Jaxon:
"We went to Italy for the first time at the beginning of '72. We thought this 6 week tour was a bit risky, and we weren't getting paid much for doing it... On the way to our first concert, which was in a big theatre in Milan, the cars got caught up in this massive crowd. The Army were there, and the Police were trying to control all these thousands of people. We thought it was some massive civil unrest or something, and we realised the gig was probably cancelled. Smoke bombs were being thrown by soldiers into the crowd. 'What's happening here?' we asked. 'It's because Van der Graaf Generator are here', came the reply. And it went on like this for the whole six weeks. We were doing two concerts a day, and always more than sold out. Pawn Hearts went to Number One in the Italian charts for 12 weeks, and was seen as the ultimate album from the ultimate band... After six weeks we arrived back in England absolutely exhausted, but almost immediately we had all these Italian promoters outbidding each other in trying to get us to do another tour. With the increased money on offer, we couldn't resist going back again. So we went back and did another tour, this time doing three gigs a day! And then after we arrived home from that, another promoter got in contact so we went back a third time doing four gigs a day... [Johan's note: I think mr. Jaxon is exaggerating to some extent, but I guess you get the picture.]

...We had done far too many gigs in too much heat without a break, and by the end of June we were overdue recording the next album...Peter left the band. All the constant work, three years without any spare time and never any space between us, always recording or touring, and we were burnt out. Peter said he'd had enough, and resigned from the band." (Ptolemaic Terrascope vol. 2, no. 3, May 1991)