PETER HAMMILL RE-RECORDS HIS ENIGMA-ERA ALBUMS
Prog pioneer cites Taylor Swift’s motivational influence behind the newly minted versions of In A Foreign Town and Out Of Water while rising to musical challenges.
Van der Graaf Generator lynchpin Peter Hammill has taken inspiration from the unlikely figure of pop colossus Taylor Swift in his decision to re-record two of his Enigma Recordsreleased albums: 1988’s In A Foreign Town and Out Of Water, which followed two years later.
Both have been unavailable to buy for some time and the new versions are set for release on November 24 via Esoteric.
“Earlier last year, I was in the process of sorting out the copyrights that I still owned from Fie! Records,” says Hammill,“and it became clear that there was a dispute about the ownership of these two albums, because these were two albums that I made for Enigma in the States. It wasn’t clear whether that ownership had passed on to various other people along the way or not. So I decided to take a leaf out of Taylor Swift’s book and do my versions by completely [re-]recording them.”
Since their original release, both albums have proved divisive among Hammill’s followers though the prevailing consensus contends that the material contained within the records’ grooves is let down by production techniques that date the albums in less-than-flattering ways. “When I made In A Foreign Town, it was the first time that I’d begun sequencing for myself,” explains Hammill to Prog from his West Country base.“It had sounds that were very much of the time, in particular big snares and all that sort of thing, which cropped up on both albums. So I think that, for myself, and for a lot of the fans, In A Foreign Town, in particular, was an album that had not a bad reputation,but it was felt that of everything that I’d done, that’s the one that, sonically, was a little bit lacking, even though the songs themselves are interesting.”
With the exception of Stuart Gordon’s violin that runs through the melancholy Something About Ysabel’s Dance on Out Of Water, everything was re-recorded from the ground up, with each albu
