Peter Hammill, one of Britain's most consistently innovative songwriters and performers, explains the reasoning behind a recently-released compilation of love songs re-mixed using contemporary instrument technology.

Peter Hammill's adventurous musical career began over a decade and a half ago when he formed the first incarnation of Van Der Graaf Generator in 1967 while at Manchester University. The following year he went solo, but so many of the other musicians returned to the fold to appear on the album he subsequently recorded, Aerosol Grey Machine, that it was released as Van Der Graaf's debut. Yet after three more albums by what Hammill calls 'the real Van Der Graaf', things slipped apart again.

'I never made a move to go solo: Van Der Graaf stopped. Post Pawn Hearts Van Der Graaf didn't exist in our minds, and we were faced with the possibility of making a Van Der Graaf record that wouldn't be us. The concept Van Der Graaf no longer existed.

'Van Der Graaf was a tightrope between experiment, noise, melody, success... whatever it was that we called it. But the chemistry dissolved; it was becoming just like any other job. I think in any case that groups are for a certain age range - the group has to be the most important thing in your life'.

Nevertheless, he did give Van Der Graaf Generator a further chance towards the end of the seventies, though by that time Hammill was regularly releasing the unorthodox solo tapestries that have sustained his reputation since.

Today

His latest album, The Love Songs, is neither a completely new work nor a retrospective compilation in the strict sense of the term, as he explains.

'I began by simply redoing 'Just Good Friends' (off 1983's Patience) because I wanted to do a wide-screen version with lots and lots of stuff, rather than just the band. Eighteen months or so before there had been talk of doing a compilation, but generally I don't like compilations as there's usually too much judder, both as regards one's capacities as a songwriter and musician, and also as regards the technology involved. I preferred the idea of a thematic album: in addition to The Love Songs I had some other ideas - redoing the 'rock' area, or maybe the 'epic' area - but I'm not sure if I'll follow them up now, because this was very demanding; almost more so than doing a completely new work.

'Just Good Friends' was completely re-recorded last December, but rather than remaking all the other tracks I used the original masters, taking some things out and putting others in. Doing them all as complete remakes would have made it too homogeneous - and I like the idea of using the studio as a time machine.

The only track I didn't put a new vocal on was 'Been Alone So Long'. I tried one but it was too knowing, too aware of the original vocal. So I simply remixed and slightly re-edited it as I discovered an extra bit at the end that hadn't been on the original version.

'I suppose you could say that the album is an attempt to sell me as a singer/songwriter balladeer, but it's not just that. I think that anyone who listened to The Love Songs expecting something like a Barry Manilow record might discover unexpected elements of subversion in it. And in any case, MOR is an area to which attention should be paid by artists: it reaches an immense amount of people who at the moment are effectively having cotton wool stuffed in their ears. I hope my songs have a bit more genuine heart, of course.'

Yesterday

Peter Hammill's first real contact with music came at the age of eight when he sung in the choir at Beaumont College, Old Windsor, though it was later on, while singing the Hallelujah Chorus, that he claims to have first experienced 'that chill down the spine that music can bring'.

Age 14 and he took up guitar, at first imitating the urban blues style of the likes of Sonny Boy Williamson: he took up the piano much later when he discovered its use as a composing tool in Van Der Graaf Generator.

Now he reckons he can play 'anything with a fretboard and anything with a keyboard' to a greater or lesser extent, and on The Love Songs he can be heard playing along with the gradually improving instrumentalist incarnations of old.

'I like the juxtaposition of the different times and capacities - it's like a band splayed out across the years. In fact, I'm now more used to these versions than the originals, though when I listen back I do still expect them to be followed by whatever the next track is on the original album.

'The main instrument I added was the DX7, which I think will be a major instrument for me when I get round to exploring it. Its humanity, especially when you treat it, is a great attraction. I put it through an Ursa Major for echo tracking, and also through cheap Boss flangers and stuff, because I like messing things up! I still really like tape manipulation too, which seems to have gone out the window a bit with the advent of sampling. I do the usual crude things - chopping, reversing, looping, changing tape speed. I actually did a whole cassette, available only by mail order, called Loops and Reels, which consisted of dance music using those techniques.'

Personally, I can't help thinking that The Love Songs is a poor reflection of the scope of Hammill's work, denying as it does the original context of relatively accessible tracks placed side-by-side amongst more awkwardly ambitious avant garde pieces. It was that juxtaposition, after all, that gave Hammill's work so much of its charm. On the other hand, the album is a convincing demonstration of PH's abundant skill as a songwriter.

'It's quite easy to write totally structured songs and it's also quite easy to write totally unstructured ones - the area that interests me is somewhere in the middle. I don't like the classic pop song formula of verse-chorus-verse-chorus-middle bit-chorus. I like a bit of change between each verse, and I suppose I now have my own classic song structure, something like verse-chorus-verse-extra middle bit-chorus-chorus-second middle bit-two bits of the first middle bit slightly warped around.... That makes it sound very analytical, I know, but at the moment of writing I don't think of the audience or the structure or anything. When I'm writing I write for myself, and for something to be true for anyone else it has to be true for me first.'

Fifteen years on, Peter Hammill is still making a comfortable living from his music, selling to a 'regrettably diminishing number of people', and living and working at home in the country.

'I still enjoy it. I work nearly all the time on music... I do a bit of gardening. I shut myself in the studio at home, and that's where I really like to be most of all - shut away in the time machine.

'I'm just a workaholic, basically!'