Some of rock’s finest science fiction was written by Peter Hammill for the band Van Der Graaf Generator. There’s not much of it, but it is all fascinating.
What’s the best ever science fiction pop or rock song? My vote’s for ‘Five Moons’ on the Ian Gillan Band album Clear Air Turbulence (1977), and not just because of that gorgeous Chris Foss cover. The song takes an old SF trope — that having wrecked our own world, we will then set off into space to wreck whatever new worlds we colonize — only to twist the ending to suggest there is still hope for us here and now.
It’s a song that feels more desperate with every passing year. (See my post Our ship is sinking for just how real it has become.) Moreover, the song is beautiful, steeped in feeling, and Gillan sings it like he means every word.
There is actually a lot of science fiction in pop and rock. The majority of it is awful when considered as literature, in other words as ideas that would stand up to scrutiny to an SF audience. In these terms even celebrated songs like David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ are not much more sophisticated than ‘I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper,’ whatever the quality of the music.
Classic rock’s SF standard-bearers were Hawkwind who, having worked with Michael Moorcock to their mutual benefit, differentiated themselves by a couple of albums in the late 1970s that set well-known science fiction novels to music.
On Quark, Strangeness And Charm (1977) the band adapted Roger Zelazny’s Damnation Alley and Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream. The piecemeal PXR5 (1979) tackled another Zelazny novel Jack Of Shadows (my favorite Hawkwind track, incidentally, and one I once got Tommy Vance to play on The Friday Rock Show), as well as including an entire side inspired by SF: the Isaac Asimov robot stories, J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise, and Edmund Cooper’s Seed Of Light.
Hawkwind could also be surprisingly literate. The hit single ‘Silver Machine’ is actually merely a description of singer Robert Calvert’s bicycle, but this in turn had been inspired by Alfred Jarry’s ‘How To Construct A Time Machine,’ which Calvert probably read in Moorcock’s 1968 anthology The Traps Of Time.
Hawkwind’s version of the Moorcock performance piece ‘Sonic Attack’ (on 1973’s Space Ritual) is included in my book The Smart Core Manifesto as one of a mere handful of notable pop and rock examples of the genre.
Also included, and head and shoulders above anything else attempted in music, is the track ‘Pioneers Over c’ on the third Van Der Graaf Generator album H To He, Who Am The Only One, released in 1970.
The three key “first generation” LPs by the classic Van Der Graaf Generator line-up (songwriter Peter Hammill on vocals and piano, Hugh Banton on organ, Guy Evans on drums, and David Jackson on saxophone and flute, with Nic Potter on bass for the first album-and-a-half) all have covers that suggest science fiction, even though the third of them (1971’s Pawn Hearts) contains no SF at all.
On the first, The Least We Can Do Is Wave To Each Other (1970), the band is shown floating on a raft on the waterlogged world of ‘After The Flood,’ Hammill’s first attempt at writing a science fiction lyric. It’s an old and not particularly convincing scenario: our nuclear bombs have thrown the Earth off its axis. The ice caps melt, flooding the planet and killing all human life. Later the planet’s spin stabilizes again, the caps refreeze, but humanity is gone.
The track’s melodramatics, and Hammill’s distorted-voice recitation of a quote from Albert Einstein, lift it to one of progressive rock’s earliest curios, though the concept of the piece owes much to the track ‘The Open Ground’ on the Pussy album Pussy Plays the previous year, which gleefully described the Earth’s ignominious demise.
H To He, Who Am The Only One signaled something extraordinary was happening with its title alone. Rock’n’roll, still at this point largely the province of teenagers, was suddenly confronted with a geek’s album, a sprawlingly awkward reference to solar nuclear fusion. The front cover, reproduced above, suggested that mankind, moving into space, had already left behind the morality of home. The scales of justice do not swing in weightlessness.
Incidentally, look closely and you’ll notice that the scales are figuratively supported by a pole leading down to London, where the band was based, as if to suggest that Van Der Graaf Generator, on this album, is weighing up humanity’s fitness to survive. (A cosmic eye at the pivot of the scale suggests the scrutiny works both ways.) Actually, it was Pawn Hearts that would weigh up humanity, and to alarming effect.
The way artist Paul Whitehead drew the cover, the pans of the scales, and their free-floating wires, strongly suggest a pair of testes. Whitehead’s humanity is a naked, liberated man pouring his seed into the universe.
The inner spread of the gatefold is more obviously indebted to the album’s one science fiction song, ‘Pioneers Over c.’ It shows a pair of giant hands literally about to grasp or manipulate a spiral galaxy. “We left the Earth in 1983,” Hammill sings in the song’s first line, “fingers groping for the galaxies.”
In the song, mankind attempts the first ever faster-than-light flight, only for it to all go horribly wrong. The crew is flung into a state of “living death, living anti-matter, anti-breath.” Even though I included this in The Smart Core Manifesto, the suspicion is that they have become unhinged from time itself, and now exist in a limbo not just of space but of time. “We are the ones they’re going to build a statue for ten centuries ago,” Hammill sings, “or were going to fifteen forward.”
In his book of short stories, poems, and lyrics Killers, Angels, Refugees Hammill noted that the song describes how “the first hypernauts are, because of theoretical deficiencies, thrown into time-warp or absolute relativity, in which they exist as ‘creatures’ of limitless imagination but total non-physicality. They are thus potentially ghouls, ghosties, poltergeists and all manner of indefinable Forces.” In other words it is this scientific experiment, cascading backwards through human history, that is the origin for all unaccountable phenomena, including god itself.
That’s a neat and heady concept. But even in his purest SF, Hammill’s focus was always on humanity. The song is actually about how it feels to be disassociated so thoroughly from normal human interaction. As the crew members disperse throughout space and time, they lose contact with each other, and with themselves.
To evoke this, the track, over its near-13-minute running time, descends into long stretches of immobility spiked with sudden squeals of sonic horror. It’s easy, on the surface, to accuse ‘Pioneers Over c’ of being aimless, boring, and unpleasant. Yes, and those are exactly the emotions it is trying to express.
Only two of Hammill’s published short stories are science fiction. One of them, ‘The Black Hole,’ has much the same premise and feel as ‘Pioneers Over c.’ It is a missive from an omnipotent cosmic entity, once human, “strung across the yawning interstices of existence” by an act of betrayal. “The anti-matter, in its totality,” Hammill writes, “is also anti-mind, anti-soul, anti-brain, anti-spirit.” The story ends with the entity about to exact an ultimate revenge not just on our species, but on the entire universe.
That first generation Van Der Graaf Generator collapsed in 1972. In his subsequent solo career, Hammill revisited science fiction just once, for the song ‘Red Shift’ on The Silent Corner And The Empty Stage (1974). You can read a little more about this track in my post Spirit of xenophobia, in which I trace the events that led to guitarist Randy California’s 1977 album Future Games. Hammill notes that the words itself are early, possibly dating from 1968. There is nothing else in these works comparable: for the most part, Hammill’s concerns were (and continue to be) human relationships.
The following year Van Der Graaf Generator reformed, and Hammill somehow treated us not just to one new science fiction epic but two, between them filling approximately half of the 1976 album Still Life. Both may well have been influenced by Arthur C. Clarke, though this is far from definite.
In the album’s title track, Hammill explores a different kind of dissociation, one caused by immortality. I would claim The City And The Stars as an influence, if only since the city of Diaspar is evoked by the opening line: “Citadel reverberates to a thousand voices, now dumb.” Like ‘Pioneers Over c,’ our immortal descendants subsist in a state of constant “boredom and inertia,” though to be fair Van Der Graaf Generator’s music in this second generation was purposefully less experimental than in the first: ‘Still Life’ is much easier to listen to.
The other epic may well be Hammill’s finest ever song. (I tend to favor ‘La Rossa’ from the same LP, which is a raging torrent of youthful testosterone.) Clarke is certainly evoked by the title, ‘Childlike Faith In Childhood’s End.’ My suspicion is that Hammill extended the title from the last two words both to avoid a copyright claim from Clarke, and to separate his work from Pink Floyd’s song ‘Childhood’s End’ on the 1972 soundtrack LP Obscured By Clouds. (It’s worth noting that David Gilmour’s words in the latter had nothing at all to do with science fiction: it’s a song about growing up.)
‘Childlike Faith In Childhood’s End’ is a lengthy, fiercely reasoned argument about human progress not just to the stars, but to new means of life itself. Few lyricists, not even Tommy Hall of Easter Everywhere, would dare swerve so precipitously from Shakespeare to eastern philosophy in its opening lines: “Existence is a stage on which we pass/a sleepwalk trick for mind and heart.”
Here are the protagonists of ‘Still Life’ before they have discovered immortality, groping not just for the galaxies but for their own meaning. The emptiness of ‘Pioneers Over c’ is evoked again: “As anti-matter sucks and pulses periodically/the bud unfolds, the bloom is dead, all space is living history.”
The song’s yearning for the future seems to me to rely less on Clarke than on a mythological striving for transcendence that is much more in fitting with Hammill’s preoccupations evident since the earliest Van Der Graaf Generator songs (‘The Boat Of Millions Of Years,’ for example). Here is the way he describes the present day human desperate for more: “Though the towers of the city are denied to we men of clay/still we know we shall scale the heights some day/frightened in the silence/frightened but thinking very hard.” I suspect Hammill is evoking Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books rather than anything in the smart core canon.
Van Der Graaf Generator imploded again in 1977, leaving behind one final science fiction song from the golden age, ‘Sci-Finance’ on the live album Vital, which is a sour diatribe on the future of commerce. “Clever money-computers chatter privately,” Hammill suggests, “no people any more.”
His last SF song of all in this period is smuggled on his solo album pH7, released in 1979. The suite ‘Mr. X (Gets Tense)’ and ‘Faculty X’ bring us full circle to ‘After The Flood,’ describing how meddling scientists (perhaps those in the UK’s chemical research bunker at Porton Down) precipitate the end of the world “under ice/under fire.” The ice here is cryogenic suspension, and the fire the torch of our own conscience — our cosmic scales, floating aimlessly in space.
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