Music Arcades: Van der Graaf: Vital

Well I went to see Van der Graaf Generator again last month, and, as promised, I stayed off the curry and the Red Bull, though I was again short of sleep, as usual. Yet, as before, I nodded off — and this was in the fourth row! I even felt a bit funny in my tummy. Maybe such symptoms have become a Pavlovian learned response for me at VdGG gigs. I didn't enjoy it a great deal, to be honest, and nor did Guy and Paul. Here are some notes I sent in to my favourite radio programme about it, showing how seriously I took it:

Peter Hammill looks more and more like Michael Palin with each passing year

the phenomenon of 'air conducting' as practised by the gentleman in front of me, most vigourously on the aptly titled song Nutter Alert

there were more women there than I expected — at least ten! [this is actually a gross underestimate]

the new songs were among the highlights for me, and one, featuring lyrics about mobile phone batteries dying and getting too much voicemail, was clearly bidding for duffer credentials.

…All of which is by way of trying to cover up that I have relatively little to say about this record. Boy, it's dense. Hammill's voice is a hectoring yell for much of the time — hard to believe he was trained as a chorister (though his between-song patter can at times sound like a pastoral address, and seems to have been fairly consistent across 30 years of performing). And the guitar is frequently distorted very similarly to Neil Young's on the almost exactly contemporaneous Live Rust. But this is much less accessible than that album. You really have to be in the mood.

I thought all live double albums had gatefold sleeves in the '70s, and I think maybe this one did originally because it's got a credit for 'centre photography'. In fact, some web sleuthwork reveals that my copy is the US release: it's on PVC, whereas the UK one was on Charisma. Strange, because I bought this in Guildford in about 1983. I know, I know: I'm scraping the barrel. Who cares?