The English prog rock band Van der Graaf Generator have very rarely troubled the UK charts. So, based on chart positions, all the recordings released by the band and the solo albums released by band leader and main songwriter Peter Hammill would fit the ‘Off the Beaten Track’ category. But if you asked fans to pick one song by the band, many would pick Refugees from the 1970 album The Least We Can Do Is Wave to Each Other. It’s the band’s most popular song on Spotify, with 2.5m plays at the time of writing. It was originally released as a single in April 1970 and failed to chart. When it was re-released over 50 years later in April 2022, it reached the number nine on the Official UK Singles Chart for one week. And when the BBC decided to feature Peter Hammill in the first-ever Prog Rock Prom, that was the track they chose, one of the highlights of the evening. In his programme note, Presenter Stuart Maconie wrote that Refugees is ‘one of the most moving songs in the prog canon.’
The song’s lyrics are bathed in sweet melancholy and nostalgia for a brief period in Hammill’s life when he shared a basement flat in London’s West Kensington, on North End Road next to the tube station. His flatmates were ‘Mike and Susie’; ‘Mike’ was Mike McLean, an old school friend, and his girlfriend, Susie, was the actor Susan Penhaligon. Her stage career was beginning to take off, and she soon appeared on TV in the 1976 adaptation of Andrea Newman’s 1969 novel Bouquet of Barbed Wire. In an interview in the May 2022 edition of Mojo magazine, Hammill told Martin Aston that when he moved out of the flat, it felt like leaving home, and ‘the last vestiges of hope lay only in a future utopia and rejoining of the hands.’
While Hammill still lived in the flat, he was often visited by his girlfriend Alice, and they soon moved in together in a bedsit in Fawley Road, West Hampstead. Ironically, this relationship eventually led to another separation, which became the subject of Hammill’s breakup album Over (1977). Most of the songs on that album describe the pain of the breakup, but Autumn (reviewed here in the Off the Beaten Track series) movingly describes another poignant parting; it’s about a couple who feel ‘alone’ and bereft after their children have left home, just as the protagonist in Refugees feels ‘alone’ after leaving his flatmates,
‘We’re refugees, walking away from the life
That we’ve known and loved;
Nothing to do or say, nowhere to stay;
Now we are alone.‘
In Autumn, the children’s departure makes the protagonist feel ‘So sad and suddenly old.’ His heart is frozen by the icy emotion he feels. The opening lines of Refugees describe a similar sentiment
‘North was somewhere years ago and cold:
Ice locked the people’s hearts and made them old’
The lyrics of Refugees are unusual in that they begin with a description of the refugee experience with universal appeal, then zoom in on a very personal situation, even naming real people dear to Hammill himself. Poetry often does the opposite: it begins with the personal and then broadens out the theme to the universal. In the song, the characters move to the West, which could be West London but also takes on an almost mythical quality,
West is where all days will someday end;
Where the colours turn from grey to gold,
The song ends on an optimistic note, ‘West is where I love/West is refugees’ home.’ But there’s a brutal sting in the tale that came only a few years later. The song Easy to Slip Away from Hammill’s second solo album, Chameleon in the Shadow of the Night (1973), revisits Hammill’s friends Mike and Susie. But as Joe Banks says in his excellent book ROCK and ROLE: The Visionary Songs of Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf Generator (reviewed here), the song marks ‘a return to the dramatis personae of Refugees but now viewed through a very dark glass indeed.’ The refugees are ‘gone’, the past is obliterated, and they are only ‘figures in an ash shroud’ – a visceral metaphor for death. Hammill has lost touch with his former friends,
‘Susie, I guess you’re on your way to be a star
…The only time I seem to see you is on the TV…
And Mike!
… I might have dropped you a line
If I’d had time
Or the will’
Hammill doesn’t only blame his friends; he accepts that it’s his fault too that they have lost touch, and the song at least ends on a slightly more optimistic note, that he ‘can only live in the hope that some day it will all return.’
Although it was released as a single, Refugees has a very different feel when heard in the context of the album The Least We Can Do Is Wave to Each Other. The previous song, Darkness (11/11) begins with the sound of an icy wind which could have come from the North. Hammill’s vocals and David Jackson’s saxophone become more and more extreme, ending with a scream and huge crash on the drums. In Joe Banks’ memorable phrase, when Refugees begins, it’s ‘as though we’ve suddenly wandered into a Bach recital in a Victorian sitting room.’ Although the opening doesn’t appear to reference a particular work by Bach, its limpid textures and stately grace recall music of the Baroque era; it’s surprising to think that the gentle, melodic flute part is played by the same David Jackson who terrified us with his saxophone in the previous track… Mike Hurwitz, who later became a cellist with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London for over 25 years, provides a mellow cello part with little vibrato, like a Baroque player. Nic Potter on bass brings a subtle, melodic line. Hammill sings in a fragile falsetto, and Hugh Banton brings a church-like organ sound, adding to the song’s hymn-like quality. Guy Evans adds drumming of the kind that an orchestral timpanist would play. What appears at first to be a middle eight briefly threatens to become full-on prog, but the music of the opening section soon returns. The song builds to a gently epic finish, with saxophone decoration and drum rolls, as a chorus of backing voices adds quiet passion to one of Hammill’s best vocal performances. The song feels firmly rooted in Hammill’s own experience, but has a timeless and universal quality that makes it profoundly moving.
Now read on…
Refugees at the Prog Rock Prom (July 2026)
Refugees played by Van der Graaf Generator on the Van der Graaf Generator tour in 2022
Peter Hammill solo, live in Manchester in October 2025
Joe Banks’ book on Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf Generator
More in the Off the Beaten Track series…