Imagine if you can the shower scene music from Psycho being played by John Foxx-era Ultravox. With its primal attack, it’s one of the band’s simpler songs, but its rawness underlines VDGG’s status as punk influencers. But once Hammill leans into the lyric like a manic drill sergeant telling his troops what they need to know to stay north of the ground, things get intense fast. It starts out deceptively unassuming with a slinky, funky intro. In 1976 their fury factor was undiminished, as proven by “A Place to Survive” from World Record. Jackson’s ravenous riffs and Banton’s organ blasts send the feral-sounding frontman into one of his most appealingly aggro vocal performances. “Killer” from their third album, H to He Who Am the Only One, is a fan favorite that finds Hammill feeling kinship with a killer shark making its lonely way across the ocean floor. Between Hammill’s fire breathing, Hugh Banton’s Phantom of the Opera organ, and David Jackson’s deployment of sax as a weapon of mass destruction, they could send Darth Vader running for the hills. When they work up a good head of steam, nobody does dangerous like Van der Graaf. The Ragers (Killer, A Place To Survive, Cat’s Eye/Yellow Fever (Running), Sci-Finance, Nadir’s Big Chance) Pre-order Van der Graaf Generator: The Charisma Yearsand scroll down for their best career-defining cuts.
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Here’s a concise crop of the best Van Der Graaf Generator songs that underline both the band’s uncompromising intensity and their broad range of moods and modes. The monolithic, 20-disc box set Van der Graaf Generator: The Charisma Years tells the story of a band that demanded to be different, chronicling the eight albums they released on Charisma Records between 1970 and ’78. Hammill was an admitted and obvious influence on punk progenitor John Lydon and others of his ilk, ultimately earning a place in history as something like the Cain to Peter Gabriel’s Abel. Even when punk made art-rock unfashionable, Van der Graaf got a pass.
Though the band’s eccentricities precluded mass appeal, prog fans have always revered Van der Graaf Generator as equals of more famous peers like Genesis, King Crimson, et al. If Yes’s sunny-voiced, utopian-minded Jon Anderson was prog’s golden boy, VDGG frontman Peter Hammill was its bad seed, its Richard III, declaiming dark, existential visions over the band’s gloriously foreboding circus of doom (however offset by moments of delicate beauty). Named for a device that creates high-voltage electricity, Van der Graaf Generator was a shock to the system of prog’s first generation.
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