Many younger fans, asked to name a Peter Hammill / Van der Graaf Generator (VdGG) song, probably couldn’t do so if their mothers’ lives depended upon it. But to his fanbase and his many admirers, Hammill’s one of the most important artists out there. He’s held in considerable regard by fans and critics alike, and such is the intensity of his fanbase, his live shows have been regarded as religious experiences. As Joe Banks says, he doesn’t so much have fans as “true believers.” Peter Hammill is very likely one of the best-kept secrets in rock.
Which is quite remarkable when you consider that over the course of an extraordinary, almost sixty-year career, both inside VdGG and as a solo artist, he’s released at least 20 albums with VdGG, as well as at least 36 solo albums. It’s an astonishing output however you slice it. Yet, with the exception of Van der Graaf’s The Least We Can Do Is Wave to Each Other album, which just about crept into the top fifty, not one of his recorded pieces has troubled the albums charts, and he doesn’t release singles. So what is it about Peter Hammill that has attracted such levels of fanatical devotion from his army of fans?
This is what Banks has set out to discover in his book, which is a deep dive into the works of Peter Hammill, as well as being a portrait of Hammill as an artist and as a man. It’s the story of someone with a musical vision, originally drawing his influences from the early ’60s beat boom and the blues, whose career begins with his band being bottled offstage by drunk medical students and ends with fans crossing continents to see him perform. Fans who are serious about music that is “fiercely literate.”
It’s an assiduous examination, going into almost anorak levels of detail, based on his time with the famous Charisma label in the 1970s. Banks dissects every song and, in many cases, the inspiration behind the song, on every album Hammill and VdGG recorded during this period – a time when Banks claimed Hammill produced “some of his best-known, most groundbreaking works, both solo and with the band.” It doesn’t purport to be the definitive account because, as the author rightly says, the book would be so much bigger were this to be the case.
A key piece of advice given to Hammill by the legendary Graham Bond has proven decisive. Bond tells Hammill, “You have to do what you have to do,” which Hammill claims was the only true piece of advice he was ever given in the music business. Hammill has since then almost defiantly followed his own muse, constantly striving to produce new and interesting music. This leads to one critic claiming, “This album will win them more acclaim but, I fear, it won’t sell.” His single-mindedness has meant, as Chris Judge Smith says, while Hammill would’ve been thrilled to have had a hit album, “he won’t let anyone screw with his music.”
This may well be because he rarely repeats himself. As Banks illustrates, from album to album, you never know where the muse will take him, ignoring current trends. Neil Young once famously said, “With every album, I give the fans what they don’t want, but they still come back.” Hammill is in that select group of artists to whom the term “maverick” applies, alongside people like Neil Young and Todd Rundgren.
It hasn’t always been easy for Hammill following his muse. His vision of what he wanted VdGG to be was occasionally at odds with the other band members, causing bouts of friction and disharmony. But as drummer Guy Evans says, the band stayed together because there was “brotherly affection arising from a longstanding, improbable friendship.”
This book is a weighty tome, checking in at over 500 pages, and contains many previously unpublished pictures of the various stages of Hammill’s career. It includes a brief look at his post-Charisma career and concludes with lists of albums and radio sessions. Greg Spawton, co-owner of Kingmaker Publications, states, “Peter Hammill has long deserved the kind of critical appraisal given by Joe Banks.” Ultimately, this could well become the go-to book about Peter Hammill and VdGG in the seventies, and Banks is to be commended on giving us such a fine study of a revered artist.
ROCK and ROLE: The Visionary Songs of Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf Generator by Joe Banks will be published on 21st November 2025 via Kingmaker Publishing.
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