This was the first Van der Graaf Generator album I owned, and it remains my touchstone for them, the one that I hoped, in vain, all my subsequent purchases would live up to. When I told Paul this after we saw them last spring he was surprised, and said that albums like Pawn Hearts and H to He Who am the Only One are generally regarded as classics. That explains at least one thing: why the songs that were greeted with most cheers in concert where those that I didn't recognise at all. Because I've never heard those albums (except, I guess, when they've been featured on the Freakzone). Happily all of VdGG's work from the late-'60s beginnings to last year's album is available to listen to in full on We7, so I can make good that gap in my education.
But back to Still Life, I bought it when I was in the Sixth Form, and it's definitely album best enjoyed by Sixth Formers — male Sixth Formers. Chock full of meditations on the quandaries of eternal life, and, well, many were the evenings when I would don the headphones and act out a strangled karaoke vocal to verses like
As anti-matter sucks and pulses periodically
The bud unfolds, the bloom is dead, all space is living history.
It seems as though time must betray us yet we're alive
And though I see no God to save us, still we survive
Through the centuries of progress
Which don't get us very far.
All illusion! All is bogus…
We don't yet know what we are.
Always be wary of rock stars that proclaim things to be an illusion; unless it's someone with the necessary gravitas, like Imagination, say.
When I was still in the Sixth Form, I couldn't yet relate La Rossa, another favourite from the album, to a great deal of my personal experience. It's a song about a man who sits up all night talking "quack philosophy and sophistry" to a woman when what he really wants is to get into her knickers, "at physicality I've always baulked" and all the time he's "faintly aware of the passage of opportunities I have missed". But in later years many were the early mornings when I'd make my way home humming those words.
But all of this talk misses what I really liked — and still like — about Still Life, and that's the way that it's not so unrelentingly dense and full-on as much other VdGG. The scream-shout lyrics are still there, and of climactic crescendos there are plenty; but they're offset with more slinky, rhythmic, and (yes) lyrical sections. Just listen to the beautifully sinous sax (sorry about the excess sibilance) on My Room.
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