I have tried in vain over the years to find some reasons to appreciate the work of Peter Hammill and Van Der Graaf Generator (VDGG).
It’s not as if I have a knee jerk downer on Prog Rock. Even though my listening habits changed radically when Punk exploded, I once defended the self-indulgent excess of ‘Tales of Topographic Oceans’ by Yes and ELP's ‘Brain Salad Surgery’.
The pseudo philosophical bombast of VDGG was always a bridge too far for me although they have maintained a devoted following in Italy, where I now live.
While record company executives scratched their heads on the delivery of an album like ‘Pawn Hearts’ in 1971, and UK audiences reacted lukewarmly, the Italians were unfazed by the borderline gibberish of tracks like the side–long medley ‘A Plague Of Lighthouse Keepers’.
It probably helped that Hammill’s lyrics were practically untranslatable. Language was no obstacle to appreciation as Hammill’s obtuse wordplay was always wide open to interpretation. Interviewed for ‘A New Day Yesterday’ , Mike Barnes’ exhaustive study of the 1970s UK Progressive Rock scene, Hammill looks back on this particular track and admits: “It was just whatever was buzzing around a young man’s brain at the time. Even if I had the original workings in front of me, I probably wouldn’t understand the thought process behind it.”
Now in his early 70s and nearing the end of what he acknowledges has been a “wonky career”, his first ever covers album is a kind of “mille grazie” to Italian fans who have stood by him over the years. He is pictured on the cover wearing an azure blue Italia sports top and openly acknowledges the Fellini-esque aesthetic that informs this collection. Three of the ten tracks are covers of Italian songs.
Translations of the seven non-English tunes are Hammill’s own and he admits that he made cultural rather than strictly linguistic choices. This is evident in his take of Luigi Tenco’s Ciao amore in which he sings “One fine day, I’ll say stuff it.” Hammill has also taken the liberty of slowing down the original’s relatively upbeat arrangement to emphasise the loss of hope facing a country peasant seeking a new life in a big city.
The haunted, funereal quality of Hammill’s voice means that he is not cut out for bright, breezy songs. In consequence, the melancholy beauty of Fabrizio de Andre’s Hotel Supramonte is given distinctly Gothic overtones as he sings of “sorrows washed away in rain.”
The Waitsian pessimism of Piero Ciampi’s Il Vino is very much in tune with Hammill’s world view as the song poses the questions: “Is there any hope left? Is it hopeless?” The answers to these questions seems to be respectively ‘NO’ and ‘YES’.
Hammill says “I’ve done my best to be true to the essential spirit of the songs in my own vocal performance, rather than going for something different or extreme for its own sake.” The more despairing the mood the more convincing he sounds.
A good example of applying a more modern, and darker sensibility to the material can be found in his version of This Nearly Was Mine, a tune from the musical ‘South Pacific’. This attracted him because it contains disconsolate reflections of unfulfilled dreams. Of this paradise lost quality, he describes the ”sense of a yearning which is always destined to be unfulfilled [which] has seemingly been with me forever.” In this regard, he’s in good company since this song has also been covered by Bob Dylan and Frank Sinatra.
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Another redefined show tune is Kern/Hammerstein’s The Folks Who Live On The Hill where Hammill stresses the bittersweet sense of loss so that it sounds distinctly more abrasive than Peggy Lee’s cosier all-American version. Hammill was once referred to as “the Shirley Bassey of the Underground” and he says is now quite happy with this label.
Astor Piazzolla’s tango music has been a strong influence on Hammill and two of the Argentine composers pieces are reimagined here: Oblivion and Ballad For My Death.In both, the emphasis is squarely on fatalism and mortality.The melodrama of these pieces is well suited to Hammill’s twisted delivery which embodies “life at the end of a tunnel.”
In versions of two classical pieces, Hammill deliberately disregards the “highly perfumed” romantic ethics and turns the sentiments into something altogether edgier and more contemporary.His interpretation of Gabriel Fauré’s song After a dream makes it sound like a living nightmare rather than waking from a dream, while the line “I’m close to heaven” from Gustav Mahler’s Lost to the world takes on a more sinister flavour in his reading.
A similarly radical transformation occurs in the treatment of Leiber and Stoller’s I Who Have Nothing which here come to embody the menacing thoughts of a stalker rather than the sad laments of a jilted lover.
I think it’s fair to define ‘In Translation’ as a pandemic record in that it only came into being during the lockdown when Hammill, like other artists, was forced to work in isolation. He also points out that the European flavour carries an implicit anti-Brexit message, describing it as “the act of a Briton who was, is and will remain a European, though one from whom rights have been stripped.”.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it makes me reassess my scepticism towards Hammill’s substantial back catalogue both as a band leader and solo artist, but I can admire the singer’s fearless intensity and the bold consistency of purpose that drives these unconventional cover versions.
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