind him and all the memories of Van Der Graaf to be carefully revisited, if not entirely. The pleasant opening of 'My Room' reminds the distracted VDGG reviewers that this is not necessarily the sunny track some believed to find in 'Still Life,' but there are many memorable moments in this beautiful concert, from a devastating version of 'Patient' (among the most beautiful pieces ever written by PH) for voice and electric guitar, to a marvelous twenty-minute synthesis of 'The Fall Of The House Of Usher,' an ambitious and beautiful suite on the well-known themes of Edgar Allan Poe. Peter is at his vocal and expressive peak, holding long notes, and his voices are numerous, and the concluding 'Modern' is a true interpretative tour de force. 'The Future Now,' 'Ysabel’s Dance,' and 'A Way Out,' keyboards and guitar alternate to support the imagery of each track and Hammill plays even better than usual because on some occasions the interpretative zeal can get out of hand, but tonight everything is perfect, and even the occasional dissonances are intentional.

Some will remember the humiliating story of a Hammill opener in Italy for the pointless and superficial Peter Tosh in 1980, scandalously and horribly booed and mocked by an unworthy audience (and I apologize to reggae lovers, which saving Master Bob Marley still horrifies me from that horrible episode, which garnered widespread media attention). There's a terrible video on YouTube that... enough. Beast was the organizer who imagined serving up a sensitive and introspective Artist to an audience of boors who only wanted to shake their obscene asses and turn off their brains; beast were those who missed the opportunity to applaud a beautiful 'Man Erg' and, if I remember correctly, a harrowing 'The Future Now.' (Unlike Peter Tosh, a pathetic monkey compared to the great Marley: who would have taken to the stage to stand for and defend Art, dub or not dub). Many years later, Peter Hammill can now count on an audience that consistently loves and understands his message, his aesthetics, and the sincerity that makes him give on stage what few others have managed to give in the musical field, his soul and his entire expressive range. Those who have seen Gabriele Lavia in theater, or Gassman’s Achab, can understand the peaks of sensitivity and interpretation we are talking about.