Gabriel, Peter

Gabriel, Peter, the genesis and genius of all that’s good in progressive music (b. Surrey England, May 13, 1950). By going with his best creative instincts, Peter Gabriel stayed on the cutting edge of popular music, modern but always accessible, from the 1960s with the group Genesis to his interest in world-music artists in the 1990s. Enamored of soul stars like Otis Redding and James Brown, in 1966, Gabriel started writing songs with pianist Tony Banks and drummer Chris Stewart at the Charterhouse School. After graduation, they added guitarists Mike Rutherford and Anthony Phillips and started playing around England as Genesis. Their show featured Gabriel’s increasingly Byzantine theatrics and musical development from near-Celtic to more complex, orchestrally textured pomp rock.

After the success of the 1974 album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Gabriel left Genesis. His early solo recordings were more direct, less portentous, and more humorous than his previous work with the art-rock group. Two years in the making, the first Peter Gabriel album (his first four albums were self-titled), his solo debut, featured “Solisbury Hill” (#68) and even an extended musical joke, “Excuse Me,” with its jug-band-meets-barbershop-quartet sound. Even “Down the Dolce Vita,” featuring a tasteful part performed by the London Symphony Orch., avoided getting bogged down in its own pretensions.

The second edition of Peter Gabriel (#48) came out in 1978 at the height of the British punk movement. Following the punk aesthetic, the album made a direct reference to the “do-it-yourself” punk ethic on the underground hit “DIY.” Using a core band of Tony Levin on bass, Robert Fripp on guitar, Jerry Marotta on drums, Roy Bittan on piano, and Larry Fast on synths, PG2 is lean, but lacked the loud, snotty edge of 1978-era punk. Instead it channeled the energy of punk and started turning it into new wave.

These proto-new wave influences combined with a new infatuation with music from developing nations on the third edition of Peter Gabriel With its striking Hipgnosis-designed cover of his melting face, the album sported some heavyweight songs. “Games without Frontiers” became a Top Five English hit. “I Don’t Remember” and “Biko” (the first known recording to combine Surdo drums with bagpipes) helped make PG3 one of the most cutting-edge slices of rock released in 1980 (maybe ever). Add to this the advent and rise of MTV, which offered Gabriel’s visual histrionics a new outlet. He created memorable clips for “Games…” and “I Don’t Remember.” The album rose to #22 in the U.S. and topped the English charts.

The fourth and final edition of Peter Gabriel (which his American record company called Security, without his sanction) was not as accessible as PG3. His densest aural testament since Genesis’s The Lamb, the alburn reflected Gabriel’s growing interest in non- Western music. Ethiopian pipes ran through ’The Family and the Fishing Net,” The Ekome Dance Company added intense African drumming to the climax of “Rhythm of the Heat.” “Shock the Monkey” garnered Gabriel his first Top 40 U.S. hit (#29) with its striking video.

The 1982 tour brought all of Gabriel’s solo repertoire to the stage and was recorded for the Plays Live double-album set. The record works on several levels, as a greatest hits collection and as a document of Gabriel’s live sound (although he does admit to tinkering with it in the studio after the fact). That same year Gabriel’s fascination with non- Western music spawned the World of Music and Dance (WOMAD) festival with performers from all over the world. Like much of what Gabriel does, WOMAD was ahead of its time, attracting lots of critical praise and very few paying customers.

Still, in the three years between the live album and his next rock project, Gabriel released but one album, the soundtrack for the film Birdy. This recording uses many of the same musicians from Security, including Fast, Levin, Marotta, and the Ekome Drummers, as well as the music from previously released (he calls them “recycled”) tracks. The alternately ambient and aggressive new material complements the recycled work.

Nearly five years after the release of Security came the follow-up, So. What Security accomplished critically, So attained popularly, garnering Gabriel something that longtime fans would have thought impossible: a charttopping single, “Sledgehammer.” Even more accessible than PG3, the hits, especially, hark back to Gabriel’s affection for American soul. Both “Sledgehammer” and the other Top Ten hit, “Big Time,” were downright funky, while “In Your Eyes” became a standard at hip weddings. In lieu of theatricality, Gabriel put together one of the most challenging and funny music videos ever, a claymation epic, for “Sledgehammer.” The video took home Best Video and eight other MTV video awards. The album peaked at #2 on the charts, and went triple platinum.

So also expanded on Gabriel’s interest in pan-global music, featuring international performers of note that were largely unknown to western audiences like Youssou N’Dour, Manu Katche, and L. Shankar. After So, Gabriel spent much of his time with these artists. He started his own state-of-the-art studios, Real World, and a label of the same name to go with it. He brought artists like N’Dour and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to ears around the world, making stars of both. His work on the soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ, released as Passion, featured Vatche Houseprian and Antrianik Askarian playing Armenian doudouk, alongside the double Indian violin of Shankar, and vocals by Malian star Baaba Maal as well as N’Dour. This music represents Gabriel’s most thorough fusion of electronic and acoustic elements and is remarkable for the fusion of North African and Asian musics with Western ideas. The album won Gabriel a Best New Age Grammy and peaked at #60.

Capitalizing on the success of So, a compilation of “the best” of Gabriel’s first three albums—Shaking the Tree—came out, went gold, and peaked at #48.

Meanwhile, Gabriel’s personal life suffered as his popularity peaked. His marriage to childhood sweetheart Jill Moore (daughter of the Queen’s private secretary) fell apart. He chronicled this on his next album, Us. In terms of sales, it picked up where So left off, entering the charts at #2. In the eight years since So, however, a lot had changed. Despite more remarkable videos, the single “Digging in the Dirt” didn’t break the Top 40, and “Steam,” a lukewarm rehash of “Sledgehammer,” peaked at #32.

Since then, Gabriel has kept busy on a variety of projects. He released a live album, put out several multimedia endeavors, and recorded non-Western artists extensively for his Real World label. He created music for Britain’s Millenium Dome and worked with his old school chums from Genesis on a track for a greatest hits record. The turn of the millennium finds Gabriel releasing his first new album in eight years, entitled OVO: Millennium Show.

Discography

Peter Gabriel (1977); Peter Gabriel (1978); Peter Gabriel (1980); Peter Gabriel (aka Security; 1982); Plays Live (1983); Birdy (soundtrack; 1985); So (1986); Passion: Music for the Last Temptation of Christ (soundtrack; 1989); Shaking the Tree: 16 Golden Greats (1990); Revisited (1992); Us (1992); Secret World Live (1994); OVO: Millennium Show (2000).

Writings

P.G.: In His Own Words (N.Y., 1994).

Bibliography

R. Star, Peter Gabriel (1988); Spencer Bright, Peter Gabriel: An Authorized Biography (London, 1988); C. Welch, The Secret Life of Peter Gabriel (N.Y., 1998).

—Hank Bordowitz