Peter Gabriel w/Hammill: Newly Found Footage

The rarest of video footage, not believed to have existed up until a few days ago, has been unearthed. I had a hand in unearthing it and I’ve been given the green light to share it! A little background…

In 1982, Peter Gabriel organized the first WOMAD (World of Music and Dance) festival in England which brought together many World Music artists from various countries, along with some well known Western popular music artists (the WOMAD album had tracks by artists like Ekome Dance Company and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan alongside tracks by the likes of David Byrne, Peter Hammill, Pete Townsend, XTC, and Gabriel himself). 

On one of the three nights, PG’s band (which included Stewart Copeland on drums, L Shankar on violin, and Peter Hammill on guitar and b-vox) did a set of new Gabriel tunes, but the first song of the set was a spotlight for Hammill and the song he wrote for the WOMAD album (“A Ritual Mask”). I’ve always wondered what that must have been like so I emailed Peter Gabriel this past Saturday afternoon asking if there was any video footage of Hammill leading the band on “A Ritual Mask”, letting him know that I wanted to share it with other PH/VdGG fans if there was. PG helped me out years ago by contributing to the VdGG book, so I hoped he’d help out again. He was great, he wrote me back a few hours later saying that he was pretty sure there was no footage unfortunately but said he’d have someone look into it. I also let Hammill know I was on a mini-quest to track down footage of that perf but he couldn’t remember if there was a camera crew that night in ’82 when the PG band performed “A Ritual Mask.” 

Lo and behold, one of Gabriel’s cohorts at Real World (thanks Mike!) got back to me saying that they did discover some raw footage of WOMAD in the Real World archives. And they found raw, unedited footage of Hammill / PG’s Band performing “A Ritual Mask”! The footage was sent to me but there was a rights issue (PG/Real World/WOMAD doesn’t own the rights) but, after a bit of back & forth, we decided that it’s okay for me to share the clip on Facebook. So… here is the rarest of video footage, hidden away unseen in 40 years, and raw/unedited but still magnificent: Peter Gabriel, Peter Hammill, Stewart Copeland, L Shankar, David Rhodes, and Larry Fast performing “A Ritual Mask” at WOMAD in 1982.

Jim Christopulos

co-author, “Van der Graaf Generator – The Book”

(Thanks to PG, Mike, and York at Real World!!!)

Here's the link, I could only post it via my VdGG Facebook page (please "like" the clip if you're able to):