Peter Hammill
The Silent Corner And The Empty Stage

February 1974. After the successful "Chameleon In The Shadow Of Night," Peter Hammill returns with his third solo album, which more or less reintroduces the same styles as its predecessor. It features a piano-voice or piano-slide guitar song formula, some rock pieces with bass and drums, and concludes with a progressive final suite. Put like this, it might sound like the same old stuff, but have a little patience, and we’ll reveal the beauty of this album...

It starts with "Modern," a song introduced by a supremely irritating acoustic guitar, creating an extremely cacophonous (but the Ealing artist has now accustomed us to such sound irritations, so to speak, of "structure") initial jingle; then the sax of the faithful David Jackson (formerly of Van Der Graaf, like Hammill) enters to sow sonic terror and relentless anguish: probably a distortion or some other strange effect was used here too. What remains at the end of this song is perhaps just the initial chant, “Jericho's strange, throbbing with life\ at its hearts”... Avoidable, anyway, the song, but there it is...

A completely different discussion, however, is deserved by the second track "Wilhelmina," a masterpiece of voice-piano, embellished in the central part by a classic harpsichord that helps give emotional depth to the piece, to which the bass (it should be Nic Potter's, correct me if I'm wrong, or perhaps that of Hugh Banton himself) effectively holds the line. An exceptional song, nonetheless, perhaps deserving the canonical "purchase of the CD."

The third track, "The Lie (Bernini’s St. Theresa)," is a song, as the title suggests, inspired by the famous baroque statue by our Gian Lorenzo Bernini and depicting the mystical ecstasy of Saint Teresa: in fact, the song is introduced by a silent piano, almost fearful and trembling, representing the divine fear of the saint or, mutatis mutandis, of the common believer frightened by divine power and the fear that everything in front of him is “just another Lie”... Here too, we find the voice-piano-bass formula, which works, if not at the excellent levels of "Wilhelmina", still more than satisfactorily.

And now we come to the "Prog-Rock" Masterpiece (in quotes, as it is still a relatively short piece) of the album: "Forsaken Garden" ("Abandoned Gardens," let me indulge from now on in translating some significant phrases, like the beautiful title now) is introduced by the nostalgic and distressed singing of Hammill who wonders where “all the joy of yesterday is,\ where the happiness and smiles we shared...” Then the song builds up, bass and drums (Guy Evans, of course, always of VDGG) come in, and David Jackson's magical flute takes center stage, giving decidedly apocalyptic tones to the song, precisely when Hammill sings: “There's ruination everywhere..,” “there's ruin everywhere,” and he shouts singing all the world's pain needing to be shown before our eyes, as he “fortunately” often does...

"Red Shift" is a sneaky, almost waiting song, almost slimy, with a serpentine and “insinuating” rhythm: it hypnotizes, leaves a strange sense of uncertainty: here too, the song form is almost similar to the previous one (i.e., voice, bass, drums, guitar, keyboards, saxophone), although the drums are more controlled and not inclined to the superb apocalyptic excesses of "Forsaken Gardens."

"Rubicon" is the classic ballad for slide guitar that Hammill reserves (I would be tempted to say "unfortunately," but I do not out of respect for the, in my view, gigantic stature of the character) in every album of his, and I actually thought it was a piece about Caesar's historic crossing: none of this though, it is probably a strange love story or something like that. A rather banal piece, anyhow, you can easily skip it.

"A Louse Is Not A Home" ("A Louse Is Not A Home"?!), is the final progressive suite, one of his last (he won't do more after this, except for "Flight" on "A Black Box" and little else) another phenomenal piece: "Sometimes\it's very scared here;\sometimes\it's very\SAD..." are words that will be etched on the mind of anyone who listens to the piece, due to their undefined content ("here," "here" where?) and the solemn cadence of the metric accents. After this beautiful and desperate refrain, which continues with "There's a line\snaking down my mirror" where Jackson's sax, truly fundamental here, intervenes, the piece becomes prog, with various tempo changes: the pace becomes sustained and pressing, made even more pressing by a long series of questions Hammill asks himself one after the other; then a slow part: "Home is what you make it..." Hammill sings slowly, then resumes to press, now yes, convincingly, in the next verse well represented by the phrase "Could this be the guy who never shows\ the cracked mirror what he's feeling," with exceptional work by Evans on the drums; finally, after another slowdown, it returns to the solemn and grand cry of the refrain: "Sometimes\it's very scared here" etc., ending, in fact, in a crescendo, with a superb and cruel effect of electronic cymbals or something like that (which will also be present, by the way, in the wordless "Childlike faith in childhood’s end" of VDGG).

In conclusion, the album "The Silent Corner and the Empty Stage" is a great album, I think, and I hope you will forgive me for a few words dictated by excessive “emotional transport”...