Transcript of Peter Hammill from Belgian Radio 1:
The Cucamonga Interview Radio 1, Belgium, Dec 8 1998, broadcast Dec 21 1998 & Dec 28 1998


*****On the the series of 30 (years of making music), 40 (th album) and 50 (th birthday)*****

I wanted to use the occasion to put a lot of things I'm still interested in in the composition of the tracks on THIS, so as to make a statement of continued intent on what interests me.One of the things that still interests me very much and which are particularly characteristic of the songs on THIS is the how-on-earth-did-we-get-HERE-in-this-song-from-THERE-a-couple-of-minutes-ago and the how-can-THIS-song-here-possibly-fit-with-THAT-one-over there ? As is the case with The Light Continent and Always Is Next on the last album ...

*****promotion*****

I am difficult to promote, partly because I never do the same thing... Even on one album there are going to be different styles... I came to the conclusion that actually I could do a very very good job in not promoting myself MYSELF! *I* could do it even better than anybody else [record companies], and so *I* might as well do it.Although externally the step seems a big one, and people keep asking me if it occupies a lot of my time or if it distracts me from doing work, I can only say that obviously it does take some time, but not significantly more...

*****on PH writing his own bios in terms of "some say he is an eccentric genius while others think he's gone completely mad"*****

Obviously the music itself, which doesn't really fit into the normal categories, polarizes people, but most of the time IF people find a way in, they do find their way to all the rest of it. If I meet somebody who doesn't know me at all and asks me what I do for a living, then I suppose the answer has got to be something like "making music" - which I won't necessarily say, because obviously the next question is going to be "what kind of music?", and then eventually I have to say that it is, well er, er, er, er, grhhhrl, sssh, er, rock music. But only just so, because my relationship with music, and things in general, is peripheral.

*****on ph's sonic youth*****

I sang in choirs from 8, maybe 9, and very much enjoyed that and got the first thrill about making music. From 14, 15 onwards I was interested in music as stuff, as audience. The adolescent thing went from writing poetry, as adolescents will and surely still do, especially sensitive boys of a certain temperament. Gradually that drive veered into writing songs, absolutely appalling songs, unbelievably bad blues songs, because that was the music I was interested in then. Again gradually I started writing other stuff, but this happened as a kind of accidental thing. Music was not something that was always around, no.Obviously I realised quite quickly that my songs were lacking in the one essential element of writing blues which is "I had not lived a life", so there wasn't really any experience that I could put into blues. So I became more and more dissatisfied with the results of my efforts, and stumbled into whatever style I began writing in and whatever subjects I started writing about. But I didn't have the impression that it was in any way strange to be writing about Vikings or whatever the other things were that I was writing about. And I still don't actually! My songs are completely normal as far as I'm concerned. I don't have to strive for eccentricity.

*****on Liberal Studies in Science*****

By the end of the sixties there was this two culture split: people that were interested in Arts & Literature had nothing to do with science and vice versa. Whereas now you have bestsellers - not always the deepest science I know - but they are popularising science and people are interested in it. Science is on the news and in newspapers in a way which was simply not the case then. Obviously I think this is important, really.And yes, I was interested in those things, and obviously some of the things I had to study were rather dry, but there was the central drive I was interested in. And still, though in an artistic way. [was followed by the nice fitting song Out Of My Book]

*****writing/singing/playing songs*****

I think I am a songwriter first, and then a singer, and, maybe equally important, player. I am a clumsy but enthusiastic player. I obviously never had any training apart from the training on the job, which is an ongoing process of self-discovery and self-teaching. And that's also why I like to change things, I like to be challenged. I like not to be on safe repetitive ground. But it does make me a bit of a clumsy player. Yes, I have become a musician over the years.

*****the voice*****

I didn't say that I wanted to BE the Jimi Hendrix of the voice. Obviously Hendrix was a major influence on all the members of VdGG. But what I really wanted to do was STRETCH things in the way that Jimi Hendrix stretched guitar and Coltrane stretched sax. There was the slightest touch of hybrids going on then I suspect, but it was a specific interest, and I did work on it. And since I was writing the songs as well, I could give myself settings in which I could stretch the voice. Then again, in the way of things, in the early days this stretching took place in the aggressive area. But obviously, singing is something I still work on, but for a number of years now I discovered the use of singing very very quietly, using the head to sing rather than the whole body. I'm still working on all this, but maybe with a little less hubris than originally ...


! PART 2 of the Cucamonga Interview:
Transcript by Koen B



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