Inextricably linked to a British progressive rock scene that was never designed to contain them, Van der Graaf Generator were prog’s wonderfully untamed and fearless awkward squad; the sublime but skewed songwriting craft of Peter Hammill propelling them to numerous audaciously dynamic heights. Drawn from a variety of live and studio recordings made for the BBC, After the Flood showcases the incisive weirdness and bristling vitality of these young oddballs, as they evolved from the tentative but joyously wonky psychedelia of Necromancer to the dignified terrorism of Man-Erg; an epic exercise in wrongness that, remarkably, sounds even more haughtily berserk in its spontaneous, Maida Vale incarnation than it did on the band’s much revered Pawn Hearts album. Where other titans of the prog realm wore self-indulgence as a badge of honour, the VdGG code was all about the sparks that flew when the genre’s lofty ambitions collided with squalls of artful violence: thus, a wild, abridged Plague of Lighthouse Keepers and a snarling Scorched Earth prove that Hammill was as much punk precursor as he was purveyor of pomp.
