[Landline] Refugees
Van Der Graaf Generator's Peter Hammill, Nico Williams, Zerai's, Ruth Denison, more
Hello friends,
Watch this: Peter Hammill1 of the much-admired English progressive rock band Van der Graaf Generator, now 77, sings the immortal, hugely emotional VDGG epic “Refugees” (1970) in an astonishing performance with the BBC Concert Orchestra at a prog night at the Royal Albert Hall on July 18…
The lyric “Yeah well, at least we tried,” delivered here conversationally, lands particularly hard in this setting, 56 years on — but then, so does practically every other line.
“Refugees” is, at its core, a serious contemplation of the poignant situation of the refugee — of their jeopardy, their courage, their sorrow, their severe loss, their utterly frightening alone-ness, their near-incomprehensible hope.
Watching this video a few days ago, in tears almost from the opening seconds, my mind drifted to recent headlines, to the many personal encounters I’ve had with people who’d been refugees at one time or another, to the World Cup.
I thought of Spanish football player (and World Cup final star) Nico Williams — and of his mother, Maria, who, seven months pregnant with her first son (Nico’s older brother), in desperate circumstances, left her homeland of Ghana with her husband and walked nearly 2,000 miles in search of a better life, eventually settling in Spain. I thought of Nico Williams, born in Bilbao, now 24, going to his mother in the stands after Spain’s win against Argentina, draping his winner’s medal around her neck.
I thought of Zerai’s, a humble football-centric Tucson sports bar, one of the most utopian places I have ever been fortunate enough to visit, run by the son of an Eritrean immigrant who migrated here 40 years ago. Zerai’s, where just weeks ago I watched World Cup matches with Colombian-Americans and with Iranian-Americans — with refugees and immigrants, and children of refugees and immigrants, in the most positive, joyous atmosphere imaginable.
I thought of my Pakistani migrant neighbor Mohammed, who invited me into his Tucson home to watch World Cup matches, where we cheered on Norway, Morocco and anyone facing Argentina as we ate homemade blueberry ice cream and drank homemade chai.
I thought of the high-spirited refugee from the Central African Republic I randomly met in Tucson one Saturday morning two years ago, while we were each having tires repaired at a local garage, who shared with me how he’d made it from truly hellish circumstances to America, where he is now happily employed as a registered nurse.
I thought of the 350,000 Haitian refugees in this country whose right to be here was revoked just weeks ago by the relentlessly callous Trump administration.
And I thought of my Buddhist teacher Ruth Denison, who, as a young adult, as World War II was winding down, had escaped the Soviet troops raping their way across her native East Germany, finding shelter here and there as she headed west. Ultimately she’d made it to England, then to America’s east coast, then to Los Angeles, and then, finally, in the 1970s, to Joshua Tree, which is where I met her in the early 2010s. Ultimately Ruth had taken the deepest shelter — refuge — in the teachings of the Buddha, and in the particular lineage she’d been trained in. In Joshua Tree, she’d used her husband’s inherited wealth to cobble together a ramshackle retreat center assembled from hastily built houses and derelict trailers, open to women first, but ultimately open to all. Open especially to the ones in extreme mental distress, with nowhere left to go, who, even in her late 70s, she was still working with, tirelessly, in her idiosyncratic, ingenious way.
The story goes that Peter Hammill wrote “Refugees” as he was separating from close friends (the “Mike and Susie” of the song’s lyrics), in the period when television news broadcasts were chronicling the plight of hundreds of thousands of people trying to flee horrific civil war and famine in what was then called Biafra. In a later interview, Hammill explained the song’s evolution:
For six months I shared a flat with Mike and Susie, who are among my oldest friends. When the time for departure came, I was washed with the melancholia which normally attends moving from ‘home’ and the physical memories it retains, heightened in this instance by the knowledge that, from being the closest of triads, we were committing ourselves to a separation in which months could easily slide into years. In this knowledge, the last vestiges of hope lay only in a future Utopia and re-joining of the hands.
In the writing, however, the song developed a life of its own (as is always the best way), and the hope becomes much more than that for reunion with my friends. We are all refugees, and there is no home but hope.
I admit that reading this statement it seems like this conceit can’t possibly work. Sir, perhaps you’ve stretched your analogy too far! Well, that’s prog rock for you, eh. And yet, this glorious, intense song worked in 1970 and it works now, perhaps even moreso, because we can see that it really does describe — inhabits— a persistent, eternal condition, with incredible tenderness, empathy and admiration. Watch this video, and when Hammill sings, “We’re refugees, walking away from the life we lived and loved,” try and tell me you aren’t sobbing.
Now, let’s try and do something with the energy behind those tears.
More soon,
Jay
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Notable Peter Hammill/Van der Graaf Generator fans include David Bowie, John Lydon, Mark E. Smith, Robert Fripp, Julian Cope, Jello Biafra...