Peter Hammill
Over

Someone once said that happiness can easily lead to creative stagnation (the malicious will immediately think of Phil Collins, his new little family, and his “incredible” new CD…). Peter Hammill undertakes to prove the truth of this statement with an album that is among the most convincing in his now vast discography. Many of the songs on Over were indeed born when Peter was abandoned by his partner, Alice. Hammill's tracks are structurally similar to many others he composed in those years: here, however, there is an involvement and a passion (for an easily imaginable reason) that isn't always found in his songs ("without conviction, there is no true art"), which are not all of the same level. From the point of view of the lyrics, Peter proves to be up to the standards of his best work (for me, Hammill has written some of the most beautiful lyrics in English progressive rock), and the level of the music is also good, almost all convincing, without the quality drops often found in Hammill's discography post Fool’s Mate.
The opening track Crying wolf is a more “hard” piece (almost akin to the proto-punk of Rikki Nadir): it almost seems that Hammill, in this piece, is against a certain ambition ahead of its time and probably even against himself (…and when it's all almost over, and you know the end is near, in an infinite genuine sorrow, there will be no one left to listen to your desperate cries, they will come out of your mouth like bleats: you thought you were a wolf, but you're just a sheep.) The only episode on the album that seems not up to par is the next one, Autumn: here everything is a bit conventional, both in the music and the lyrics. With Time Heals, we get to the heart of the album: after a meditative introduction, a musically captivating verse follows with a simple and direct text (and here there would be much to say about certain excessively redundant, not to say pretentious lyrics that have infested progressive). Peter expresses himself with sweet desperation and sings in a direct, almost embarrassing manner, the abandonment of his beloved. Even more personal is the next track Alice. Here we find Hammill in a bare setting, which deliberately contrasts strongly with the orchestration of Autumn and especially of This side of the looking glass. Alice is instead a meditative, reflective, and in some ways ruthless episode because it talks about Peter's conduct towards his wife (…I had my chance and I wasted it, because I loved you so much these years, and somewhere in myself, between pride and fear, I couldn't make you understand it….). It thus leads to a folding into one's own pain (…what is good about songs is that they are exercises in solitude…). A similar episode is (On tuesday she used to do) Yoga: a continuous brooding over one's own faults and the impossibility of making amends for past behaviors (On Tuesday she used to do yoga while I watched her immobile as if I were a vegetable, and always ready to tell myself that I was an artist, implying that she was not.…funny how self-pity can arise from self-esteem…).
Very beautiful is This side of the looking glass, which highlights a perhaps not very original, but captivating refrain. My personal favorite track, however, is Betrayed. Here, too, the atmosphere is dark and melancholic but no longer related to Hammill's marital affairs. It rather speaks of the painful thing that happens to everyone, when we lose our innocence and look with desperate eyes at the paltry desolation of the world (When I started, I was full of altruistic dreams, believed in principles, princesses, in kings and queens, now I see that I am like the others……why shouldn't I be like them? It seems that I have forgotten all the things I strove to learn and it seems that there is no love or trust anywhere in the world…). The text then continues with the negation of friendship and the lucid despair that what we often do doesn't interest anyone (…it was all useless, all the efforts to be kind are repaid with disdain, reduced to insignificant kindness….). Until reaching a pain that is not out of place to call planetary and absolute (I have nothing to fight for except to make my passion heard. I don't believe in anything anywhere in the world). Even in this track, the arrangement is sparse, with only an intervention during the track of Graham Smith's violin which was about to be involved in the new Van der Graaf generator mechanisms. And finally, there is the awareness that the past does not return and that life simply, trivially continues: Lost and found(even the wolf can learn, even the sheep can change, and even the toad finally becomes a prince..…no more “if only”, no more “and yet”, no more wishes for the future…I'm finally free, in love, lost and found). A few years later Peter would dedicate a composition to his new partner, My favourite, but the wound of love was, evidently, already healed…..
It is worth noting that on the back cover of Fugazi, the second album by Marillion, there were depicted in a messy room, some album covers that the jester/Fish was evidently listening to: one of them was precisely that of Over by Peter Hammill (the same musician who acted as the opening act, with little appreciation from the ''cultured'' English audience, at some Marillion performances in the early Eighties). Talk about elective affinities…