Reviews of Prog Rock, Classical Music, Art Rock and Jazz
Peter Hammill performing Refugees by Van der Graaf Generator at the Prog Rock Prom in July 2026. Image © Andy Paradise/BBC 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 …
Continue reading "Off the Beaten Track # 18 – Refugees by Van der Graaf Generator"
Saturday 18 July 2026 Royal Albert Hall, London ★★★★ There’s life in the old prog yet… A celebration of the classic era of British prog rock The BBC Concert Orchestra and conductor Robert Ames.Image © Andy Paradise The first-ever rock band to appear at the Proms was Soft Machine on 13 August 1970. The first-ever …
Continue reading "Prog Rock Prom: A Fanfare for the Common Man – Live Review"
***** How a magnificent new book helped me rediscover the maverick's music The Cover of ROCK and ROLE by Joe Banks published by Kingmaker Publishing. Often, the route to discovering new music is fairly conventional; there's no Damascene moment. I found The Cure and Joy Division (and many other bands) by listening to John Peel …
The Cover of pH7 (1979) by Peter Hammill 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 …
Continue reading "Off the Beaten Track # 16 – Mr X (Gets Tense)/Faculty X from pH7 by Peter Hammill"
Tuesday 1 October 2025 RNCM, Manchester Nearly 60 years since first playing in Manchester, Hammill is still a supreme communicator and a powerful performer **** 'The hits just keep on coming', quipped Peter Hammill early in his set at the RNCM in Manchester this evening. In 2013, when Guy Garvey interviewed Hammill for a documentary, …
The cover of The Silent Corner and the Empty Stage (1974) from which 'A Louse is not a Home' is taken "They don't make 'em like this any more. Actually, they didn't at the time. Then, you were a serious concrete artist, or a sensitive singer-songwriter, or an all-out rocker, or a Progmeister, or whatever. …
Continue reading "Off the Beaten Track # 14: A Louse is not a Home by Peter Hammill"
Peter Hammill, lead singer with the English prog rock band Van der Graaf Generator wrote the song 'Autumn' for his 1977 solo album Over before he was thirty, but it is imbued with the wisdom and sadness of a much older man. Many of the tracks on Over mourn the loss of a long-term relationship, …
Continue reading "Off the Beaten Track #4: Autumn by Peter Hammill"
The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester Tuesday 22 February 2022 Prog rock band still generating sparks in Manchester over 50 years on **** In one of those lovely disambiguations on Wikipedia, Van der Graaf Generator the rock band are not to be confused with the electrostatic machine the Van der Graaff Generator. Both are capable of creating …