Author Archives: Judge Smith

Well that’s pushing it a bit, but I did come across the Elfin One on three occasions. On the first of these, the original ‘Van der Graaf Generator’, consisting of Peter Hammill and myself, supported the original ‘Tyrannosaurus Rex’, consisting … Continued

THE FREE ART RESEARCH TRIO – PART 1 I want to tell you about a strange corner of my musical life that is not represented to any great extent on this website, and not at all in any recorded musical … Continued

It was in the early 1970s and I was in Soho, no doubt trying to set-up some ill-starred music project or other, and probably looking like a weekend hippy. It was pouring with rain and I was trying to get … Continued

The Operatic Voice is not really my cup of tea. The Operatic Voice is generally too much for me; it’s too loud and too dramatic. Opera singers are trained to produce an astonishing volume of sound while still producing a … Continued

In 1976 I was in Edinburgh as Musical Director of ‘The Kibbo Kift’, a musical at the Traverse Theatre that I had written with composer Maxwell Hutchinson. (Script and recordings are in the Archive section of this site, by the … Continued

  Singing in English is not easy, and singing in non-accented, non-regional, middle-of-the-road English is pretty well impossible. It’s to do with the vowels; they’re fine for the talking, but start to sing and they don’t fit in the mouth; … Continued