Progressive Generator

There's nothing quite like discovering new music.

If you ever listen to NPR, you'll always be pleasently suprised at some of the music they feature. On Friday's All Things Considered, they profiled a little-known prog-rock group called Van Der Graaf Genereator.




Listen to Friday's episode of All Things Considered here.

Musician Peter Hammill isn't a household name, and his music isn't necessarily for the household. As a founding member of the British progressive rock scene in the early '70s, Hammill reached beyond the pretension of prog rock and into the fury of punk.

In 1973, progressive rock's epic sound was king. Sitting on the throne were Genesis, Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. But there were a lot of bands slaving in the fields — like Van der Graaf Generator, whose leader and singer, Hammill, is not a big fan of the label "prog rock."

"It began to seem that in order to be in a successful group, you had to have 23 banks of keyboards and a zillion lights and all that sort of thing," Hammill says.

Music geeks made up a large portion of the progressive rock audience, but Van der Graaf Generator was gathering attention from an unexpected place. In 1977, punk pioneer Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols played guest DJ on a British radio show. He called Hammill a true original, saying, "If you listen to him, I'm sure [David] Bowie copied a lot." Pettigrew says the interview became legendary.

"[Rotten] played two tracks from Hammill's Nadir's Big Chance record. That record was very much an influence on him," Pettigrew says. "And when you consider what [Rotten] did with Public Image Ltd., that whole type of reductionist thinking, I think a lot of that has to do with Van der Graaf and Peter Hammill."

Hammill's influence on Rotten is intriguing, because punk was the antithesis of prog rock. It was about immediacy and not caring whether you could play your instrument well. Yet Hammill insists it shouldn't be a surprise that what was assumed to be a brainy overload of pretension actually had a broader appeal.

"Part of the drive was just for it to be visceral, immediate, active," Hammill says. "And actually, I think we picked up quite a lot of audience at that time who wouldn't have remotely dreamed of going to see ELP or Yes."

Here's some video of the band performing live: