The title comes from the painter John Minton, who reckoned that we are all adrift in a sea of blood and that waving is about all that remains available to us. The sleeve carries a dedication to two initials, thanking them for the unhappiness they caused. And the first pressing went out with a mix the band hated, which they then forced the label to scrap. Everything about this record is Van der Graaf Generator arriving with their elbows out — which, given what is actually on it, is exactly right.

The short version

Released in February 1970, this was the first Van der Graaf Generator album on Charisma — Tony Stratton-Smith founded the label largely because nobody else would sign them, and made them one of his first acts. It was recorded in four days at Trident, 11 to 14 December 1969, produced by John Anthony with Robin Geoffrey Cable engineering. The band is now five: Peter Hammill, Hugh Banton on organ, Guy Evans on drums, and two new men — David Jackson on saxophones and flute, and Nic Potter on bass and electric guitar, replacing Keith Ellis. Six tracks, all written by Hammill except Out of My Book, a Jackson co-write. It reached the UK top 50, and remains the only Van der Graaf album ever to do so.

Four days before Christmas

They were so well rehearsed that the sessions finished early, which left Potter time to overdub electric guitar onto some of it — the only Van der Graaf record where a band member does that. Then the arguments started. Stratton-Smith disliked Anthony’s production and brought in Shel Talmy to remix; the first pressing carries Talmy’s version; the band objected and persuaded Charisma to let Anthony remix it again, and that is what every subsequent copy contains. Meanwhile the sleeve was dedicated To L & M, without whom everyone would have been much happier — a parting shot at Lou Reizner and Mercury Records, the contract they had just escaped. The American edition came out on ABC’s Probe division with different artwork. The cover shows a Van de Graaff generator, the machine they misspelled to get their name.

The sound

Jackson changes everything. He arrives playing alto and tenor at once in the manner of Roland Kirk, and where the rest of the genre was busy being classical and stately, Van der Graaf go straight for free-jazz squeal and skronk. This is a band perfectly willing to make an ugly noise, and the noise is the point — the endings of the long tracks routinely collapse into dissonant catfights that no ELP fan would have tolerated for a second. Underneath, Banton’s organ is already unmistakable and already loaded with effects, Evans refuses the obvious beat, and Potter’s bass is fluid in a way the later, bass-less records simply cannot be. Hammill moves from tenderness to shrieking within a single song. The structure is neat: each side opens with something heavy and closes with an epic, with a ballad to let you breathe.

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The songs

Darkness (11/11) sets the tone grimly, with an organ solo full of sonic trickery and Jackson closing on both saxophones at once. Refugees goes entirely the other way: a churchy, gentle ballad written for Hammill’s former flatmates, carried by Farfisa and Mike Hurwitz’s cello, uncharacteristically hopeful, and arguably the most beautiful thing the band ever recorded. White Hammer takes its title from the Malleus Maleficarum and follows the persecution of witchcraft in the Middle Ages, starting clean and ending in two minutes of distorted organ and twisting saxophone. Whatever Would Robert Have Said? addresses Robert J. Van de Graaff himself, the inventor whose machine gave them their name, and hands the lead to Potter’s electric guitar. Out of My Book is the folky interlude — Jackson wrote the music at a piano and Hammill finished it on guitar. And After the Flood closes with eleven minutes of science fiction: a cataclysm brought on by the earth’s magnetic field inverting, a twelve-tone figure arranged by Jackson, Hammill’s voice electronically treated, and words drawing on Einstein’s alarm at the nuclear arms race.

Reception and legacy

It sold, it charted, and it did more than any other record to put this band in front of an audience — which makes it the closest thing they have to a commercial success, achieved on their second try and never repeated. What it also did was establish that they did not belong. Charisma housed them alongside Genesis and the folk-prog wing, and the pigeonhole has never fitted: Julian Cope, a devotee, once described them as some Brechtian bar band, the opposite of prog rock, really, and the list of admirers — John Lydon, Mark E. Smith, Marc Almond, Graham Coxon — explains why the punk generation left them alone when it came for everyone else.

The verdict

The best place to start with Van der Graaf Generator, and the one where all the pieces are visible at once. Refugees first, because it is lovely and it will surprise you, and because nothing else on the record sounds remotely like it. Then Darkness (11/11) and White Hammer to hear what they actually do. Then After the Flood, whole, for the ending. Then go to H to He, made ten months later without a bass player, and Pawn Hearts after that. This is the one that makes sense of the rest, and it is also the one you can lend to somebody without a warning.

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