Still Life by Van der Graaf Generator (1976)
Rupert Loydell
Back in 1979, I was working as a hospital porter in Harrow, having been put off fine art by the foundation course I had completed. In a few years time I would take a Creative Arts degree that allowed me to write and paint, but at the time I was enjoying being paid well enough to run a motorbike, go to lots of gigs, and buy loads of music.
I went to a grammar school where progrock was de rigeur, and to this day I still have a soft spot for Yes, Genesis and King Crimson although when asked it is post-punk that mostly engaged me in the late 1970s. I never got punk, it was simply a mix of pub rock and heavy metal with attitude to these ears, but once the likes of Simple Minds, XTC, Magazine and PiL arrived, I was on board.
I made a new friend at the hospital. He was into all sorts of interesting music, but mostly improvised and ‘out there’ jazz. He took me to the London Musicians’ Collective, who put on gigs at a damp, rundown premises somewhere in Camden, and also introduced me to records by the likes of Sun Ra, Pere Ubu, Joy Division, This Heat and Spherical Objects. I spent many hours shivering in his kitchen with only lit gas burners for heat, listening to strange, often atonal and abstract, sounds. I didn’t always like what I heard, but these records and evenings seeing Evan Parker, Keith Tippett or Lol Coxhill in concert, Roger Turner banging things, or Phil Minton’s strange vocalisations, were key to learning to listen, my musical education.
As was a secondhand record shop in the room behind a greengrocers in Harrow. The argumentative and grumpy vegetable seller had to be braved to get to the music shop his son ran, but it was a treasure trove of obscure and forgotten music. The owner was always full of suggestions and recommendations. Nico’s Desertshore was an album I bought there having been played a track, and Van der Graaf Generator’s Still Life was another.
It was prog but it wasn’t. It had jazz elements but it wasn’t jazz. It was noisy, pretentious, awkward and exhilarating. Its demented saxophones reminded me of Essential Logic who I had has recently seen supporting Stiff Little Fingers. It was the missing link between prog and postpunk, alongside King Crimson’s gamelan guitar workouts on Discipline.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Hammill was a musical hero of John Lydon’s, and there was a long discography of Van der Graaf and Hammill solo albums waiting to be discovered. Still Life remains my favourite, however, probably because it was the first. Although I’m not big on drums, Guy Evans is a subtle yet powerful rhythm machine underneath Hugh Banton’s ethereal organ, keyboards (and bass pedals), whilst the front line of David Jackson and his electronically treated and sometimes doubled-up saxophone and Peter Hammill’s unnerving vocals, shriek, moan, plead and sweep all else aside.
There are no atonal, fragmented side-long epics here, neither is it a concept album, just a set of five extended songs with underpinnings of despair, science fiction, mysticism, lust and love. The music ebbs and flows, frantic then calm, before a song’s final crescendo or slow fade out in a triumphant flurry.
There has never been another band like Van der Graaf Generator. Live, they often only just held it together as they grappled with chaos and cacophony; on albums they sometimes lacked energy and meandered on for too long. Still Life, however, remains a complex, surprising and challenging listen 40 years later.
Rupert Loydell is a writer and visual artist, the editor of Stride, and a contributing editor to International Times. He is a widely published poet and has edited anthologies for Salt, Shearsman and KFS. His critical writing has appeared in Punk & Post-Punk (which he is on the editorial board of), New Writing, Revenant, The Journal of Visual Art Practice, Text, Axon, Musicology Research, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, and he has contributed chapters to Brian Eno. Oblique Music (Bloomsbury, 2016), Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Music in Twin Peaks: Listen to the Sounds (Routledge, 2021), Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and A Critical Companion to David Lynch (Lexington Books, 2024).
