Peter Blegvad

Peter Blegvad

Peter Blegvad (born 14 August 1951) is an American musician, singer-songwriter, and cartoonist. He was a founding member of the avant-rock band Slapp Happy, which later merged briefly with Henry Cow, and has released many solo and collaborative albums since Slapp Happy split up. He is the son of Lenore and Erik Blegvad, who are respectively, a children's book author and illustrator.

Blegvad collaborated with bassist John Greaves (recording Kew. Rhone. with Greaves in 1977) and a much later collection of spoken word pieces set to Greaves' music, Unearthed. In the 1980s, he released a number of commercially unsuccessful albums on the Virgin Records label, including The Naked Shakespeare and Knights Like This, both of which show the influence of external producers with fulsome and contemporary instrumentation. By contrast, Downtime, an independent release in the late 1980s features mainly very simple demos, often recorded cheaply in professional studios' "downtime". King Strut and Other Stories (Virgin, 1990) is a collection of short stories set to simply-arranged, professionally-produced music played in many cases by noted session musicians. The album features XTC's Andy Partridge while Orpheus - The Lowdown (2003) is a whole album in collaboration with Partridge. Many of Blegvad's albums feature former members of Slapp Happy and Henry Cow and Slapp Happy have re-formed on occasion for specific projects.

Blegvad is a deft and literate lyricist whose lyrics frequently feature word games, literary references and complex and extended rhyme schemes. He can also claim credit for one of the world's longest grammatically correct palindromes (from Kew. Rhone.):

Peel's foe not a set animal laminates a tone of sleep.

From 1992 to 1999, The Independent ran Blegvad's strangely surreal, comic strip, Leviathan, which received much critical praise for blending some of the most interesting elements of Krazy Kat with a coming-of-age-esque story akin to Calvin and Hobbes. Some of the strips have been collected in the 2001 volume The Book of Leviathan. Other comics and illustrations by Blegvad have appeared in The Ganzfeld and Ben Katchor's Picture Story 2.

He has also conducted two- and three-week writing courses at Warwick University, England, in association with the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth (NAGTY).

External links

• The Canterbury Website. Peter Blegvad biography.
• Template:Amg.
• Amateur Peter Blegvad's Amateur - a collection of his writing and art.
• Leviathan Archive
• Full Discography