Peter Gabriel

A performance that's not entirely convincing, but not entirely disappointing either. Peter Gabriel, using the excuse of the tracks most voted for by fans on his website, puts together a setlist that ultimately suits him (as he is today) more than it suits fans of his more restless, unsettled worlds. These were the key moments of the show: "No Self Control" (almost re-created in its studio version and far removed from the "So tour" rendition: the crowd, largely unprepared for it, stood there unmoved, and Gabriel seemed put out by it), "Intruder", "Family Snapshot" (as moving as ever), "Lay Your Hands On Me" (an absolute high point, including for the lighting design: a dense, suspended atmosphere), "Secret World". The "no" tracks (yet predictably the ones the crowd loved most): "Steam", "Big Time", "Sledgehammer" (no, enough already!), "Biko" (ditto), "In Your Eyes" (ditto). The tracks that landed somewhere in the middle: "The Rhythm Of The Heat" (Ged Lynch is too "powerful" a drummer to bring out the agility this song demands), "Signal To Noise" (the guitar interplay between Rhodes and Adams is enjoyable, with riffs straight out of the Zeppelin playbook, but there's simply too much pre-recorded material), "Blood Of Eden" (which never really takes off without a strong female counter-vocal: light years away from the wonderful version heard on the "Us" tour), "On The Air" (in its hard-rock guise), "D.I.Y." (which still works better than "On The Air"), "Mother Of Violence" (very delicate, but undone by the voice of young Melanie Gabriel). 

The songs that had already been played on this tour, and that we'd hoped to hear, were quite different ones: "Indigo", "Hundrum", "Moribund The Burgermeister", "I Don't Remember", "We Do What We're Told"… Instead, here we go again with the usual "building crescendo" version of "Solsbury Hill", laid on to satisfy a crowd that probably wouldn't have known its way around the lesser-known corners of Gabriel's catalogue. Why not a full performance of "IV"? Gabriel at his very best is all there. And I've always hoped for a setlist that drew heavily from that record: at least a "Wallflower", at least a "The Family And The Fishing Net"… Instead we got a little game of nostalgia, pulling out one token track from each album.

Gabriel no longer has the strength to play the showman, but the trouble is he keeps trying anyway. The result is a bit clumsy and, ultimately, of questionable taste (how much longer will we have to put up with the Steam "routines"?): why not stay elegantly behind the keyboards instead, and maybe put a bit more effort into that? The band, despite Tony Levin and David Rhodes still operating at a high level, has lost some of its shine and needs to lean more on Ged Lynch's rhythmic wall of sound (who, incidentally, seems anything but a "kindred spirit" to the bald, moustachioed bassist). The usual bland keyboardist of the moment (this time it's Angie Pollok) only manages to conjure up sounds that were filed away in Gabriel's sonic hardware long ago. 

Overall, though, the performance was seriously lacking in terms of dynamic range: as an example, take "No Self Control", where the guitar fails to cut in cleanly when the drums enter. In short, a concert with no real punch. Nor was the setlist put together with much care to avoid the ineffectiveness of certain song sequences.

All things considered, my feelings about this show were, to borrow an English phrase, "mixed emotions". Twenty years on from the magic of the "So tour", things have inevitably changed…

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