Early years Peter Blegvad's life began in America – he was born in New York City and originally raised in Connecticut. When he was 14, the Blegvad family moved to England in 1965, unhappy with the social climate of America following the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the threat posed by the Vietnam draft to Peter and his younger brother Kristoffer. Blegvad was educated at
St Christopher School,
Letchworth, a boarding school where he met his musical collaborator
Anthony Moore. Moore and Blegvad played in various bands during their schooldays, alongside fellow musicians such as
Neil Murray (then a drummer, later a well-known hard rock bass guitarist).
Slapp Happy and Henry Cow In 1972, Blegvad followed the itinerant Moore to
Hamburg, Germany, where the two formed the avant-pop trio
Slapp Happy with
Dagmar Krause. Slapp Happy recorded two albums for Polydor Germany with
krautrock group
Faust as their backing band. Polydor released the first,
Sort Of in 1972, but rejected the second,
Casablanca Moon. Blegvad had got to know Faust due to playing with them at their base in Wümme, and would subsequently go on tour with them in the UK, playing guitar as a live band member. This in turn put him in contact with Faust's tourmates, the
avant-rock group
Henry Cow, with whom he was "soon making all sorts of plans". The rejection of
Casablanca Moon prompted Slapp Happy to relocate to London where they signed up with
Virgin Records and re-recorded
Casablanca Moon, released in 1974 by Virgin as
Slapp Happy. (The original
Casablanca Moon was later released by
Recommended Records as
Acnalbasac Noom in 1980.) In 1974, Slapp Happy merged briefly with Henry Cow, recording two albums in 1975,
Desperate Straights and
In Praise of Learning. Shortly after recording
In Praise of Learning, first Moore and then Blegvad left Henry Cow due to incompatibilities with the other musicians in the group. Blegvad has confessed that the technical demands of Henry Cow's music were beyond him ("It was discovered – not to my surprise – that I actually couldn't play Henry Cow music. The chords and the time signatures were too complicated. And... just generally, Anthony and I felt kinda lost..." In the 1980s, Blegvad released a number of albums on the
Virgin Records label, including
The Naked Shakespeare and
Knights Like This. Although these were commercially unsuccessful, one of Blegvad's songs from this period, "How Beautiful You Are", was covered by
Leo Sayer on the
Have You Ever Been in Love album. The two groups also played together on February 10–11, 2017 at
Cafe Oto in London. On February 24, 2017 Slapp Happy, without Faust, performed at Mt. Rainier Hall,
Shibuya in Tokyo. In 2007, his song “Daughter” was covered by
Loudon Wainwright III for the end credits of
Judd Apatow’s comedy,
Knocked Up. Work as cartoonist, educator, radio dramatist, etc. 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. In 2013 the book was published as
Le livre de Leviathan in French and received the "Prix Révélation" at the 41st
Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2014. 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), and the new University of Warwick venture for gifted and creative children,
International Gateway for Gifted Youth (IGGY). In 2011, Atlas Publishing (trading as "The London Institute of 'Pataphysics") published Blegvad's
The Bleaching Stream, described as an "interview format biography." Blegvad's work for
BBC Radio 3 includes numerous "eartoons" for the weekly poetry strand The Verb, and a number of radiophonic dramas with
Langham Research Centre and with
Iain Chambers. These include
guest+host=ghost, featuring
Nick Cave;
Use It Or Lose It which won a
Radio Academy Award in 2012;
Chinoiserie;
Eschatology, starring
Harriet Walter and Guy Paul; and
The Impossible Book (2016). His 2015 drama with
Iain Chambers for
Radio Australia,
The Eternal Moment starring
John Ramm and Emma Powell, was shortlisted for the 2015
Prix Europa. ==Discography==