Bonus!
Van Der Graaf U.S Price Guide

Van Der Graaf Generator, wrote the editors of the “New Musical Express Book Of Rock” in 1975, “failed to make much of an impression on [the] British public. However they managed to accrue a small, but dedicated cult following for their heavy, doomy music.”

It was not much of an epitaph for what that same small cult following would have declared was one of the most ambitious, adventurous and, above all, challenging rock bands of the early 1970s. But VDGG had broken up a full three years earlier, and anybody still mourning the group’s demise was at least left with frontman Peter Hammill’s dogged pursuit of similar musical ends.

In fact, what was then his most recent album, 1975’s Nadir’s Big Chance, included a reprise of the very first song the band ever released, the 1968 single “People You Were Going To,” in whose lyrics could be found a virtual template for every critic’s own perception of the group:

“The people in the downstairs flat
are no longer there now because they left
the gas tap on, they’re all dead.
So you’ve no-one left to talk to….”

And that was the band’s first single. By the time they reached the end, four years and four albums later, they had more or less set to music every conceivable method of extinguishing life, hope and existence that you could dream of. The final words of the final track of that final album were “all things are apart.” Weeks later, the group split up.

They would return. No sooner had the “Book of Rock” gone to press than the group was back with a new LP and a blistering rebirth that threw up another four albums (plus a live souvenir). More recently, in 2005, Van Der Graaf regenerated again, and with two new studio albums already behind them (and a third on the way), the band is currently preparing for their first American concerts since a New York date in October 1976 — which, in turn, was the band’s first U.S. concert ever. At the time of writing, only one date, at Nearfest on June 19, has been confirmed. But Peter Hammill assures fans that “the plan is to do a few more shows while we’re over there. I suspect they may be East Coast/Canada only, but we’ll see what emerges in due course ...”

For anybody seeking an introduction to Van Der Graaf Generator, a host of compilations have been released over the decades, both on vinyl and CD. Most simply concentrate on the band’s best-known material. But there’s a few that go beyond, with the first, 1972’s budget-priced 68-71, rounding up several single-only sides that were already fetching high prices among collectors. Repeat Performance, later in the decade, amplified that same exercise; Time Vaults in 1984 scraped up various outtakes and doodles recorded during the group’s 1972-1975 hiatus, while the entire career was exquisitely profiled on the four-CD The Box in 2000. But still there were omissions, from these and every other set, beginning with that first VDGG single.

Neither “People You Were Going To” nor its flip, “Firebrand,” would ever appear on album, and it would be 1997 before they even made it onto CD. Neither did the band members mourn their unavailability; Hammill was most definitely not speaking as a collector when he warned, in 1995, that the single “is emphatically not worth the £250 it’s been reported to be going for.” 

As an artefact, it’s fascinating. But as a musical experience, it could be a different band — or, as a review in Melody Maker put it, “here is the group people say are going to replace the Beatles, Stones, BeeGees … at the top. Mind you, the person who told me that was an idiot.”

By the time “People You Were Going To” was recorded, Hammill and sometime bandmate/songwriting partner Chris Judge Smith had already signed with Mercury Records in London. It was a deal they quickly regretted, and manager Tony Stratton Smith was clearly spoiling for a fight when, rather than hand the completed single to Mercury, he instead leased it to the US-based Tetragrammaton label, who then handed it on to Polydor. 

The single was available for less than a week before Mercury’s lawyers forced its withdrawal — hence its scarcity today, and for all Hammill’s protestations, hence the sky-high price tag now attached to it.

The band recorded what would become its next single, “Afterwards”/ “Necromancer,” in January 1969. Before it could be released, however, the band had all its equipment stolen from outside a London club. Unable to replace it, the group broke up.

When Hammill re-entered the studio at the end of July, it was to record a solo album for Mercury. Erstwhile bandmates Hugh Banton (organ), Keith Ellis (bass) and Guy Evans (drums) accompanied him, however, and before the two-day session was over, the decision to reform VDGG had been made — at the same time as Stratton-Smith was negotiating with Mercury to release Hammill from his contract. A deal was struck that saw the completed album, The Aerosol Grey Machine, released as a VDGG album in the United States only; back in London, Stratton-Smith was signing the group to his own newly formed record label, Charisma. 

A simple story, then? Not at all; in fact, The Aerosol Grey Machine is the most challenging of all the band’s albums, at least for the collector.

Early pressings of the album featured a lengthy instrumental titled “Squid One,” only for it to be swiftly replaced by “Necromancer” — the B-side of the just-released “Afterwards” single. (Confusingly, both versions of the album exist as promo and stock copies.) Another much sought-after variant hails from Italy, where it was released on the legendary Vertigo “swirl” label, while completists are further bedevilled by the album’s CD history.

Unavailable on disc for a full decade after the rest of the VDGG catalog, The Aerosol Grey Machine finally materialized in the form of two competing versions. In March 1997, German label Repertoire released a version featuring both sides of the debut single as bonus tracks; two months later, Hammill’s Fie! appended the same LP with the outtake “Ferret and Featherbird” (a song he would return to on 1974’s In Camera solo album) and a restored “Squid One.”

VDGG’s career really had not got off to the most collector-friendly start! 

Back in London, the group was undergoing another lineup change, as bassist Nic Potter stepped in to replace Ellis, while saxophonist David Jackson was recruited to add extra flesh to the sound — and perhaps, to further alienate listeners who were already discomforted by the band’s apparent disregard for an electric guitar. 

Hammill played the instrument but did so rarely; the sound of VDGG, as the band rehearsed and then gigged through late 1969, was of heaving organ, honking sax and, above it all, a vocal that could swing from mad operatics to slasher-movie screams without even pausing for breath.

Sessions for the next album were completed across three days in December 1969; The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other was then released in February 1970, an epic album that stepped far from the earnest convolutions of its predecessor to present VDGG as a sonic behemoth, utterly unswayed by anything else that might have been going on in the musical marketplace of the era.

When critics and fans lumped them in with the then-prevalent underground prog movement, it was because there simply was nowhere else to place them. Especially as Stratton-Smith remained convinced that the group’s epic portrayals were just one lucky break away from pop superstardom.

He was not necessarily wrong, either. Edited down from the album version, the band’s next single, “Refugees”/ “The Boat Of Millions of Years,” remains one of the most moving songs in Hammill’s entire catalog and one of the loveliest singles of 1971; a decade and a half  later, “Strat” admitted that the failure of “Refugees” as a single was one of the greatest shocks of his entire musical career.

“There was no way it shouldn’t have been massive,” he said. “And if it had been, everything would have changed.” Unfortunately, it was not to be — although the band would enjoy its first and only U.K. hit album, as The Least We Can Do climbed to #47.

With Charisma today numbered among the most collectible U.K. labels of its era, competition for early pressings of VDGG’s albums is fierce. The label underwent two major changes of design during the band’s lifetime; just so you know, the original, rarest, U.K. pressings of The Least We Can Do have a pink label; later editions depict the company’s famous Mad Hatter logo, and these same variants hold true for the two albums that followed, H To He Who Am The Only One later in 1970, and Pawn Hearts in 1971. 

All three also received US releases — The Least We Can Do and H To He through the Dunhill label (the latter with a striking alternate sleeve), while Pawn Hearts appeared in early 1972 on Charisma’s newly launched American wing. The band’s masterpiece, the U.S. release jumped immediately to the attention of the band’s European fans through the inclusion of one track not featured on pressings elsewhere, the A-side of the band’s next single.

But even this triumphant pounding through the George Martin instrumental “Theme One” didn’t help the album in the marketplace. And, no matter how low key the band’s demise might have felt in the U.K., in America, the silence was deafening. When copies of any of the band’s albums appear at fairs today, they are almost inevitably cut-outs. That always says a lot for a group’s profile!

Van Der Graaf Generator broke up following the release of “Theme One,” but, of course, the story of these albums does not end there, as 2005 brought newly remastered versions of all three Charisma LPs, each appended with bonus tracks. 

The original CD releases, during the late 1980s, were adequate at best. Many are the fans who, having disposed of the original vinyl pressings, found themselves regretting it once the sonic imperfections of the CD transfers became apparent. The 2005 releases, however, were superlative, both in terms of the remastering and their content.

Both sides of the “Refugees” single bolstered The Least We Can Do, while H To He gained an early version of “The Emperor In His War Room” and a previously unissued studio version of the live leviathan “Squid One / Squid Two / Octopus,” recorded during the sessions for Pawn Hearts. And Pawn Hearts itself is a revelation.

With Nic Potter having now left the group, Pawn Hearts was originally conceived as a double, with all three remaining instrumentalists contributing a signature solo excursion: Guy Evans’ “Angle Of Incidence,” Hugh Banton’s “Diminutions” and two Jackson efforts, the brief “Ponker’s Theme,” and the more ambitious “Archimedes Agnostic.” The package would be completed by live-in-the-studio versions of the previous two albums’ “Darkness” and “Killer,” and the aforementioned “Squid One / Squid Two / Octopus” medley. But Charisma nixed the project, Pawn Hearts was released as a simple single disc, and it would be 34 years before the world got to hear what we’d lost.

In the event, only the shorter solo cuts made it onto the remastered CD, while the squids, of course, were grafted onto H To He. But with alternate versions of both “Theme One” and “W” added to the show, still the album that is already considered VDGG’s pièce de résistance could not help but blossom further than ever. If there was ever an album to say goodbye on, it was Pawn Hearts. Van Der Graaf Generator would be back, of course, to more than double their discography and give collectors a whole pile of new obscurities to search for. But it is these earliest years that hold the most starry-eyed fans in their thrall, and when you dive into the thick of it, you will quickly understand why. 


U.S. SINGLES
Mercury 72979 —
Afterwards / Necromancer 1969

U.K. SINGLES
Polydor 56758 —
People You Were Going To/Firebrand — 1968

Charisma CB 122 —
Refugees / The Boat of Millions of Years — 1970

Charisma CB 175 —
Theme One / W 1972

Charisma CD 297 —
Wondering/Meurglys III, The Songwriters Guild (excerpt) — 1976

Charisma 6837 345 (France) —
Masks pt 1/Masks pt 2 — 1976

Charisma 6837 441 (France) —
Cat’s Eye/Ship Of Fools — 1977

ALBUMS
Mercury SR 61238 —
The Aerosol Grey Machine — 1969

Probe-ABC CPLP 4515 —
The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other — 1970

ABC/Dunhill DS 50097 —
H To He Who Am The Only One — 1970

Charisma CAS 1051 —
Pawn Hearts — 1972

Mercury 1069 —
Godbluff — 1975

Mercury 1096 —
Still Life — 1976

Mercury 1116 —
World Record — 1976

Charisma CAS 1131 (UK) —
The Quiet Zone / The Pleasure Dome — 1977

PVC 9901 —
Vital / Van der Graaf Live — 1978

Charisma 73676 —
 Present — 2005

Fie FIXD 01 —
Real Time / Royal Festival Hall — 2007

Virgin 103001 —
Trisector — 2008