Counting beats with Van der Graaf

I had a long drive yesterday to the north of Israel, and took with me a few disks to listen to on the way. Coming back, I played Van der Graaf Generator's "Godbluff" and "Still life" and for want of something better to do, I started counting beats.

People have always ragged VdGG with their weird time signatures, but I've never really noticed and always assumed that those people were just tarring VdGG with the time signature brush, whether it's true or not. If you want real funny time signatures, listen to National Health....

So: "The undercover man" starts in 3/4 for two verses and then moves to 4/4 for the rest of the song. "Arrow" is in 4/4 throughout. "Scorched earth" is a different kettle of fish, though. The opening statement is three bars of 4/4 followed by one of 3/4. The verse has lines of 4/4 and lines of 5/4. The closing riff sequence is mainly in 5/4. There's a restatement of the riff at one point in 6/4. There's one section which seems to have 5/4, 3/4, 4/4 in successive bars. I also counted some bars as 7/4. That's fun for all the family.

Over the years, I haven't listened much to "The sleepwalkers", so this was quite a metric shock. I haven't figured out yet in which time signature the opening verse is - this will have to wait for another time. After the middle "if I only had time", there's a long riff section of 18 beats per repetition, which is probably three bars of 4/4 and one of 6/4. When the final verse comes in, the main structure of the vocal lines is 4/4, 2/4, 4/4, 4/4, with the instrumental bits in 3/4. I wonder whether the song was originally written like the final verse but became "tarted up" during the arranging process, during which beats were lost forever.

I listen to most of "Still life" quite frequently, but there are still some interesting things to be heard. The opening two tracks, "Pilgrims" and "Still life" seem to be totally in 4/4. Yesterday, I heard "La Rossa" as a slow 12/8, and on that basis, the middle section became very interesting ("if we made love now..."): a bar of 3/4 followed by two of 4/4, repeated several times (that could be written as 9/8 followed by two bars of 12/8, to make the triplet beat clear).

I noticed a few weeks ago that "My room" has a similar metric structure to the final verse of "Sleepwalkers" - 4/4, 2/4, 4/4, 4/4. If we take the first line, "Searching for" is a bar of 4/4, "diamonds" is a half bar of 2/4, "in a sulphur mine" is two bars of 4/4.

"Childlike faith in childhood's end" has most of its verses in 13/4 (or 4/4, 4/4, 5/4)!

Buy me a metronome for Christmas.