Van der Graaf Generator - Pawn Hearts
On November 12, 1971, "Pawn Hearts", the fourth studio album by the band "Van der Graaf Generator", was released.
In the summer of 1971, "Van der Graaf Generator" was at a rare creative boiling point. After two seminal albums released in 1970 on Charisma Records, "The Least We Can Do Is Wave to Each Other" and "H to He, Who Am the Only One", the band had formed around an unstoppable musical quartet that included vocalist, songwriter and pianist Peter Hammill, Hammond organ and bass pedal wizard Hugh Banton, double saxophonist and flutist David Jackson and virtuoso drummer Guy Evans. The complete abandonment of a permanent lead guitarist or bassist gave the band a unique sound in the British progressive rock landscape, a turbulent combination of expressionist theatricality, free jazz, modern classical music and raw power that threatened to erupt at any moment.
The seeds for "Pawn Hearts" were sown during a grueling and intense tour of Germany in the spring of 1971. On the long road trips and in hotel rooms, Hammill began to sketch the outlines of new songs dealing with existential loneliness, the inner struggle between good and evil, and the human loss of control. Upon their return to England, Hammill invited the band's regular producer, John Anthony, to his home and played the new sketches to him alone on acoustic guitar and piano, while Anthony took meticulous production notes in preparation for entering the studio.
(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
To formulate the complex material away from the hustle and bustle of the city, the band's manager and label founder, Tony Stratton-Smith, made his country estate, Luxford House, in Crowborough, Sussex, available to the quartet. For two whole months, the band members secluded themselves in the estate, playing long hours every day and dissecting and reworking every musical idea. On tour, the band invented a wild ball game known as Crowborough Tennis. Keith Morris took the posed infrared photograph used on the inside cover.
Between July and September 1971, the band entered the legendary Trident Studios in London with producer Anthony and a team of elite sound engineers including Robin Cable, Ken Scott and David Hentschel. The band's ambition was so great that the original plan was to release a double album, with one disc dedicated to the band's three new compositions and the second disc featuring experimental solo tracks by the band members alongside studio-recorded versions of excerpts from their warm-up shows, including the stormy arrangement of George Martin's instrumental "Theme One" and the song "W". The record company vetoed the idea for financial reasons and decided to release a single album of only three tracks, but the American and Canadian editions of the record included "Theme One" as a short track separating the two parts of the first side.
The album opens with the piece "Lemmings", which also includes the section "Cog", and stretches over nearly twelve minutes of relentless rhythmic tension. The song was born from the image of lemmings marching to the cliff of suicide as a parable for humanity racing blindly towards its technological and moral destruction. Hammill's thoughtful acoustic opening is quickly interrupted by the sharp saxophone whistles of Jackson, who plays alto and tenor saxophone simultaneously, and stormy asymmetrical drumming by Evans. In the section "Cog", the music becomes a creaking and dense industrial machine, in which Banton's distorted Hammond organ simulates heavy gears crushing the individual, but in the end Hammill leaves a thin sliver of human resistance in his refusal to jump into the abyss.
The second track, "Man-Erg", is one of the most moving melodic and philosophical peaks that Hammill has ever written. The ten-minute piece explores the extreme duality of the human soul, torn between angels and murderers residing within the same body. The song opens with a gentle, warm, and almost heavenly piano and organ ballad, in which Hammill's voice is more caressing and vulnerable than ever, but suddenly the tranquility crashes into an aggressive and crushing riff in an odd meter of 11. Banton's Hammond organ and Jackson's saxophones rage in an apocalyptic storm that represents the inner destructive instinct, before the song returns to its quiet opening, this time accompanied by vocal layers and majestic keyboard playing that complements the dual existence of man.
The entire second side of the original record, over twenty-three minutes long, is dedicated to the monumental masterpiece "A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers", a suite of ten consecutive movements co-written by all four members of the band. Initially, Banton resisted including the long piece on the album, fearing that it would be too complex and gloomy for the audience compared to more accessible songs like "Killer" from the previous album, but after a band meeting, he agreed to rehearse it and worked out an arrangement, becoming its main sound architect. The plot tells the psychological story of a lonely lighthouse keeper at the edge of the world, who watches helplessly as ships crash onto the rocks and people drown in the stormy sea below him, until feelings of guilt and isolation drive him to the brink of madness.
The suite was recorded at Trident Studios in separate sections that were stitched together with bold, groundbreaking tape editing. Throughout its ten sections, from the chilling opening of Eyewitness through Pictures/Lighthouse, Presence of the Night and the free-flowing chaos of The Clot Thickens, the band and engineer Cable used every recording medium available in the studio, from reversing tape, loops, Mellotrons and early synthesizers, to recording drums and pianos through organ effects units. A brief part of "Presence of the Night" features guitarist Robert Fripp from the band "King Crimson", who returned to collaborate with the band after his guest appearance on the previous album, contributing a brief electric guitar passage. The suite has an open ending, which leaves the listener wondering whether the lighthouse keeper jumped to his death or finally found peace of mind.
The album's name was born as a humorous slip of the tongue, a spoonerism, coined by Jackson in the studio when he meant to say he would overdub some "horn parts", and accidentally switched the letters to "Pawn Hearts". The album's iconic gatefold cover was created by the surrealist artist Paul Whitehead, who also designed the masterpiece covers for "Genesis" from that period, including "Trespass", "Nursery Cryme" and "Foxtrot". Whitehead painted historical figures enclosed in transparent pawn pieces floating above the Earth, with a giant curtain, as a metaphor for the fact that all humans, from counts and kings to commoners, are but small pawns in the great game of life.
Upon its release in November 1971, the album struggled to break into the charts in Britain due to its somber and uncompromising nature, but in Italy a veritable cultural miracle occurred. The Italian audience embraced the band's dramatic theatricality and emotional depth with unprecedented enthusiasm, and the album enjoyed notable success: books report a number-one placing in Italy, while the Musica e Dischi chart records a peak of number 12. This tremendous success led to historic tours in Italy in which the band members were welcomed as cultural heroes and were forced to perform under heavy police security, which led to the band's exhaustion and temporary disbandment in the summer of 1972, but established "Pawn Hearts" as one of the most daring, original and influential works in the history of global progressive rock.
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