Van Der Graaf Generator: Still generating excitement

"I've never regarded it as evil music," says Peter Hammill (vocals, guitar, piano) of the glorious racket he makes with his Van Der Graaf Generator bandmates Hugh Banton (organ, bass pedals) and Guy Evans (drums). "Some of it is evil to play. A lot of people think it's very, very dark, and some of it is, but we've always tried to play it with the proper human spirit and approach."

He stresses this, as if keen to dispel the notion that the group he originally formed with Chris "Judge" Smith at Manchester University at the end of 1967 became "cursed" over the following 10 years, plagued as they were by fitful stops and starts and several line-up changes.

"In later life, I believe less in curses. We bumped the curves a few times, but I don't think we heaped trouble on ourselves by virtue of the music we were playing. It was intense but, in the 1970s, the world was such a different place in every way," muses the front man when I mention the riots the band caused in Italy and France in 1975. The saxophonist Dave Jackson had his equipment stolen after a show I attended in Marseilles that year, one of many band mishaps along the way. "Even talking about it now, it's like talking about a movie," Hammill says.

It was the time of Baader-Meinhof and the Red Brigades, and Van Der Graaf Generator's brand of Sturm und Drang seemed to tap into a very potent and volatile zeitgeist. "The world was getting wacky, basically. More grown-up things started to happen to us," admits Hammill, who wrote complex, tortured songs like "Killer", "Man-Erg" and "Scorched Earth", which turned into relentless and epic tours de force.

"In non-English speaking countries, in Italy and France, there was an immediate response to the sound. People got the emotional effect of the music. Whereas in Britain, and particularly in America, the fact that there was this bloke spouting all these words tended to put people off. From quite an early stage, we had this attitude of, 'We are going to play this music. You might not like it but, if you don't like it, we're sorry, that's just too bad because we are going to play this music,'" the singer says.

Trouble seemed to follow the band from early on. They even split (briefly) in June 1969, just a few months after signing to Tony Stratton-Smith's Charisma label and supporting Jimi Hendrix at the Royal Albert Hall in London. "That was very exciting," Evans recalls. "It was only our sixth or seventh gig. The beginning of our career was quite strange. We were the band who could never do a gig; it got cancelled or the van broke down."

They reunited later that year and became darlings of the underground with the albums The Least We Can Do Is Wave to Each Other, H to He Who Am the Only One and Pawn Hearts. "We got a bit of a reputation. We were on John Peel shows, and I can remember getting our first £100 gig," says the drummer, who has fond memories of touring with Genesis and Lindisfarne in early 1971. "Six-bob gigs, a great price, a very good package. It meant we could go and play some proper concert halls. Otherwise, every time there was a career opportunity to be grasped, we'd be walking the other way. Even our name gave people problems. It took them maybe five or six goes to get what it was - and then they still had to remember it."

Having made their first successful forays into Germany, France and Italy, Van Der Graaf Generator took the perhaps unlikely step of covering the George Martin instrumental composition "Theme One". "Our one commercial move, it was natural because it was the encore," explains Hammill. "It wasn't a mission statement [to remedy the fact] that we weren't having singles. That was not the drive. Honestly, there's never been a moment when we've said, 'What can we do to make a single? What can we do to be successful? What can we do about our show to get more punters in? No more fiddly bits!'" the singer jokes.

Hammill seems in a playful mood as we talk during a break from rehearsals in north London, neatly deflating the group's propensity towards long pieces and gloomy subjects such as "Necromancer", "Darkness" and "Lemmings".

"Oh, I'm Mister Glum, me," he says. "I generally find that song subject-matter tends to be on the darker side. There's a limited number of shiny, bright, happy, clappy songs one can write. 'Lemmings' in any case is a long, long way back. Doubtless, I was a possibly over-serious young man, possibly in awe of his own overseriousness, even."

Hammill would split the group again in August 1972. In the next three years, he released four solo albums, including the proto-punk Nadir's Big Chance (1975), a project forever name-checked by John Lydon, Nick Cave, Julian Cope, Graham Coxon and Mark E Smith.

According to the Van Der Graaf Generator front man, the album's influence "was in attitude rather than in the music. Apart from having an influence on other people, it did have an influence on us because it was the first time the four of us played together having decided to be a band again. Doing simple songs really fast on Nadir had a significant effect on the material of Godbluff" - the VDGG album that appeared the same year.

"We thought: why don't we try to do the complex songs like that too? There is definitely an element of being a beat group, especially when we're trying to play something that's very complicated. That is when we try to inhabit it with the spirit of a beat group. It's fun. This is music," the singer stresses.

Having issued three albums - Godbluff, Still Life and World Record - within a year, Jackson and Banton left in 1977 and Hammill and Evans soldiered on as Van Der Graaf before calling it a day in 1978 after the drummer almost drowned in Ibiza. "Everything was so manic. All this endless recording, travelling, total tunnel vision," reflects Hammill.

Still, the singer went to to make another 20 solo albums after that, and invited the other three members of the classic VDGG line-up to join him on stage to play the song "Still Life" at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London in February 2003. This was a reunion more than an attempt to re-form the band, but the seed had been sown. "The decision had been made, partly because of the awareness of our growing age, intimations of mortality," says the front man. "We had booked time in February 2004 to try it out, and my heart attack was in December 2003. It certainly gave an added piquancy to the whole thing in terms of post-cardiac rehab. It worked."

Indeed, when the Banton-Evans-Hammill-Jackson foursome got back together, they "didn't play anything from the old days for an entire week," Banton remembers. "We just played. We did improvisations, new songs like 'Every Bloody Emperor', 'Nutter Alert'. It was clear that, if we could play what we played that week, then the old stuff would be easier. It was actually quite hard, but now I can simulate the way I sounded in 1970," adds the organist, before doing a Hammond-style flourish on a keyboard (his day job is designing church organs).

Fans' expectations ran high, but Van Der Graaf Generator matched the intensity of their mid-Seventies selves on the Present studio album and at the Royal Festival Hall in London in May 2005, a concert that has just been released under the title Real Time. "We aren't doing this to get rich or to achieve world fame," muses Hammill. "There's an element of a game of bluff, of poker, where you stick a card on your forehead. It's not meant to be a karaoke show. It was never a karaoke show back then and it isn't now." Evans adds: "It's a big dare, really. We sort of open the box, and out it comes." These days, Evans has to fit VDGG around his teaching commitments.

After leaving VDGG, Jackson worked as a special needs and mainstream teacher, before starting Tonewall in 1992. An interactive music-technology project for people of all levels of ability and even profound disability, Tonewall features music-creation devices that include the Soundbeam, Echo-Mirror and Jellybean Eye. To take one example, the Soundbeam is a music creation device that works by echo location. Jackson describes it thus: "A Soundbeam is an invisible elastic keyboard in the air, but it's a keyboard that you can adjust. It doesn't have all the notes all the time and it isn't necessarily one sound. It can have anything you want in it, but the important thing is that you have to move within it. The better your quality of music within it, the more beautiful the music's going to be. There are lots of very sophisticated playing techniques for the beam, which really have to be taught - but having said that, certain disabled people play it with an intuitive understanding that defies belief. They seem to know how it works, which is marvellous."

Now Jackson is no longer involved with VDGG, perceptions have had to be adjusted. "We're not pretending we're the same group, only without a saxophone player," says Hammill. "We're not the same group. It's a different Van Der Graaf Generator. We had to have a go at doing this as a trio, we absolutely had to. It was our responsibility to ourselves and to the history and ethos of the group. Everything else automatically follows," Hammill says, stressing their determination to keep rotating the set list and to keep writing and playing new material.

"If there was a comfort zone, we wouldn't be doing it. There's got to be an edge, an uncertainty. Once it becomes routine, we're not Van Der Graaf Generator. The one thing the late Tony Stratton-Smith and Gail Colson, who manages me, always said is, 'Van Der Graaf Generator have to carry on working until they have a hit.' In other words, forever."

'Real Time' is out now on Fie! Records; Van Der Graaf Generator play the Barbican, London EC1 on Monday (www.sofasound.com). To find out more about David Jackson's Tonewall, visit www.jaxontonewall.com