Time & Perspective Quote by Peter Hammill

There is a particular kind of musician’s shrug in Peter Hammill’s aside: the casual flex of ownership paired with the genuine sense that none of this machinery is really the point. When he notes Marc Almond and “a few people in Europa” covering his work, he’s acknowledging a quiet afterlife many cult artists don’t get. The detail isn’t name-dropping so much as a temperature check: the songs travel, they surface in unexpected scenes, they keep earning attention without being officially “handled.”

Then comes the pivot that matters: “I own all the publishing.” That’s not just bookkeeping. It’s Hammill marking a line between the art and the industry, reminding you he has control over the most leverage-heavy part of the catalog even if he isn’t playing the usual game. The subtext is almost weary: yes, the paperwork is in order; no, he hasn’t built a career around maximizing it.

“It’s never really been addressed” reads like an indictment of how recognition often works in music: if you don’t campaign for your own legacy, the culture won’t do it for you. Hammill frames promotion as “touting,” a word that makes self-advocacy sound faintly grubby, like hawking souvenirs. Contextually, it fits his long-standing position as an influential outsider - revered by musicians, under-leveraged by the mainstream - suggesting a career shaped less by ambition than by a stubborn preference for making work and letting the work fend for itself.