Robert Fripp, with Peter Hammill on vocals, from his groundbreaking 1979 album Exposure. The song is Disengage. Daryl Hall was supposed to sing on the whole album, but his record company put a stop to that. So Fripp got Hammill, Peter Gabriel, and Terre Roche to fill out the album. Other musos on the album were Phil Collins (who plays drums on this), Tony Levin (who plays bass), Brian Eno, and others. Heres Fripp, from a Zig Zag interview in 79 which covered the making of Exposure, on Hammill: ZZ: I was very impressed by Peter Hammill’s bits on your LP. RF: He did very well. This thing about collaboration without pre-conceptions: Peter is a remarkable singer, but as in all these situations where there’s a style of English artist where they’re unproducable. They determine their own situation, nothing can change it. Bowie, Eno, Fripp, Gabriel, Ferry, Hammill – these are the names that spring to mind. No-one could normally come along and put Peter Hammill in a context where he would have to work outside his own way of operating, and since from the conceptual point of view my way of operating is not very far removed from his, he could immediately respond to it. He [Hammill] came in, well-dressed, took off his nice smart trousers, put on this grubby, smelly, flannel dressing-gown and a hefty brandy which he’d brought in himself, and went in. Here’s the microphone, here’s the words, go ’n’ sing. And he did. All he had were the words. ZZ: I got the impression from your LP that he was set loose in a field, if you like, and ran around (!) RF: Right, something like that. I must say I enjoyed working with him. I think he’s accepted practically the notion of the Peter principle. You know this one? He has found the signs of success that he needs simply to be a human being, and he needn’t go beyond it. I’ve a feeling he might change his mind actually. I think that he could be put in situations which conceivably could bring him out more and more to where he could even be very successful, not perhaps in the sense of double platinum, but in the sense of having a far wider acceptance for his work than he does now. ZZ: Yeah, if he could extend the fanatacism he has now (by the way, ZigZag’s long-delayed PH feature soon to come!) I always thought there was a parallel between what you and Van der Graaf were doing. RF: Yes I know. From my point of view, I always sensed that Peter didn’t always have the musical context which would enable him to spread as much as he was capable of. This is also true of Gabriel, it’s also true of Hall – Daryl always needs a guitarist he can work against as a pole, and I think any creative situation really needs at least two strong poles so the friction between the two, which needn’t be a negative, nasty, sort of type, but just ideas bouncing off ideas in a positive way. For a singer would often be a musician, like a guitarist. youtu.be/bE9F5HvIkRQ
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 17:58:53 +0000
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