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excuse the mess in the background, but please remind me to start painting him today...I'm planning to finally use my oil paints...

#robert fripp #bob fripp #frippy #king crimson #i know he's a bit up but i don't want to start again on the sketch

Robert Fripp

#king crimson robert fripp #british glasses man #discipline #the #bob fripp

Fool’s Mate

(Note: this entry is enabled by the recent purchase of an LP copy of Fool’s Mate which replaces the very beat-up Caroline CD I purchased second hand about 10 years ago. Even though my stereo is not great, the format demands more focus from me, and I think enabled me to dig into this entry in a different way than with previous albums…the same purchase netted me a copy of “H to He” which may result in me expanding the blog to talk about VdGG for the first time. Onward!)

Context is important, and the context of Fool’s Mate in the discography is particularly intriguing given the time in which it was recorded - in the thick of a busy period for Van der Graaf Generator Mark I. This is remarkable given that the songs can be divided pretty evenly between songs that feel like novelties in the catalog, and songs, like the ones that have become live staples, that feel like the beginning of a line that can be drawn through Hammill’s career.

And it’s true that there are some truly iconic PH songs on this record. Vision is the no-brainer here, a song that has been represented live in a majority of Hammill’s tours as a solo artist, and deservedly so. Having gotten so used to an older PH singing this tune a little more gently, it’s a nice surprise to hear the sweet and earnest voice of the young artist on this recording. Solitude hints at the brooding qualities of both songwriting and mix that we would see throughout his early albums, vaguely metaphysical lyrics against a gentle groove, with a disarmingly optimistic harmonica woven throughout. Although Re-Awakening feels a bit like the writing on A Grounding In Numbers, the serpentine rhythms and effortless interplay of the tune are definitely representative of the sound of Van Der Graaf Generator of that era (evidence as provided by the recent After the Flood collection of early BBC recordings). I Once Wrote some Poems foreshadows the more intimate style of subsequent albums, a single guitar track and a lead vocal full of emotional and musical acrobatics.

But then there’s showy theatrical tunes like Sunshine, a peppy number that feels tongue in cheek as a result of its musical setting. The mood is subverted toward the end by the slightly demented chorus of “la’s” and the lengthy instrumental fade out, but by then the audience has a clear sense that Hammill can write (and has fun performing) a song in a more conventional style. Imperial Zeppelin has a similar energy, but is less ambiguous about its sense of humor, given the “Zep-pe-lin” chant at the end. The flute and organ interplay in Happy seems to predict the more developed instrumental textures of Lost or Childlike Faith in Childhood’s End, but filtered through a much more baroque lens, a curious choice for a lyric seeming to convey insecurities about a relationship.

Really the album is a classic “young songwriter” album - the love songs are full of observations that toe the line of precociousness, the high-concept lyrics are variously successful in their narrative and functional capacities, and the more abstract musings are rendered with skillful phrasing and delivery. The range here is enabled by the cast of session musicians - some familiar, like collaborators in Van der Graaf Generator Nic Potter, Guy Evans, Hugh Banton and David Jackson, an appearance by Robert Fripp, and several members of Lindisfarne. Multiple bass and drum credits explain some of the album’s restlessness, but the subtle pushes from other collaborators brings certain songs into a different territory. The mandolin flourishes on Candle steers the tune more firmly into folk-rock territory than at any other point in Hammill’s career that I can recall, while the more ambitious instrumental interlude to The Birds unleashes some of the more uneasy energy build throughout, but never rising much in tempo or volume.

As a modern listener, it is hard to imagine what these tunes must have sounded like to fresh ears. Looking back, they feel like some of the most conventional “songwriter” tunes of Hammill’s, lyrics rendered with fine poetry but none of the more ambitious narratives or thematic attempts of later Hammill. Even compared to Clutch, the more self-conscious attempt at making an ‘acoustic songwriter’ album, this collection of tunes stands out in the discography. The use of session players, rather than collaborators, has something to do with this - Fool’s Mate may have a similar structure of other solo albums in terms of alternating stormy existentialism with more straightforward emotion, but the fact that the band is changing from tune to tune disrupts the continuity of the album a bit. Hammill uses his collaborators well - particularly interesting to hear a familiar lick or two from Fripp in a pretty un-affected guitar tone, but it doesn’t feel quite like they have the chance to dig in, say, the way the quartet did, or the way PH did in tours with Jaxon, Smith, Gordon, or Ellis. We hear an artist making the most of what he has, given the rigorous scheduling of labels, engineers, and session players, and that is decidedly different, for better or worse, from the more labored, directed efforts of PH’s subsequent recording career.

My backward-looking view aside, I can’t imagine what a listener might have thought if they were coming to this record from Van Der Graaf Generator material. Sure, some of the players are the same, and the towering organ drone that bookends the album feels appropriately foreboding given the context of the work of VdGG MKI, but the album does feel as though it hails from a different sound world than the rest of Hammill’s work with the possible exception of the more straightforward tunes from The Aerosol Grey Machine - feeling much more like an album of its era, regardless of the quality of the songwriting and arranging. But this is obviously an album of considerable merit despite being something of a novelty in the catalog - it’s just that, in an alternate universe, this would be a point of divergence for PH’s career, full of threads that could have brought us to a much different Hammill than the one we know and love today.

#Peter Hammill #Fool's Mate #PH:THE CATALOGUE #Bob Fripp #Charisma Records