Van der Graaf Generator: the “genius” group Bruce Dickinson thought were sorely underrated
An admiration of prog was what set the likes of Iron Maiden and the broader new wave of British heavy metal apart from their punk adversaries.
Aside from their beer-soaked affirmation of masculinity at odds with punk’s relative gender upend, a fierce appreciation for the complex arrangements pioneered by Canada’s Rush, Uriah Heap, and even choice cuts of Yes could be detected in NWOBHM’s embrace of the lengthy shred. While sparked into existence by punk’s white hot flame in the late 1970s, the denimed metalheads never lapsed into ‘Year Zero’ mission agendas the punks rhetorically paid lip service to.
Keenly connected to the prog of yesteryear was Iron Maiden. At the centre of their East London street metal and hard-nosed twin guitar attack was a veneration of the all-mighty melody. Detected even when Paul Di’Anno fronted the band early on, once Bruce Dickinson entered the fold for 1982’s Number of the Beast, a grander scope of complexity seemed to flourish from then on, despite always being anchored in the holy urgency of a solid riff.
Prog and the emerging heavy metal would pepper the young Dickinson’s record collection, nabbing copies of Black Sabbath and Deep Purple as well as Jethro Tull and even Emerson, Lake & Palmer, as an eager music fan, but it would be Peter Hammill and Chris Judge Smith’s eccentric Van der Graaf Generator that would spsrk the most effusive praise over the years when casting his mind back to the formative bands of his adolescence.
“I love Van der Graaf cause they were a band that were on the edge,” Dickinson stated. “Although they had quite complex arrangements, they made some great sounds. They were an incredibly depressing band, that’s why I loved it, because it was so out there.”
He added, “You put Van Der Graaf on and you could clear an entire room of people, and I loved it. I love music like that.”
Eschewing too silly a fantasy escapism that befell their pointy-hatted contemporaries, Van der Graaf Generator indeed conjured an artfully bleak yet askance slice of vaudeville strange in their experimental suites, leaning toward King Crimson or even vague dashes of krautrock over oft-compared peers like Genesis. Hamill and his Van der Graff certainly made a deep impression on Dickinson, the line “There’s a house with no door” from 2024’s solo ‘Face in the Mirror’ is a nod to H to He, Who Am the Only One’s ‘House With No Door’.
Van der Graaf Generator’s legacy would extend into punk. While famously sporting an “I hate Pink Floyd” T-shirt back in the day, Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon confessed his fandom for the band, and selected Hammill’s solo ‘The Institute Of Mental Health’, ‘Burning’, and ‘Nobody’s Business’ on a Capital Radio segment covering his favourite songs in 1977.
“I’m damn sure Bowie copied a lot out of that geezer, he told host Tommy Vance. “I love all his stuff, it is about punk. He didn’t mean it to be, but it is, it’s true, you’re nobody’s business…”
