Peter Hammill

Ealing, Derby, Manchester

Hammill was born in Ealing on 5 November 1948 and moved to Derby at twelve. He was educated at Beaumont College and then read Liberal Studies in Science at Manchester University, where he and Judge Smith started Van der Graaf Generator. He has described the band's earliest phase as a theatrical conceit, complete with staged photo sessions, and says the pretence dissolved once Hugh Banton, Guy Evans, David Jackson and Keith Ellis were in the room and the music became the serious business.

Mercury Records offered a contract in 1968, but only Hammill signed it. When the group came apart in 1969 the solo record he was making under that deal was issued instead as the band's debut, The Aerosol Grey Machine. Fool's Mate, in 1971, was the first album released under his own name. That year the band shared Charisma's Six Bob package tour with Genesis and Lindisfarne, a pairing Hammill still draws a line under: Genesis were meticulous, Van der Graaf Generator were chaotic and occasionally extraordinary.

Two catalogues, one writer

The solo albums never waited for the band to be free. Chameleon in the Shadow of the Night arrived in 1973, The Silent Corner and the Empty Stage in 1974, Nadir's Big Chance in 1975 with its proto-punk streak, and Over in 1977, written out of the end of a relationship. Material built for the band's stage set, including (In the) Black Room and A Louse Is Not a Home, surfaced on solo records after the first split. His reasoning has not changed since: songs should not die simply because the band that played them did.

The later run is long and largely unbroken — Singularity in 2006, Thin Air in 2009, Consequences in 2012, Other World in 2014 with Gary Lucas, From the Trees in 2017, the covers set In Translation in 2021 and, the same year, In Disequilibrium with the Swedish group Isildurs Bane. The one hard interruption came in December 2003, when he suffered a cardiac arrest less than 48 hours after finishing the album Incoherence.

The band is dormant, not finished

Van der Graaf Generator reformed in 2005 and has worked since as a trio of Hammill, Banton and Evans, David Jackson having left soon after the reunion. Their last studio album, Do Not Disturb, came out in September 2016. A European tour ran through 2021 and into 2022, including the band's first shows in Finland in October 2021, where Evans missed two Helsinki dates over a Brexit-related passport problem.

Asked about the band in an interview published in February 2026, Hammill called it dormant rather than retired, said it was not impossible they would play live again, and on the question of new recordings offered nothing firmer than never say never. Nothing has been announced since.

Tears In Time

The new album is released on 25 September 2026 through Esoteric Antenna, part of Cherry Red. Its eleven songs — For A Rainy Day, The Wheels, Heavy Weather, Angle Of The Curve, So Much Water, Tabula Rasa, Oh The End, Red Flags (In The Sunset), You'll Never Know, The Half Of It and And When He Ran — were recorded at his Terra Incognita studio across a span running from 1991 to the present. "These songs have been a long time in the gestation and making," Hammill said on announcing it. "I'm pleased with the way they've worked out. They seem to hang together as a group, even though there's a wide range of styles represented here."

Two of them, Heavy Weather and Tabula Rasa, started life as experimental instrumental pieces recorded when Terra Incognita was in Bath, and were only later given words. The Wheels carries a string arrangement with Middle Eastern colouring and turns on the way memory misleads. Hammill has explained the record's assembly plainly enough: he had been working on a number of unrelated pieces, some of which went into the pending file, and at a certain point the survivors started to sound like they belonged together, at which stage he added the orchestration.

It is his first collection of new songs since From The Trees in 2017, and his first solo album of any kind since In Translation in 2021. Reviewing it for Echoes And Dust ahead of release, Zachary Nathanson called it a meditation on memory, loss, endurance and renewal, and heard in it both the spirit of the Charisma years and something unmistakably current. Hammill has already said another album is taking shape out of what he calls slabs of noise.

The Albert Hall, and what it confirmed

In July 2026 Hammill appeared at the Royal Albert Hall as a guest of the BBC Concert Orchestra for a Prom billed as Prog Rock: A Fanfare for the Common Man, singing Refugees. The reviewers' consensus was that he was the vocal event of the night. BroadwayWorld's notice, published on 20 July, described his gravel-throated delivery giving the song its full melancholy weight, made the point that he was the only guest on the bill singing his own song rather than someone else's, and judged that he left every other singer in the building looking like a tribute act. Gruff Rhys and Jane Weaver also appeared as guest vocalists.

That was a national platform for a writer whose audience has otherwise been self-selecting for five decades, and it landed two months before the album.

The current run

Hammill plays Klub Studio in Kraków on 26 September 2026 and the Palladium in Warsaw the following night, both billed as An evening with… — the Kraków show has doors at 7pm and a 8pm start, tickets from 149 złoty, on sale since 19 June and promoted by Fundacja ACADEMICA with RockSerwis. Five Italian dates follow in November: Teatro Ghione in Rome on the 10th, Teatro Goldoni in Livorno on the 11th, Teatro Superga in Nichelino on the 13th, the Sala dei Giganti at the Palazzo Liviano in Padua on the 15th and the Sala Shakespeare at the Teatro Elfo Puccini in Milan on the 16th. They follow a short British run in late September and early October 2025 that took in the Queen's Hall in Edinburgh, the RNCM in Manchester and the Royal Festival Hall in London.

His method for choosing what to play has been consistent and is deliberately fragile. He writes a setlist about an hour before he goes on and then makes a point of forgetting it, and avoids repeating songs on consecutive nights, which is possible only because the catalogue behind him runs to more than thirty solo albums plus the band's.