FROM DUTCH MAGAZINE 'VINYL'
NOVEMBER 1983
by

Harold Schllencsx

This is a translation of a translation so these are not the man’s real words but just an approximation of the translation of the original, nevertheless I hope the essence stays the same. [Leo] in the Netherlands

The holes in language

There are but a few pop musicians you can interview as much as Peter Hammill. Undiminished expressiveness comes out of an uninterrupted search. Every song is a question added. And ultimately there is only one question, the question. Whereas pop music was not the intention in the beginning. Patient is his latest LP. Number twenty two.

When for a festival that is about everything that is new, modern and pop music, someone is invited who already appeared at such occasions when most of his invited colleagues still went to school or drank their milk, then there must be something special going on. When this same person with minimum means succeeds in captivating the audience and providing the shivers where most of the other acts with a lot of fuss and a hollow display of power merely cause shaky eardrums, then this can not be “new” nor “modern”. Can it be pop music?

And yet… Peter Hammill , in the last fifteen years, made all in all twenty two LP’s, sixteen hours of music, some 250 songs, of which he can choose freely when performing. That Hammill, accompanied by drummer Guy Evans and guitarist John Ellis, just played one song of his latest album Patient at the Pandora festival is characteristic. Hammils oeuvre is a whole, growing year after year, where only little is irrelevant or redundant. And where everything in the end is equally important.

Pieces

“When you’re eighteen everything is so nicely uncomplicated. I saw myself making music for three or four years, gaining some reputation and with the aid of that beginning a career as a writer. Then for some time there was nothing. Next I saw myself at fifty or so as a respectable man of letters. That was my idea. And now I’m here fifteen years later, more than three times the maximum time I gave myself at the beginning. I’m still interested in writing prose but music got hold of me much deeper than I could ever think. I was lucky to be able to go on and to be doing in principle the same things as when I started with one difference, I’m thirty four now, not nineteen anymore. If I would write the same things now as when I was nineteen I would of course not have gone through any personal or artistic growth. In that respect there are major differences, connected with age and experience.”

“I’ve learned a lot about what it is that “works” in songs and what does not. For me personally, I mean. This is of course all subjective. But nowadays in my eyes I’m a better songwriter. On the other hand, as you grow older, more doubts arise. When at eighteen I would have written “this is so and this is this”, now I’m inclined to say “look, sometimes it is this way, but then again you can very well look at it like that way”.

Which means that the lyrics become more difficult rather than easier. They concentrate on smaller things perhaps, but are more complicated because they contain opposite viewpoints and word games, so there are often three or four levels of feeling in it. And that is what I think is important in songs, that they hold all kinds of different elements, pieces of dogma, pieces of spirit, intellect, discussion. And that in principle it comes down to questions and doubts that cannot be put in words any other way. So they have to be songs.”

Question mark

In Hammills body of work a few items reappear again and again. Alienation within relationships, for example. The tragedy of lost friendship or a stranded love affair.

Another reoccurring subject is man’s littleness in relation to the world around him, often illustrated with subjects from natural science, in which Hammill was engrossed during his student years. Indeed most of Hammills songs ask a question. Different songs take a view on the same question from a different viewpoint. Without ultimately removing the question mark, not once.

“There are only a few fundamental questions to be asked. And these can be condensed to one question, one word…A life…question mark. You know, you can put everything in that one word, all different levels…”what is faith?”,” what’s the origin of individuality, in relation to friends, society?”, etcetera. And these questions inevitably pop up every time I try to write something that is “serious”. The moment this happens I am not really conscious of it. But it doesn’t matter from which side you dive into the ant-hill. You end up in those four or five rooms with fundamental questions”.

“And I think in this twentieth century, despite our technological progress, we have not yet invented really new questions. We discovered new approaches, new information you have to take into account when you handle these questions, but the questions remain the same. They all amount to “A life?”…or “ I?”…And then you hit the boundaries of language, which always remains an abstraction, whether you write a story, talk, or make a song text.”

“In the course of years I’ve begun to love language more and more, or actually the holes in language. In spite of being more and more conscious of its shortcomings. It’s worse than shortcomings. The lies, the lies you create trying to recover the truth, because words are abstractions and every question is made of words. But language continues to fascinate me. Take for example the English word “patient”. Thinking of the things I have written about the last years, it is strange that the remarkable flip-flop in the meaning of the word did never before occur to me. There are dictionaries full of words that not get their real meaning until you stop looking at them as description 1, description 2, description 3….”

“Of course you can wonder why these bizarre paradoxes in certain words exist…Perhaps one of the reasons is that I can write songs about it at a certain moment…Nonsense of course, I do not really mean that, but there are things in language that have to be made clear. For that reason I can even imagine writing prose again at a given moment. But on the other hand at this moment I’m so wrapped up in the musical language.. And there the mystery is even greater! Why does this chord feel like that, and why does this tone hurt there, and why do you get those shivers when you put them together? Mystery, mystery”.

. Rude violence

As I prepared myself for this interview by playing a large number of Hammill records, it struck me how again and again Hammill takes on a strange wrestling match with the form he has chosen, the form called pop music. A form that does not seem to satisfy, but that he always manages, with rude violence as it were, to bend to his own will.

On every record he adopts elements from whatever is current, “modern”, at that moment in pop music. But on the few moments he, perhaps unconsciously, conforms to it, his music as by magic loses all power. Hammill is at his best when the things he has to say or ask relentlessly dictate the musical setting and lead across boundaries and conventions, to extremes. Live as well these songs best prove their right to exist. They have become completely independent of that musical setting and even gain in intensity in their bare guitar-, drums- and voice-form.

Necessity

“I do not write continuously. In a certain way I first have to be passionately bored before I can start. I got to have that feeling of ” blaah, how awful to be doing nothing”. In that state of mind I can half receive, half create songs. Writing songs then is a necessity. But I have to wait for the right moment. It is a hopeless case if I try to write a song when there is no song to write.”

“It doesn’t matter how much money I earn with it or how much esteem I obtain. The only thing that counts is that I do it well, because if I don’t, I devaluate my life and wrong myself. One of my great privileges is that I do something, which at the moment I do it, is the only important thing in the world for me. Everything depends on it , there is nothing else, whatever it is, the state of things in the world…or the state of my own life… Everything outside is integrated in that one process.”

“And then there is that strange moment a song is finished. Then I always sing it to myself and from that moment on the song can no more be undone. That is an awkward aspect, that something I’ve written can not be unwritten anymore. A matter of emotion, that has nothing to do with intellect. For me the song is there and it calls to be written…while it doesn’t exist before it is written. On one hand I determine the song, but on the other it determines itself.” “I have no idea where they come from. Perhaps that is the greatest luck, more than making records, more than playing, the fact that I still don’t know where it comes from… I mean there are people who can write songs and people who cannot. There are songs that are songs and songs that are not. There is no other option. If I try to write songs, when there are no songs to write, then I fail. Probably because I would feel it is not genuine, the forced character of the result.”

Every cliché is true

“Still the I-character in my lyrics is seldom hundred percent me. In many of my songs different characters appear. In a given dramatic situation you’ve got this character and that, and they react like this, say that, feel this. On the other hand there is obviously a part of myself in all songs, because I can write only from my experience. But I think it is my responsibility to write about parts of myself, which are consciously or unconsciously parts of everyone, or common to a large number of people. That is an important function of those songs. You realise those fears or desires, or feelings, or fundamental questions are not yours alone. This can make you less lonely”.

“Therefore I have to make that connection between personal and general, and I can only do that by being sincere in what I do. If that sincerity is there, people who can put the parts together, can pick that up. Obviously not everyone. Nothing is for everyone, unless it is a cliché. Every cliché is true, you can not have an argument with a cliché.”