Search - Peter Hammill :: Noise

The Noise - remastered and noisier!

Stephen Andrews | London | 05/25/2007

(4 out of 5 stars)

"'The Noise', recorded in 1992, was what many people had been waiting for: a classic rock band line-up, consisting of Hammill on lead guitar, keyboards and vocals; Nic Potter on bass; Manny Elias on drums; John Ellis (borrowed from The Vibrators and The Stranglers) on guitar; and David Jackson on sax and flute. The intention was to be loud, although, in the event, the original release of this album suffered from a somewhat muted production. The format here was the short 'four-to-the-floor' rock song, with Hammill eschewing his more elongated dramas, although Q Magazine at the time noted that: 'Hammill has called on some of the melody mazes and prog-rock density from the Van Der Graaf songbook which...has decorative frills and coarse swagger.' It was certainly an album of some power, Hammill getting stuck into such topics as materialism and fame with full-throated vigour on such classic songs as 'Planet Coventry' and 'A Kick to Kill the Kiss'. But the band was perhaps at its noisiest on stage : the storm they kicked up was captured on the subsequent live release, 'There goes the daylight' recorded at the Clapham Grand in south London. This remastered version, however, puts back some of the fizz that was missing on the original CD issue. Boom. Boom. Rat-a-tat-tat."