Judge Smith

Track	Album / Single
A Cloud As Big As A Man’s Hand	Heebalob demo
Been Alone So Long	Democrazy
The Institute Of Mental Health	Democrazy
The Sleeper	The Fall Of The House Of Usher
A Byronic Sort Of Blighter	Curly’s Airships
I Want Some Of It	The Full English
The Light Of The World	The Tribal Elders CD Single
Rundown Rudi	Orfeas
Cardboard Suitcase	Zoot Suit
The Overstayer Parts 1-4	The Overstayer

Judge Smith (or Chris Judge Smith as he used to be called) is an English songwriter and singer who often highlights little known subject matter as the central theme for his musicals and songstories. This piece doesn’t pretend to be a full and thorough examination of his fruitful output over 50 years, so for example I won’t be looking at his stage productions in the 1970s. This is just a ramble through his back catalogue, picking out a song here or there along the way. Although I do start with more than just a nod towards his earliest days in Manchester and collaborations with Peter Hammill.

Judge Smith was a founder and former member of the enduring prog band Van der Graaf Generator (VDGG) with Peter Hammill, who he met at Manchester University in 1967. The two went on to form VDGG with a fellow student called Nick Pearne. Smith was on drums (and occasionally the typewriter!) with Hammill on guitar/vocals and Pearne on keyboards. This trio gave a few performances in the city up to the spring of 1968, but Smith had left the band when its first single, People You Were Going To, was released. Smith did feature as a vocalist on this but by then a new drummer, Guy Evans, had been recruited. Smith found he was relegated to being a backing vocalist, so he departed without any rancour apparently. To be absolutely fair to Smith, he felt he was not adding anything to the band and thought it was best to leave them to get on with it.

Smith then did a few gigs as a guest vocalist with a Scottish band called Cousin Mary but soon after formed his own called Heebalob. One of the members of this new band was a highly talented sax player called David Jackson. Heebalob didn’t last very long although they did perform at the National Jazz and Blues Festival on 8th August 1969. They recorded a song called A Cloud As Big As A Man’s Hand in 1969 which served as a blueprint and inspiration for one of VDGG’s most popular early songs, Killer, with its distinctive heavy sax riff.

Killer was on VDGG’s third album, H To He, Who Am The Only One, in 1970 and was also included on a cheapy (£1.49) compilation album called ˈ68-ˈ71 released in 1972. This album was my introduction to VDGG at the very impressionable age of 14. The back cover of ˈ68-ˈ71 featured a host of band members, past and present, including Chris Judge Smith in a wizard’s cloak or something similar.

Although Smith had left VDGG he kept up his collaboration with Peter Hammill. A couple of songs he had written in his VDGG days with Hammill appeared on Fool’s Mate which was the first of many of Hammill’s solo albums. These two period pieces were Imperial Zeppelin and Viking.  I always liked the slightly frantic sound of Imperial Zeppelin, but not so keen on the plodding Viking effort.

In the 1970s and 1980s he was active but not releasing any material on albums. Instead, he concentrated on stage musicals with artists such as Max Hutchinson and Lene Lovich. However, a song of his was recorded by Peter Hammill in 1975; the soulful and emotionally charged, Been Alone So Long, which is included on Hammill’s Nadir’s Big Chance album.

Judge Smith recorded his own version of his song and it appeared on his 1991 collection of demos called Democrazy, unfortunately no longer available. Smith was honest about the quality of the recordings on Democrazy and realised the album was mainly sought after by VDGG/Hammill completists.

Smith’s version is interesting but sounds somewhat pale in comparison with Hammill’s take on it. I have always rated this song as one of the best ever in expressing loneliness and love torn angst: Been alone so long, that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to feel somebody next to me and hear her breathing peacefully when I wake up at night, Been alone so long that I’ve forgotten what to say if I meet somebody who might easily resemble you, I smile but look away… I look away. If this had been recorded by a big name, let’s say Rod Stewart, it would probably have been a massive hit.

I just had to select another Hammill/Smith joint piece (see video clip below from Nadir’s Big Chance) for number four on my list, the weirdly wonderful The Institute Of Mental Health, Burning complete with tortured sound effects and a consistent background burbling as the song moves towards its repetitious ‘Burning’ finale: Throughout the city, people say it isn’t pretty, everyone agrees, and everyone feels glad; doctored brains celebrate and everyone waves their chains … it’s a pity they’re all mad. It’s probably not quite how it would be referenced these days, but it’s such an original piece that Smith deserves great credit for his part in creating this arty nightmare. John Lydon agrees, he cites this song as one as one of his biggest influences:

Smith also wrote Time For A Change on Hammill’s 1979 album pH7 and the lyrics for Four Pails on the album Skin that Hammill released in 1986.

In the background, he was working on and off with Peter Hammill on an opera that was based on the Edgar Allan Poe story The Fall Of The House Of Usher. This was released some years later in 1991. I had a cassette tape version that I mistakenly donated to Oxfam when I had a clear out of about 50 other cassette tapes in the late 1990s. It took me a long time to get over that.

As a continuous piece it’s difficult to select a passage or section, but I always particularly liked the gothic overkill in the words Poe penned for Madeline Usher in The Sleeper in Act Two: My love, she sleeps. Oh, may her sleep as it is lasting so be deep! Soft may the worms around her creep! Far in the forest, dim and old, now may some tall vault enfold her; some vault that oft hath flung its black and winged panels fluttering back triumphant o’er the crested palls of her grand family funerals …

In 1993, Judge Smith released an album called Dome Of Discovery, but his peak offering has to be the totally absorbing Curly’s Airships which came out in 2000, in time for the 70th anniversary of the R101 airship’s crash in France in 1930. It tells the story (in about 2 hours and 20 minutes) of the airship and is stuffed with great tunes and clever, witty lyrics. It features Smith on the front cover as the fictional narrator Curly McCloud in an airship officer’s uniform, but surrounded by flames. The ‘songstory’ covers the construction of the airship in Cardington, Bedfordshire until its demise on a hillside near Beauvais.

This work included Peter Hammill, Hugh Banton (keyboards for VDGG), David Jackon (sax for VDGG), John Ellis (Hammill’s K-Group, the Vibrators, the Stranglers) and Arthur Brown (yup, that one, the crazy one). David Lord completed the mixing and mastering. If you like fast furious shouty stuff, this really isn’t for you.

There are 26 separate songs in this far from ordinary rock opera, with an incredible range of musical influences. To do it justice the whole album needs to be appreciated in a single devoted session.  With so much to enjoy this is tricky but I have to select A Byronic Sort Of Blighter (as this was my introduction to the album) which is about Baron Thompson of Cardington who was largely blamed for forcing the R101 to make its maiden flight before all the necessary safety checks had been followed through: Urbane and charming, a glamorous figure, he got things done and made powerful friends, but safer not to get in his way, he was hard as nails and ambitious as hell, a Byronic sort of blighter, he was having an affair with some Romanian Princess or was she Swedish, I forget, well anyway, we didn’t trust him as nothing’s what it seems when politicians are concerned, just what was going on behind that noble profile?

His next project was The Full English in 2005, a collection of musical scenarios revealing Smith’s ability to distil human character into a few short songs. He wrote all of the music and lyrics and with organ, piano and accordion there is a very different ‘feel’ to this album. 

Never one for following musical fashions, his albums are for anyone who wants to step outside the more usual offerings and take a chance with a uniquely ‘English’ artist. Forced to pick one track, I’ll go for I Want Some Of It, a poke at the world’s wealthier people and countries:

Some people have the gift I swear, of making money from thin air, it’s not as if they need it, they just like to greed it, like having it there, I suppose it wasn’t tactful, I asked for a sackful, they don’t like to share, and I want some of it, I want some of it, I want some of it, I want some of it, if it’s all the same to you.

A two track CD was released in 2007, another collaboration with David Jackson and John Ellis, with spoken vocals by Michael Ward-Bergeman, under the band name of the Tribal Elders.

This features a terrific couple of songs, The Light of the World and I Don’t Know What I’m Doing, both of them bouncing infectiously along. Of the two I narrowly prefer The Light Of The World, a quasi-religious look at the coming of an all-powerful figure who demands everyone to experience only his light, with a cataclysmic end due to blind obedience: Time came we couldn’t light a candle, no-one would have dared, ‘My own light should be quite enough for people’ he declared, Then he turned his powers skyward, So strong had he become, His scientists fired a black device, Extinguishing the sun, ‘You will have no other Light but Mine!’

I am not familiar with the album also released that year called Long-Range Audio Device, a project with the American artist Steve Defoe. One for another day. In 2010, Smith put out another songstory album, The Climber, about an English mountaineer who is climbing the Italian Alps. The album is heavy on male vocals with a Norwegian choir featuring throughout. Again, Smith creates a chasm between what everyone else is doing and his own musical vision.

A third songstory album followed in 2011 called Orfeas based on the story of the musician and poet Orpheus from Greek mythology. This version examines George Orfeas, a guitarist who just about survives a car crash and returns to the living world. The story is worth following in detail on the album as there are some spanking tunes here. With 34 tracks it’s a bit of a lucky dip to select one but I love the Mike Oldfield-like Rundown Rudi with some incredibly clever guitar work by John Ellis.

In 2013, Zoot Suit came along; an energetic set of 14 wonderful songs that includes a curious update of Smith’s classic Been Alone So Long with a vocal introduction that sounds like a 1930s radio production. Then it’s back to a rockier version, a big improvement on his effort of many years before. There’s some autobiographical lyrics here with a wistful look at his career in Extract From ˈThe ‘Book Of Hoursˈ (Part 2) as he notes: “I’ll never be Neil Sedaka,  Gerry Goffin or Carole King, But I wish I’d wrote just one standard, That people would always sing.” On the track I’m Through he suggest he’s about to throw in the towel. Cardboard Suitcase is the one track I’ll take from the album though.

He then devoted his time to getting his long-cherished Requiem Mass recorded. This had languished for about 40 years on Smith’s ‘to do’ list and in 2015/16 he finally brought everything together. He described it in September that year: “It’s just a half hour piece, but it does require the full, real-world participation of a sizable choir; a two guitars, bass and drums rock band, a solo singer, orchestral percussion, and an eight-piece brass section.”  The choir he used was the Crouch End Festival Chorus and my wife’s cousin Lucy is a performer with them, although amongst 48 members of the choir he probably didn’t pick her out specifically.  And it’s sung in Latin. One for the seekers of the weird and the wonderful.

The eponymous album Towers Open Fire with songs Smith co-wrote with Brakeman emerged in 2019. Maybe it’s just me but I’m not getting anything new or different on this one. I feel like I’ve heard this sort of thing before (and in the case of Been Alone So Long, I certainly have). Maybe I need to give it some more listening time. I’m afraid the same goes for the next project, The Solar Heresies And The Lunar Sequence.

The next album (released in 2021) was ‘a film with music’, a score set against the dreamlike visual backdrop of ‘The Garden of Fifi Chamoix’ with the usual sax contributions from David Jackson and guitars of John Ellis. I’d call Music From The Garden Of Fifi Chamoix 40 minutes of inoffensive pleasantness.

After the art school style projects, it was back to some decent songs on Old Man In A Hurry in December 2021, mixture of old and new material, one of which was ‘Four Pails’ from the Hammill album 35 years previously. I couldn’t pick a song that was any better than those I’d already selected for my top ten though.

The Trick Of The Lock appeared in 2023, a pared-down piano-based selection of new songs and ones not previously recorded. He’s at his quirky best with songs like It’s Another Day and Best Before although the pick of the songs here is The Cosmic Commodore, a clever swipe at the nonsense espoused by L. Ron Hubbard.

In complete contrast, a collection of short instrumental pieces came out at the end of 2023 called Mr McKilowatts Dances. It’s nearly an hour long with all the tracks around the two-minute mark. I’m left with an overriding impression of a load of themes for children’s TV programmes in the 1970s. Having made that sightly disparaging comparison, there’s some decent tunes here, give these a listen: A Frankfurter Blush Continuo, Respect The Sevenfold Wavenumber, A Round Cast Shining Thing, Methyl Will Sooth A Tungsten Bowstring.  The titles mimic the frivolous nature of this album.

His most recent work from 2025 is far from lightweight in tone or content; The Overstayer Parts 1-4 is an 18-minute piece about a female illegal immigrant who was a teacher in her homeland after some form of unnamed ‘liberation’ who is forced to leave and seek work in the UK:

When the big man ran the country, things were bad, When the big man ran our lives, The pay was poor but it came each month, And no-one stole your things except the police, Now the big man’s dead and gone, Things are worse, Now we have been liberated, There’s no pay, there’s no books, there’s no heating, And no children at the school, And everybody steals your things.

There is no naming and shaming here and the lyrics are moving and beautifully sung by David Jackson’s daughter Dorie Jackson. You do get a strong sense of where the song’s sympathies lie and this isn’t going to be sung by those hanging Union Jacks upside down from lampposts in Essex. The Overstayer tackles a loaded subject most other artists shirk from in such a heartfelt and evocative way and perfectly illustrates that Judge Smith is a tremendous songwriter.

This terribly English musical artist will never be a rock superstar, but he is engaging, silly, inventive, odd, clever and, I believe, unique. I can’t think of a comparison anywhere in the British music scene.

Judge Smith official website & musicography

Judge Smith bandcamp

The Universe Is Made Of Voices – by Judge Smith
A guide to “the unseen universe that lies beyond and behind our physical world”

The Fall of the House of Usher opera – wikipedia page

Curly’s Airships wikipedia page

Excellent interview by Dmitry M. Epstein (2025 with historic photos)

Jim Christopulos interview at VDGG website (2003)

Judge Smith interviewed by Seán Kelly on Curly’s Airships (1995)

Toppermost #368: Van der Graaf Generator

Toppermost #1,193: Peter Hammill

And finally …

… we are indebted to Andrew Holloway on Bluesky for pointing out the above classic to us. Written by Chris Judge Smith in 1979 for this celebrated group of TV comics, it went something like this:

Alan Haines is now retired and enjoying not going to work but doing things he wants instead, such as reading, listening to music, researching family history and walking the dog.

TopperPost #1,192