Jul 28, 2025
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Peter Hammill by Anton Corbijn, 1981
Peter Hammill - Ophelia (1983)
You're treading water, the price is steep, you say you'll cope with it all; you've made some promises you can't keep, you throw yourself against the wall, you throw yourself against the wall. And it's strange...
Sitting Targets
As an early PH/VdGG fan, I had skipped over a lot of the early 80s material. It was the organs and saxes and the curious additions they made to a expansive songwriters palette that made me interested, and I dismissed this album and the subsequent K-group albums as a possible attempt to get more mainstream. Consider it a youthful mistake, as from what I've heard, a few sappy ballads aside, PH just simply doesn't DO mainstream. PH does PH no matter the format, and although it took me some years to appreciate this fact, I've come around to albums like Sitting Targets and subsequent ones from what has come to be known as the K-Group era. In the liner notes, PH describes aiming for greater simplicity, especially after A Black Box, which had intricacy and imprecision in equal measure. Despite that, this record is still quite deep - a somewhat shallower production that helps to frame the album as something more resembling a "band record," with more recognizable instrumental sounds among the layers (a nice clean rhythm guitar sound throughout), but still many layers of sounds involved in the final creation, PH's insight at overdubbing serving him well here. There's a nice emphasis on a clean and audible rhythm guitar track (as well as some nice elastic bass guitar riffs) that expand on the the proto-New Wave feel of The Quiet Zone/The Pleasure Dome, both of which seem to center the album in a nice way.
There are a handful of tunes that, despite the stated goal, fit nicely into the "weird solo" aesthetic of the previous few albums, although still observe the "simplicity" aesthetic set for the album. "Empress's Clothes" and "Glue" both feature some truly minimal productions that find overdrive somewhere toward the end. Both are built around syncopated beatbox use; in the former, some extra percussion contributions from Morris Pert as well as some winding sax overdubs from David Jackson that are used to great effect. One moment in the middle of the tune featuring Hammill singing a melody and Jaxon playing it an octave above is a pretty chilling texture, as brief as it is within the song. Glue is a bit more abstract but holds together until the end, where someone starts messing with the guitar delay, which is completely reminiscent of some of the more brooding moments on A Black Box, "Fogwalking" coming to mind. "Ophelia" is one of the tunes that has become a foundation of PH's live sets. I have to say that I'm not especially fond of the tune when played live, but here it is a nice and brief flirtation with mainstream pop, albeit with the somewhat weird and sardonic synth lines of Phil Harrison that add a twist to the nostalgia of the lyrics. "What I Did" is built around some off-kilter, backward masked percussion, some sharp-toned electric guitar and various sax honking, a somewhat abrasive sound but entirely in service of a nice harmonic structure.
A few of the tunes seem to be more built around the expectation of being performed live, where each sound seems to be framed in the context of "guitars/bass/drums" for eventual adaptation by a group. The way PH recounts it in the liner notes, the K-Group sprang up rather organically out of this session, so I doubt PH imagined a rock quartet for himself while recording these tunes - yet they all have a similar thread for this reason. "My Experience" is a wonderful and concise statement, built out of a weirdly syncopated yet driving drum rhythm with a serpentine bass line weaving around, and a strangely uplifting synth-drenched chorus. (When I think of showing PH to the uninitiated, this is one of the tunes I reach for, providing demonstration of his pure songwriting and lyrical ability, some of his quirks of rhythm and production, the random extra beats at the end of certain measures, etc.) This was apparently a single from the album, and deservedly so, although I've got no idea how well it performed. "Hesitation" seems a fairly straightforward rocker, almost harkening back to the days of Nadir. I don't find this an especially interesting tune - the piano and sax suggest some kind of Bowie-filtered view of 50's rock, but after getting out of the intro, the tune sits a little too comfortably, relying a little too heavily on the noodling of David Jackson and fading out shortly thereafter. "Sitting Targets," the title track, is to me one of the most successful tracks on the album - a solid rhythm section of bass and drums with some nice delayed rhythm guitar underneath. The 6/8 feel gives the tune some real momentum, and by the time it has deconstructed and rebuilt itself around the 3 minute mark, and begins to feature the additional percussion of Morris Pert on top of the kit work by Guy Evans, the song has incredible motion and really comes screaming into the finish line, so to speak. "Sign" is a tune I feel I should like, a slow, off-kilter drum performance anchoring a simple guitar and vocal rhythmic motif that finds its way into every portion of the song. I think this song hits my limit for repetition, despite some of the more obvious points of repetition elsewhere on the album ("Stranger Still" and "What I Did" come to mind.) Central Hotel is another tune that I definitely prefer the studio version to most live versions I've heard. The drum (with delayed snare) and sustained chord in guitar is reminiscent of the intro of "Golden Promises" from A Black Box but becomes its own, extremely hard hitting tune from there. I feel as though the live version on Typical comes close, but it's a tune that demands at least overdrive if not a heavy rhythm section - even the sharp tone PH gets from his acoustic doesn't quite do enough to convey the gut-punch of the tune appropriately, even though it's admirable that he still does it this way.
Two exemplary tunes on the album are the opener "Breakthrough," a brooding opener with some real energy to it but quirks in equal measure, and "Stranger Still," another tune that has become a live staple, albeit in a much different interpretation than the studio version. "Breakthrough" works with brooding piano and bass guitar interplay in the beginning, picking up a slightly behind-the-beat vocal that is joined first by beatbox and later some driving percussion by Guy Evans. Returning to the opening motif, there's some nice call and response between synths and guitars. There is a nice looseness to the drums here that feels really alienating against the disaffected voice PH uses here. The tune has a simple structure but uses it so well instead of cloning each section, and I appreciate the vocal canon at the end. "Stranger Still" is known in live performances for PH's near-screaming of the final "A Stranger, A Worldly Man" at the end, but in the studio version the end is a slow fadeout of some chant-like vocal layering, one set of voices repeating "en-tro-py" slowly and another the "a stranger, a worldly man" at a reasonable volume, with additional powerful vocal interjections thrown in irregularly for good measure. After building from the ballad-like beginnings into a lush backing of orchestral synths and choral backing voices, the tune reaches a brief brooding section that contains a concise back-masked guitar solo before returning to the beginning of the form. The second time through, the brooding final section grows into the aforementioned vocal experiment, which is one of the more enjoyable purely avant-garde moments in PH's recorded career to my ears.
So of course, until subsequent touring and the recording of Enter K, the identity of the "K Group" wasn't really complete. But the tunes on this record provide a good idea of how that group would sound, drawing on the previous most-rock-oriented lineup PH had been involved with, i.e. Van der Graaf, and adding in all the lessons from subsequent albums. When the album is boring, it isn't bad - the craft and mix both are good enough throughout that there are things to enjoy about each piece, even if some are clearly superior to others. What stands out is what PH calls in the liner notes an attempt to make a "band/not band" record. This gives a unifying feel to the whole album, allowing stranger "solo" pieces and ballads to stand alongside full band tunes without feeling discontinuous. This certainly works better here than, say, This, which attempts the same thing with members of the PH Quartet but manages a fairly disjointed feel from song to song, never feeling as though it has an album-identity of its own.
(When I use the term "solo" in quotes to describe a certain class of PH tunes, what I'm referring to is the type of palette he uses on on all-solo recordings like the great majority of In Camera - usually multiple layers of guitars or keyboards, perhaps some percussion or a beat-box, lots of weird studio trickery and many layers of vocals. I would contrast this "solo" approach with tunes that seem more "live" i.e. a discernible core of rhythm guitar or piano/keyboard, and perhaps one or two other layers, and of course "band" tunes which are obvious for their more rock-band construction, whether or not they have the participation of other musicians. Similarly, I would consider the tunes I label "solo" to include songs with contributions, especially by Jaxon and Graham Smith or Stuart Gordon, but used in an architectural manner as I would consider common to the truly solo recordings. Let me know if this distinction is confusing - I've been trying to come up with a good way of differentiating and naming the various approaches PH uses as a songwriter and arranger.)
