Revaluation

I'm so used to reading stuff afresh that I first read as a teenager and responding in a completely different manner this time round that I've come to expect and enjoy the experience. My ability to almost completely forget a good deal of the original reading experience plays a significant role in the process. I seem to be particularly good at forgetting how novels end.

But this doesn't usually apply in the same way to music, except insofar as some albums have lost their original magic for me. I notice the clichés now. However, one magical exception for me over recent weeks has been my sort of rediscovery of Van der Graaf Generator. My purchase of a number of their albums, both recent and of the seventies, both live and in the studio, has alerted my ears to things they somehow missed first time round. This applies to the whole band, but especially the drumming of Guy Evans. If you'd have asked me a couple of years ago what I thought of him I'd have said that he overplays and is a bit too busy for my liking. I certainly would not have thought of him alongside the mighty Bill Bruford or even Phil Collins (with whom I saw him share a stage many moons ago, when all three of us had a lot more hair.)

What was I thinking? Now I put him right there at the very top. Astonishing playing on everything I've been listening to lately. There are some Peel sessions he plays on around 1977 featuring on the live from the BBC double CD set, with the five piece, violin-based version of the band, on which I just can't listen to anybody else because he's so darned perfect just playing in a straight-ahead, four square, almost punk manner.

I just listened again to H to He Who Am The Only One, the only VDGG album I actually possessed as a teenager (everything else I borrowed from friends) to check out the drumming since somehow or other it had never stood out for me and I wondered why. What I realised was that I knew almost every drum-beat on the album, but had somehow assumed that this was sort of routine so the playing had become just part of the musical wallpaper for me. (It doesn't help that the production kind of blends everything together into a bit of a mush.) Listening to it now I heard the drums as they would have really sounded on stage and, believe me, it was quite something.

As usual, it's a fine thing to find out how wrong-headed I've been. And now back to side 2 of the album I thought I knew inside out and back to front. Yowza!