With typical sarcastic humour, Peter Hammill named his eighth solo album pH7, when it would have been more logical to name it PH (Peter Hammill) 8. He wrote,
As a measure of acidity/alkalinity pH7 signifies perfect neutral balance; but these recordings are neither neutral nor balanced. The album is, therefore, both jokey and in disguise.
Mr X (Gets Tense) and Faculty X are the last two tracks on the album. It was recorded at Hammill’s home studio, Sofa Sound, in spring 1979 on 8-track analogue tape and mixed at Rockfield Studios in Wales. Other artists who used the Studios in the 1970s included Hammill’s own band Van der Graaf Generator (VdGG), Hawkwind, Mike Oldfield, Queen, Rush… and Showaddywaddy.
The two tracks segue into one ten-minute track, showing Hammill reaching towards the kind of ‘epics a la VdGG’ he had previously avoided in his solo work. The following year, he released his ninth solo album, A Black Box, which features Flight, a seven-part epic that’s nearly 20 minutes long.
It’s easy to see why Mr X is getting so tense. The song opens with the radio news suddenly bursting in: the Sun is crashing to Earth, threatening humanity’s destruction. Mr X seems to represent a normal person (‘the norm, the average… what is this?’) The story may end with his being ‘the last residual/Holder of the torch, conscience of all men.’ He is caught up in the ultimate existential crisis, wondering whether the world will end ‘under fire’ or ‘under ice.’ It’s unclear what humanity’s role is in the end of the world, but Hammill makes it clear that the devastation is man-made. We can’t stop the Earth’s imminent destruction,
The apparatus rolls, no-one here can stop it
Too busy learning more – always knowing less
The track begins with what Hammill describes as ‘loads of loops and stuff… sheer exuberance’, until a piano joins with an awkward, angular and supremely proggy riff, reflecting Mr X’s unease. A blistering bass line almost bursts through the speakers. Hammill’s voice initially sounds a little whimsical. Throughout these two tracks, and indeed throughout his whole recorded output, his voice is remarkably theatrical: the ‘Hendrix of the Voice’. Perhaps only David Bowie, particularly in his live performances, has matched Hammill in his supreme theatricality.
The classical violinist, Graham Smith, who joined VdGG in 1977 and appeared on The Quiet Zone/The Pleasure Dome, provides anguished howls and resonant two-note riffs. Hammill’s voice eventually becomes so passionate that it cracks into falsetto on the words ‘under ice.’ A drumless instrumental passage follows, with dystopian guitar loops. The weirdly heavy drums (Hammill described them as ‘pretty strange’) rouse themselves as the vocals return with even more intensity, accompanied by manic backing vocals from Hammill himself. The track almost becomes unhinged with a babel of voices on the words, ‘Lord, deliver us from Babel’, and a repeated riff that threatens insanity. We enter a strange world of electronic loops, somewhere beyond time and space.
The next track, Faculty X, starts relatively calmly with a brief moment of optimism, and florid flute flourishes from David Jackson, a long-term member of VdGG and a frequent collaborator with Hammill on his solo albums. But the protagonist soon begins to fall apart again. There is some dense wordplay in the following lines,
Motes in the eye, portcullis is shut…
A skull isn’t much
Of a c-c-castle to live in
The ‘motes in the eye’ recall Jesus’ parable of the mote and the beam in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew, Chapter V). The mote is a speck of dust in the eye, and the beam is a large piece of wood. The parable’s meaning is that before trying to correct the minor faults of others, we should correct our own major faults. Hammill was brought up as a Catholic, specifically as a Jesuit, so would no doubt have been aware of the parable.
He plays on the word ‘mote,’ which sounds like ‘moat,’ the deep ditch that surrounds a castle. He develops the castle imagery further – the castle is the skull, home of human consciousness. The portcullis, the vertical gate into the castle, is shut, suggesting that the protagonist’s consciousness is closed off to new ideas. Hammill stutters on the word ‘castle’, an unusual effect in music, most famously used in The Who’s 1965 single My Generation,
Why don’t you all f-f-fade away (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
And don’t try to dig what we all s-s-say (talkin’ ’bout my generation)
There are various explanations why The Who adopted this style, but in Hammill’s case, it seems to emphasise the protagonist’s paranoia.
In a previous song on the album, written by his former VdGG band-mate, Chris Judge Smith, Hammill sang that it’s Time for a Change, but that song doesn’t offer any solutions except self-expression,
“Please, sir, if that’s alright,
‘I’d really rather like to learn how to be me“
Faculty X offers a much more detailed solution to the desire that ‘The change has got to come. The solution is Faculty X,
It won’t be the drug
It won’t be the sex
It’s got to be the Faculty X
So what is ‘Faculty X’? The word ‘faculty’ is used here in the sense of a mental power, rather than a university department, although Hammill does hint at the latter meaning in the lines, which suggest a university governing body,
I think I’ll have to go,
Go for the governing body
My consciousness elects.
Hammill cryptically writes that the song ‘takes Colin Wilson’s work as its basis.’ The website Colin Wilson Online: The Phenomenology of Excess includes an article about Faculty X and an interview, which explicitly mentions Hammill’s song and The Black Room from Hammill’s second solo album Chameleon in the Shadow of the Night (David Bowie and Mark E Smith of The Fall are also mentioned as fans of the theory). Wilson launched the concept in a lecture in 1967. Encyclopedia.com describes it as ‘a latent power in human beings enabling awareness of a higher reality beyond immediate sense perception.’
Colin Wilson and Faculty X
The English philosopher and novelist describes ‘faculty x’ as ‘not a sixth sense, but an ordinary potentiality of consciousness.’ It’s the ‘ability to grasp reality’ – the ‘reality of other times and places’. It’s exemplified by Proust’s ‘madeleine moment’ in Swann’s Way from A la recherche du temps perdu. A memory of a French ‘madeleine’ cake from Swann’s childhood is triggered so strongly that he exists in both realities at the same time. Wilson writes, ‘Faculty X is the key to all poetic and mystical experience.’
Colin Wilson in Cornwall, 1984. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Faculty X begins with a highly compressed piano sound, hopeful yet slightly ominous. Hammill’s piano and Jackson’s flute are soon joined by Smith’s violin and Jackson’s sax. For a moment, it appears that VdGG are back together again. Hammill’s call for change becomes increasingly insistent. The references to alternative philosophies from ‘seer, sages, prophets, obscurantist tracts’ are accompanied by a sarcastic violin melody which casts doubt on their value compared to Faculty X.
The track descends into a moment of quiet contemplation, as Hammill’s aggressive call for change suddenly becomes tentative, ‘Still, I hope that the change will come’, with a sweet, almost sentimental violin. The track gradually regains its urgency, with a dramatic and stunningly rhythmic return of Hammill’s vocals in the half-spoken words,
‘Meanwhile,
I don’t know,
I think I’ll
Have to go.’
The final minute of the song, after all the pent-up energy of the two tracks, is truly cathartic. We get a deeply personal insight into Hammill’s creativity. He ‘plucks all these characters out of thin air’ and infuses them ‘with meaning as much as I dare.’ Finally, he reaches a moment of complete calm, using the metaphor of swimming back to shore while waiting for the wave to carry him. A gorgeous ending to a pair of remarkable songs.
Both tracks are now available in revelatory remixes, in stereo and 5.1 surround sound by Stephen W. Tayler, who has also created surround sound mixes for Van der Graaf Generator, Be-Bop Deluxe, Bill Nelson’s Red Noise, Marillion, Renaissance, Barclay James Harvest, The Moody Blues, Hawkwind and Camel. Tayler has remixed pH7 and The Future Now in surround sound as part of the mammoth box set The Charisma and Virgin Recordings 1971 – 1986.
Sources:
Peter Hammill’s website: sofasound.com
Colin Wilson Online: The Phenomenology of Excess
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