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Malcome Dome
Classic Rock - July 2005

Record Collector - July 2005

Jonathan Glancey
Tuesday May 10, 2005
The Guardian

"'Wavering between the absurd and the inspirational.' 'Delectable chaos.' 'Lightning in a bottle.' 'A dishevelled dream world where Coltrane plays with King Crimson.' Van der Graaf Generator have never been easy to pin down. Splitting up and reforming since 1968, loved by underground freaks and Johnny Rotten, the band - never conventionally prog rock - was nicely described by drummer Guy Evans as "an unstable entity". From the moment Guy Evans, Hugh Banton (organ), David Jackson (sax and flute) and the extraordinary Peter Hammill (guitar, keyboards, voice) come on to the stage through a purple haze of backlit dry ice, there is a nervous uncertainty in the air, combining with an astonishing tightness, relentless energy and crafted intensity.

No painful solos. No ambling through the back catalogue. Van der Graaf Generator clearly intend to be a band for our times. This will seem unreal to those nurtured on rap - yet Van der Graaf sure sound like a band for today. Act like one, too. Hammill, who has a voice of Himalayan range, opens with Undercover, off the Godbluff album of 1975. At first he sounds like Leonard Cohen. And then his voice rises through Lou Reed and David Bowie-like heights, and on towards terrifying peaks very much his own. He's good. Very good.

Topical, too. There's an excellent song called Every Bloody Emperor, from new album Present: it is a charge against a lying politician "spinning and spinning and spinning into his own decline". You can make out pretty much every word, by the way: Hammill, although performing like a rag doll possessed, communicates in the kind of crisp English the BBC fears. And proves it can work for rock.

There's also wonderfully weird gothic organ from Banton, who plays the bass lines with his foot pedals; intelligent, fractal sax and elegiac flute from Jackson; and spot-on drumming by Evans.

Was I surprised by Van der Graaf Generator? Very much. Tickets for this performance sold out in January. The audience came from an extraordinary 27 countries. They were clearly satisfied. The band is wired up. Electric. A million volts."

Nick Hasted
Tuesday May 10, 2005
The Independent

"When the four core members of this almost-forgotten prog-rock band start a gig for the first time in 29 years, a joyous roar bounces round the auditorium. That's how much Van der Graaf Generator mean to a small but fanatical section of their Seventies generation, and those, such as ex-Blur guitarist Graham Coxon, who have joined the cult since.

Centred around the "Hendrix of the voice", Peter Hammill, the band's jazz-influenced improvisations always retained an intensity and lyrical despair that set them apart from the likes of Yes. It is why they were spared in punk's dinosaur-cull, and praised by Johnny Rotten. And it is why this mostly middle-aged crowd is generating an atmosphere of adolescent expectation, as if this might just be a major event.

When Hammill last took to a London stage, in 2004, quite soon after a heart attack, he seemed fragile, his voice shakier than normal. Tonight, though, he throws his whole stick-thin frame into hurling words from his body, arms flapping at his side, like a marionette flung about by his own music.

It is no more than the band's signature "Refugees" deserves, as its lyrics of alienation sink in and Hugh Banton's soul organ takes flight. To some here, it's like The Beatles doing "She Loves You". But it's on the less familiar "Childlike Faith in Childhood's End", when Hammill essays an operatic baritone, that the band's bleak sense of lifelong struggle hits home.

For all Van der Graaf's improvisation, they remain in control of pace, carefully shifting volume and rhythm, even as they let each song's shape stretch, without ever snapping. Despite moments of tumbling dissonance, and the sense that any song could carry on indefinitely, there are no free-form freak-outs. The two songs from the new album, Present, grow into themselves in this environment.

But it's in the encore, "Killer", that Van der Graaf find their purpose. The sound gets insectoid and thick, the song becomes schizoid, forgetting itself, before familiar chords crash back in. And Hammill, conducting from the rear, lost in something larger than himself, seems rejuvenated. As do his transported fans."

See the David Jackson page for information about Jaxon's set-up that appeared in The Box.

Peter Hammill played two guitars. The first was his black Guild, aka "Meurglys III", and the second a dark blue DeArmond M75T, manufactured under license from Guild. His keyboard was a Yamaha DX7 Mk I, with custom sounds and GEM piano module.

Guy Evans was playing his '65 Gretsch drum kit.