condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Gatefold sleeve. With original innersleeve.

Peter Hammill's third solo album, Chameleon In The Shadow Of The Night (1973), was recorded during a hiatus in Van Der Graaf Generator between Pawn Hearts (1971) and the band's mid-1970s reformation. Hammill assembled the record at Sofa Sound, his home studio in Sussex, with occasional support from the rest of VDGG (David Jackson on sax, Hugh Banton on organ, Guy Evans on drums) and his usual collaborator Robert Fripp on guitar. The result is the most exposed of his early solo records and arguably the most psychologically extreme.

"German Overalls" opens the album with the kind of cracked piano-and-voice gravity that would become a Hammill signature, a song built around a long European train journey of disorientation. "Slender Threads" is two minutes of acoustic dread. "Rock And Role" is a sustained distorted electric piece that anticipates the post-punk Hammill of the late 1970s. "Tapeworm" is one of the songs critics most often cite as a direct influence on John Lydon's PIL-era vocal approach. "In The End" closes the album on twelve minutes of accumulated darkness, the singer's voice cracking through the song's accelerating climax. Lydon himself has named Chameleon as a touchstone.

The pressing on offer is the European Charisma / Phonogram edition on 6369 937, the version distributed across continental Europe (the UK first issue was Charisma CAS 1075). Chameleon In The Shadow Of The Night is one of the central Hammill solo records of the early 1970s and a notable post-progressive song-cycle of its decade.