Being overloaded
with various tasks and due to certain circumstances, I missed the right moment
when I could illuminate the process of completing the work on my tribute album,
on which I've been talking for two years. Editing and mixing multi-channel raw
material into the final stereo version and applying sound effects, mastering, getting
and preparing the necessary paperwork, disc duplicating, developing and printing
the artworks – all these important processes were mapped onto two and a half
months which have passed since my last publication here in my Journal. It would
now be very difficult to me to bring together the expressions from all those
time-consuming yet necessary steps, but I will try to finish this essay having
left some memories on these pages.
In retrospect, I
realize that the title of the album – “Something Deep Inside Me” (a line from one
of the songs from Peter Hammill’s first solo album “Fool's Mate” (1971) - I
Once Wrote Some Poems, which has been included into my album) – suits it the
best. It really contains something that lies somewhere deep inside me (most
likely, it was always there). People mentioned on the pages of the booklet also
live deep inside me, even if they are not with us already. The songs played,
sung and recorded on the disc also came out of the depths to which they were
immersing during long years of listening, thinking, performing, and, of course,
reliving. Even the artwork design – every part of it! - carries some embedded meaning.
By the way, the
design. I really wanted to create a product that would be a pleasure to hold in
one’s hands, to open, to read, to look at, and even to unpack. I was well
prepared for hearing statements such as "who buys (listens to, collects,
etc.) CDs today?" and "Better tell me where can I download the album
from?".... Nowhere, unless someone rips it and shares over the net. But in
the downloaded files you will not get all of the particles that "are deep inside
me" and which constitute my work. Therefore, if you are interested in the
album in its full sense, I would recommend to buy the original. You would spend
on it some five hundred times less than I did, and you will get 73 minutes and
59 seconds of music, cardboard gatefold cover, one wing of which holds the disc
placed in the inner cover with a commemorative photograph (taken during the
last hour before my trip to Madrid concert by Peter Hammill in December 2015)
and information about the albums on which the submitted songs were published
for the first time, and in the other you will find a 12-page booklet with colour
photographs of musicians and brief information about them, with introductory
essay and notes on each of the fifteen songs represented on the album. "Didn’t
you invest too much in the design?", I was recently asked. No, not too
much – well enough to proudly offer the diligent work of seven people, done during
the last two years. The front cover picture is a slightly modified photograph
taken by me in London in 2013. I wanted to capture myself reflected in the
window of a passing London red bus, which I finally did not far from Wood Green
Tube Station. Trying to find a way to give a hint on “who is the author of the songs”
at a first glance at the cover, I replaced the transport logo with the Hammill monogram
(of course, with his personal approval). On the back side – those five of us
who were in town at the time of the photo session, selflessly conducted by a
professional photographer Lilianna Hakhverdyan, with the Northern Avenue recently
erected in the heart of my city in the background. On the inside gatefold –
London as viewed from the heights of Alexandra Palace. I used a photo taken my
eldest daughter for the first page of the booklet, and on the last page I put one
of the photographs taken after the Van der Graaf Generator London concert in
2013. If my memory serves me well, the shutter button of my camera was pressed
by a beautiful Brazilian female fan… or was that someone from the band or the crew?
Each of the
songs carries something that prompted me to include it on the album. I am not going
to repeat what is already written in the booklet, but rather refer to the
subject discussed on the pages of my Journal earlier: Tribute. How has my
Tribute been expressed?
In one of the 1994
interviews Peter Hammill was asked about his attitude towards tributes. Having
said that he personally had nothing against it, he presented his personal understanding
of "tribute version" and "cover version" concepts. According
to it, when one is playing a song in its canonical form to which the listeners
are used to, we deal with tribute versions. When doing a cover version, the
performer “should mess around with the song and make it sound completely
different”, i.e. the song should be performed in an unusual manner for the listener,
"reworked" in the good sense of the word, reinvented, reinterpreted, relived.
In other words, cover versions should contain the personality of the artist.
Following this formula, my album contains both tribute and cover versions, therefore
I decided to use the encompassing «homage» for the subtitle.
The first
category can be represented by Afterwards, Celebrity Kissing, I Once Wrote Some
Poems, Nadir's Big Chance, Happy, Easy to Slip Away, Sitting Targets and The
Future Now. They all repeat their original structures and the manner of performance.
However, each of them contains something that makes it "new".
In the
instrumental part of Afterwards, only the first phrase of the 1969 original piano
solo was borrowed, after which the baton is being handed to my electric guitar,
Sat Sargsyan’s flute and Rima Mirzoyan’s violin – two charming
"classical" musicians and good friends of mine. Celebrity Kissing demonstrates
a dialogue between two solo guitars, one of them performed by the main drummer
on the album – Ashot Korganyan. I Once Wrote Some Poems is presented here with
minimalist acoustic ending, transforming into Nadir's Big Chance with loose
'home' vocal. Happy is introduced by a brief theatrical either introduction or
rehearsal, and Easy to Slip Away and Sitting Targets combine elements borrowed
from different versions performed during several decades. In addition to this, The
Future Now has a small but important time shift.
The songs from the
second category deserve more detailed coverage, but again I will hold to a
concise form, as much as this will be possible.
My version of
The Boat of Millions of Years includes all three verses written by Hammill at the
time, but only performed live during the early concerts. The official studio
version contains only two of them. Pictures formed by the characters from the Ancient
Egypt mythology were being drawn in my mind by some divine voice, soft and
powerful at the same time, sounding everywhere and making it impossible to find
its source. However fantastical it might sound, Leslie Diaz had brilliantly played
this role through just a few takes. Much more had to be done in perception and further
implementation of the role of the rhythm section. You say East – OK, let’s do
East, so the drum set was replaced with congas, tambourines, toms and cajon, all
played by Levon Hakhverdyan, and gong completed the culmination. You say Egypt –
OK, let’s do Egypt, so a talented singer, composer, sound designer (and many more)
Aidin Davoudi sang in a geographically correct (not the one that we thought of
as an appropriate) oriental singing manner, and provided “martial respiration“.
Too Many of My
Yesterdays – my debut as a director. I’m not sure how to call the resulting
piece – audio film, sound play, song theatre… The song that is known for thirty
years already as one of the Hammill’s classics, has been taken by me out on the
stage, where the protagonist whose life was broken once but who hasn’t lost
himself finds himself in a telephone booth hoping to reach the woman occupying
an important place in his life. In the original – voice and piano, in the cover
– voice and bass (or rather a few basses). As you can see, the original concept
of "one voice, one instrument, one pass of one pair of hands on the
instrument" has been affected slightly, while the form has undergone
almost total change. Some musical passages are tightly coupled with sonic
patterns of everyday life, the play has its beginning and end. "You're a
good director, Mik!", Leslie Diaz told me after the recording. "The recording
hour was fantastic, Les!", I say right now. Thanks again!
The Birds is easily
played alone, so I did play it quite often before Levon Hakhverdyan said:
"Record is on!" But when the piano part was ready for the initially planned
canonical version, I asked to keep on the recording, and started playing this
wonderful song as I heard it in my head and how my fingers wanted it to be
played. And of course – the birds had to be there. Maybe the resulting song is
similar to the original, but the testimonials made by those who heard it give
me reason to leave it in this category.
Necromancer can
also be called a cover because of its theatricality, the materialization of the
image of the White Magician fighting against evil, and, in a way, due to the
electrification of the sound produced by a few electric guitars and the metal of
bass.
Changing of the
underlying instrument has been used for creation of my version of The Top of
the World Club. Interestingly, when I analyzed the chords of the song, it
turned out to be more convenient for me to do it on guitar rather than piano. At
some point during the process of creation the international project "All
of Us Pilgrims" (double album, produced by members of a Facebook group ‘Top
of the World Club’ – I regularly mentioned that project in my publications) I
thought it would be nice to offer a version of the song which could be a kind
of a symbol of the group. Somehow I wanted to have the accompaniment of only
one guitar. But I am not a good guitarist, and if something should be done it must
be done conscientiously. So the idea of a studio version was eventually
implemented, but with total exclusion of piano and replacing it with sounds of different
guitars and very low synthesizer low-ends.
Finally,
Tintagel by the Sea – a song written in 1979 for Play Away children's programme
on British TV. It was never released officially, so when one of the members of
the above-mentioned Facebook group had found, digitized and posted it to the
network in the end of July last year, we decided to bring it to our double
album, thus remembering the tribute album of XX Century – "Eyewitness – a Tribute
to VdGG" (1995), which also contained a surprise – Squid One, a version of
‘Giant Squid’ song from the vinyl version of The Aerosol Grey Machine album, at
that time only available in private collections and virtually unknown to the wide
audience. During the preparation of the original demo version, synthesizers
were overdubbed, vocals remixed, some sound effects added. The demo version would
have remained in my personal collection in case if there wouldn’t had left some
six minutes of free time after the main assembly of the album material was
finished. I thought "Let it live!", as well as its second creator did
– Levon Hakhverdyan who was responsible for recording, mixing and mastering of my
album (on this track he also played all the drums and percussion). "But let
it not affect the overall impression of listening to the album!", added we
and put a half-a-minute pause in between. The right solution in such a
situation.
I deliberately
did not mention Vision – the only one of all the songs, in which nothing was
changed. This is my personal tribute to everything clean and bright, to all that
keeps us in this troubled life, to all heavenly and eternal like Love, good and
bright as Dream. This song was one of the two most beloved VdGG/pH songs of my (now
late) friend Jamie Fogg, who played an important role in my life, who together
with all other mentioned people lives somewhere deep inside me, where the idea
of creating this album was conceived and where my own songs were born and
already get their forms to appear on my next album. This will be discussed later,
for sure. In the meantime, you get a piece "of something deep inside of
me" in the form of a seventy-four minutes of “pure digit”, packed in
cardboard and paper, and supplied with all the necessary information.
I think too much
has been said, but it was necessary in order to complete the Tribute topic started
two years ago. Everything else is there – in the recorded music. Listen to it.
I begin to open a new chapter of my musical activity: creation of songs.
P.S. The album
was created with kind permission and personal approval of the author of all the
songs – Peter Hammill, whom I want to thank once again on this page of my
Journal.
