Van Der Graaf generator
Pawn hearts

"If I am the one who doesn't allow me to be me, what the hell is the point of the 'I'?" With these words, ironically recalling those of Peter Hammill in "A plague of lighthouse keepers," my friend Marco would always announce "Pawn Hearts" before putting it on the turntable.

We didn't listen to it often, we weren't that sophisticated, not yet.

"Listen up, jerks, this guy is a damn poet, even if not as great as me," he would continue.

"Listen to the noise the others make, not just noise, sound...a great sound...poetry and noise, damn...better than those Floyd wankers..."

He was right, and if you happen to watch on YouTube the video of "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers" recorded live on Belgian TV in seventy-two, you'll notice that even the poet would eagerly hammer on his keyboard when needed.

And, you'll agree, it's satisfying when the greatest lyricist of rock gets his hands dirty playing a sonic terrorist.

Anyway, Marco was a great guy, often fantasizing about the most exciting musician of Vdgg, David Jackson, a two-meter tall long-haired saxophonist, fabulous and picturesque, with his little glasses and funny hats; a distant cousin of Otto and Barnelli, a splatter caricature of the kraut rock hero, part freak and part biker.

A fantastic guy to contrast with many pseudo-heroes of the time. "If this guy meets Merlin in an alley, he'll tear him to pieces," Marco always said. Impossible, actually, since our guy was, and is, a well-known gentleman. But his appearance to kids like us, which we were then, made us think such things.

Merlin was, of course, Rick Wakeman. And among my friends, many were worshippers of Rick Wakeman, who always won the Melody Maker poll as the best keyboardist.

Yes, Marco was a great guy and was already part of the "Kafka vs Tolkien" party, according to the happy definition of the generator's music given by someone I can't remember.

Those are good memories. But regarding "Pawn Hearts," I don't know where to start.

Let's start with "Man-erg."

Imagine an essential melody, one that, while not devoid of a certain sweetness, immediately becomes the ideal setting, like a kind of soul's ring, for a hand-to-hand combat with oneself.

And imagine that melody accompanies a calm and slightly aching voice. That's what happens in Man-erg, at least at the beginning.

At the beginning, yes, but soon it changes, moving from elegiac to dramatic. It's a classic Hammill ballad trick, with that subtly metaphysical piano and the chameleonic voice quickly shifting from one register to another, visited by presences of opposing and irreconcilable nature.

"Man-erg" is the one with the famous opening "The killer lives inside me" and talks about the individual's schizophrenia because the killer is accompanied by angels, "Angels live inside me."

The dichotomy, beyond the words, is represented by that voice which, from being calm, soars to dizzying heights starting from the end of the second line of each verse, specifically from the words "room" (the room where the killer sleeps) and "mind" (the protagonist's mind).

In the third line, where the song's intensity has already become unbearable, the killer's eyes (no longer asleep) look through ours, and the angels' love heals our wounds. But let's move on. That's not the point.

At the end of the second verse, the organ comes to the forefront and almost seems to have a peace-making function, as if the two parts had somehow reached an agreement. But it's just an impression. A fabulous, exciting, and sinister free-form cacophony bursts forth with unusual and splendid urgency: it starts bouncing from one channel to another, perhaps to make sure it wakes the dead, and settles into a mad pounding and blowing.

Even Robert Fripp's guitar is there to deliver blows.

And damn, it's just the kind of sound that, to use the Iguana's words, swallows the suffering whole. Maybe just a tad more cerebral than the Stooges. Or a tad and a half, you decide. In any case, the effect is devastating.

If that wasn't enough, here come the shaman's cries. "Am I really me? Am I someone else?"

Yes, that's the point. This violent fracture. This sudden shift from melody (even though it's a unique kind of melody, as we've seen) to chaos. It literally makes you jump out of your chair and really has little to do, if not the barest connection, with the genre usually attributed to our guys, romantic rock as it was called in my day, or progressive rock as it's called today.

(And let's be clear that when I say progressive rock, I mean only the English kind - excluding Canterbury)

Sure, in the generator we find some of the classic (and often deleterious) aspects of progressive: a complete detachment from black roots and rhythm 'n' blues, notable musical complexity, and not least, a pretentiousness not to be laughed off. Only in "Pawn Hearts" do you never get the feeling that the step is longer than the leg, and we are very far from baroque-ness and cloying displays of technique.

And about pretentiousness (what else can you call even the mere thought of writing a twenty-four-minute piece filled with an epic poem even William Blake couldn't match?) well, if pretentiousness leads to a tense, raw, vibrant sound and a taste for experimentation never for its own sake but instead aimed at a dramaturgy that seems to be at the crossroads of the winds or in that existential hand-to-hand we mentioned, well let it come on.

Oh yes, let it come on.

Because the fact is, Peter Hammill is a great poet. And the renowned time changes of the generator, all those sudden flashes, the killer riffs, the outrageous chaos (and so on and so on) always serve what his words say.

In "Man-erg" the chaos and the shamanic singing simply express the anguish of not knowing who you are, and they do so with a sound that, like the blues, like folk, like the most desperate and powerful rock, is nothing but despair and its cure. Here's something else totally absent in the crassest progressive, power and catharsis.

I confess I hadn't listened to this record for thirty years. I don't know what kept me away. Perhaps its complexity and its sparse offerings to the listener. Perhaps that possessed poetry. Perhaps the fact that you must listen to it from start to finish. And by the end, you are exhausted.

Anyway, the other day I put the vinyl back on, and, let me tell you, it was one of the most beautiful listening experiences of my life...it brought me back to my sixteen years, to that pre-punk period when Hammill and Fripp were my heroes...to my friend Marco who translated Hammill's solo lyrics, transcribing them with his wonderful handwriting on small white sheets he would give me...to Hammill's mixes on a C60 cassette he made for me, calling them all "Exercises in Solitude"...

It brought me back to my sixteen years, yes...but it also made me hear the generator as I never had before...because at sixteen I preferred "Over" "In Camera" "Fool's Mate" "The Future Now"...

Which still begs the question of how the hell three sixteen-year-olds, whose greatest cultural experiences until then had been Alan Ford and Cochi e Renato, could listen to Hammill? Nothing seems really further from sixteen years old.

But let's go back to "Man-erg."

After the chaos, the initial theme returns, stronger and electrified, with the voice having an elegant virile nonchalance and a smooth almost jazzy saxophone taking the scene...then a steadily richer layering of sounds, and a return of the killer chaos, softened though, and gentled by melodic richness that assimilates it... at the end the two souls seem to find an accord...or maybe it's just as Hammill says, that his condition of being a man is that of everyone, angels, killers, redeemers, despots, refugees...

Dammit, what a masterpiece...the problem is the other two tracks are even better.

The first, "Lemmings," is an initial acoustic arpeggio and light, sinister electronics, with Hammill's voice (first sharp and feminine and then immediately deep and stern) quickly reaching a sort of climactic point that explodes into the usual masterful killer riff, the voice becoming increasingly powerful to withstand the hand-to-hand of keyboards and horns...then a first atmospheric pause, gentle organ and again acoustic arpeggio, makes it seem that everything subsides...however a devastating guitar (I think at least) leads to a devastating free-form wonderfully dissonant that gradually leads to a frantic disturbed jazz and back to the initial killer riff...

Throughout, Hammill's voice continues to flirt between octaves and what he does amidst the terrifying free-form distortions is remarkable and I don't know how to explain it. From an expert, I take an "alternate dynamics of timbre and power in a fraction of a second."

The track then closes in an atonal and noise-filled fading that is also a wonderful rest after all that chaos. Without it, you'd arrive with water up to your neck.

Okay, there's still another track. But how can I say anything about that kind of monster occupying the entire B-side? Better not even try. But oh well.

Here, compared to the other two, the hand-to-hand is absolute, the atmosphere extra rarefied and nocturnal, and the beauty of the words staggering. A ten-part soliloquy on loneliness, masks, identity, nightmare, terror, memory.

A whole series of perfect ballads, with accompaniment now atmospheric, now devastating. Only that the devastation grows on itself, and from the rubble new rubble arises. There isn't a moment of rest or maybe there are a few million, but each is too short.

From some salvific melodies, from that voice that can also be angelic, you derive only the illusion of your defense, but it's a disillusioned illusion because you know well that soon another blow will arrive, though the definitive one never comes, and you are like suspended in a very sick ambiguous ecstasy. Moreover, there isn't music that represents better split, dichotomy, ambiguity than that of Van Der Graaf Generator.

The moments that move me the most, even if I must say it's a very strange kind of emotion, are those ballads I mentioned. Especially "(Custard's) last stand," first because it's beautiful, with that weeping organ and Hammill at the height of his resigned sweetness, and second because it's crushed between the two behemoths of the record, the furious end of "Presence of the Night" and "The Clot Thickens" which features a manic, madly tenor voice and absolute chaos.

Then certainly the opening "Eyewitness," with those initial piano notes that alone give the tone of the entire piece...with that solemn singing, now high-pitched, now deep both rhetorical and anti-rhetorical...with that choir of children's voices (which is just Hammill overdubbed I don't know how many times)...with that incredible increase in intensity...with those two-three minutes of liquid, desolate, nocturnal, metaphysical sounds to represent a bare landscape totally devoid of illusions but also a moment of rest in which to hear the deeply echoing solitude of those words...with that return to the starting theme, as if now we were ready to hear it again...

But there's not a single word not written in blood, not a single sound that isn't essential.

Uncle Julian has described "A Plague of Lighthouse Keeper" as "a damn pagan monster: scraps of brute primitiveness attached to each other, made even more mysterious by each having its title."

And yes, a damn pagan monster seems a good definition...

If you've never listened to this record, do it...