Peter Gabriel - Between fairy tales and Real World

As leader of the Genesis, he had managed to create a distinctive form of theatrical, strongly dramatic progressive art-rock; as a solo artist, Peter Gabriel proved to be just as formidable, developing an ambitious exploration of the integration between rock, electronics and world music, which led him to create innovative, experimental records destined to leave a deep mark on later generations. An artist engaged in social and political causes as well as music, and the author of theatrical works and shows, Gabriel also helped, through his Real World label, introduce audiences to “ethnic” musicians from every corner of the globe, with particular attention to the Third World.

Having left Genesis right at the peak of their fame, with Phil Collins ready to take over as frontman and leader, Gabriel began his solo adventure with his self-titled 1977 album. Simply titled Gabriel I but also known as “Car” – an unofficial nickname later endorsed by Gabriel himself – the record was produced by Bob Ezrin and embellished by star musicians such as his crimson majesty Robert Fripp and Tony Levin, a key collaborator of Yes and the aforementioned King Crimson. On the gorgeous cover (designed by Hipgnosis), Gabriel is pictured in a car in the rain, an elegant, melancholy image in keeping with the spirit of the record.

Musically, some traces of Genesis remain, with solemn, forceful passages, but overall the sound shifts, veering towards new, less baroque electronic horizons, with Gabriel's gorgeous, gloomy voice always front and centre.

The folk ballad "Solsbury Hill" alludes, indirectly, to the story of his farewell to his former bandmates: it recounts a spiritual meditation experience Gabriel had on the hill of the same name in Somerset, where King Arthur defeated the Saxons. According to the musician himself, the song is about loss, about giving something up. More properly rock are the epic "Slowburn", with searing guitars and tonal shifts still reminiscent of prog, and the aggressive "Modern Love", where Gabriel's vocals grow dirtier and more vibrant as he sings of telescopic umbrellas, Lady Godiva and romance. "Excuse Me", on the other hand, veers into pure divertissement, echoing David Bowie's "Join The Gang". And while "Waiting For The Big One" is a barroom blues transfigured by Gabriel's sophisticated sensibility, "Down The Dolce Vita" revisits prog atmospheres, with fanfares, organ chimes and an interlude marked by cuckoo clocks.

But the real masterstroke comes at the very end: "Here Comes The Flood", branded by Fripp's immortal guitar, is a moving ballad, with a faint organ backing supporting Gabriel's soft voice, until it explodes in the chorus: “Lord, here comes the flood/ We'll say goodbye to flesh and blood”. The arrival of the flood and of death thus transforms into an ascension, a liberation from earthly bodies, and the vocal becomes contrite and poignant, yet joyful at the same time.

The leader of King Crimson is also the inspiration behind the second album, Gabriel II, also known as “Scratch” (from the cover depicting Gabriel scratching at his own image with his nails). A darker, more experimental work than its predecessor, it marks the abandonment of progressive sonorities in favour of a leaner, more urban sound, with distorted vocals and abrasive riffs. No track became a hit, but there are plenty of interesting moments, helped along by the use of the Fairlight, the synth-computer that characterises much of the arrangements. A sense of desolation and powerlessness dominates, paired with an inner tension well exemplified by "Exposure", where Fripp's corrosive guitar riff (enriched by his famous Frippertronics) grows ever more obsessive and unbearable.

Gabriel's softer, more sentimental side comes to the fore on the fragile ballad "Mother Of Violence", which started out as a Christmas song written together with his partner Jill for their daughters and for the local church, and which turns into a poignant hymn against every form of violence. Equally moving is the melancholy of "Indigo", where Gabriel, accompanied only by piano, reflects on the temptation to give up, to abandon life, overwhelmed by disappointment and frustration (“Alright, I'm giving up the fight”). It's a theme he would return to a few years later, in the epic duet "Don't Give Up" with Kate Bush.

But there are other rhythmic excursions too, such as "On The Air", "D.I.Y." (verging on hardcore) and "Animal Magic", while "A Wonderful Day In A One-Way World" takes an ironic look at consumer society, mixing reggae and funk with bizarre keyboard sounds.

The high point of the album, however, is the complex "White Shadow", which opens with a long instrumental prelude, driven by Levin's pulsing bass amid muted drums and keyboards, before building to a blistering guitar solo from Fripp. Curiously, on the vinyl edition, the song - placed at the end of side one - continued onto the spiral run-out grooves that close the record and onto the closing circle, forcing listeners to lift the tonearm off the groove themselves.

Closing out one of Gabriel's darkest records is the horror-tinged fable, for sax and piano, of "Home Sweet Home": it tells the story of a couple who spend all their money on an apartment in a high-rise, which soon turns out to be a bleak family prison, until one day the protagonist comes home from work to discover his wife has killed herself, taking their son with her; he then decides to squander the insurance money at the casino, but wins, and is thus able to afford a "home sweet home" out in the countryside.

The second chapter of the Archangel's solo saga divides fans. It's a bold "scratch" against all the unwritten laws of the music business. Some are left baffled, while others - given the experimental vein running through it - go so far as to consider it the work closest to Genesis's own labyrinthine sonic experiments, particularly those of "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway".

Having set up headquarters in an old villa near Bath, Gabriel embarks on a new era of formidable creative freedom, experimenting with new ways of making music. The first fruit of this is one of his absolute masterpieces, Gabriel III (1980), also known as "Melt" because of its cover art, showing the musician's face dissolving. For the occasion, the former Genesis frontman enlists guitarist David Rhodes, who would go on to accompany him for years, and brings in producer Steve Lillywhite at the console, the new rising star of the UK scene, already behind the boards for Ultravox and Xtc and soon to collaborate with U2. Some will also read a sense of continuity into the choice, since Lillywhite was a disciple of Brian Eno, who had himself contributed some effects to "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway".

The melodies are still there, and this time the songs are all sharply focused, but the emphasis is placed above all on rhythm. Alongside a Paia drum machine, two exceptional drummers shine: Jerry Marotta and former bandmate Phil Collins. The latter uses a drum and percussion set completely stripped of cymbals and, together with sound engineer Hugh Padgham, develops a new sound - hard, powerful and compressed - resorting for the first time (on "Intruder") to gated reverb, a distinctive effect on the drum's reverb that he would later reuse on his immortal hit "In The Air Tonight". Adding an extra pinch of unpredictability is also the Fairlight sampler, which allows Gabriel to process his sounds and create entirely new ones.

The result is a collection of electronic songs steeped in a bleak, pessimistic vision of humanity's future, with themes of alienation and mental illness recurring throughout. Opening the album is "Intruder", a shadowy thriller on the emotions of a house burglar, driven by Collins's obsessive drumming. A tense atmosphere that carries over into the following "No Self-Control", with the Genesis drummer again to the fore, backed by minimalist touches such as the xylophone. Percussion, combined with distorted guitars, synthesizer and Fairlight, still dominates on "I Don't Remember", an unsettling reflection on amnesia and the loss of self, while the splendid ballad "Family Snapshot" - based on "An Assassin's Diary", the account by Arthur Bremmer, the man who attempted to kill segregationist politician George Wallace - obsessively digs into the psyche and tormented childhood of its protagonist, amid the tolling of electric piano (the Yamaha CP-70) and jagged sax, confirming Gabriel's masterful gift for building tension and cutting straight into the most intimate emotions.

No less stirring is "Games Without Frontiers", a dazed nursery rhyme that pokes fun at humanity's childish behaviour and at the "war without tears" of the famous TV format "Jeux Sans Frontieres" ('Games Without Frontiers'), set against filtered synth sounds and relentless drum-machine patterns, with the icing on the cake being the eerie, piercingly high vocals of Kate Bush, in her first collaboration with her friend Peter.

And while "Not One Of Us" and "Lead A Normal Life" are two further bitter reflections on xenophobia and mental distress, the closing track could not have been more epic: Gabriel takes to the pulpit to deliver his poignant ode to "Biko", martyr of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, a dry-eyed, lump-in-the-throat requiem, enriched by a strikingly varied array of ethnic instrumentation (martial drums, African choir, Scottish bagpipes, etc.). A choir singing in Xhosa (Biko's own language) chants Yihla Moja ("come, spirit"), while Gabriel narrates the protagonist's nightmare ("When I try to sleep at night I can only dream in red"), closing the circle with the simplest and most moving of funeral laments: "The man is dead, the man is dead". A live version of the track, recorded in July 1987, would later be used in the soundtrack of Richard Attenborough's film "Cry Freedom", about the life of Stephen Biko, while in South Africa the song remained banned until the end of the regime.

Gabriel's third act is the decisive one: with "Melt" comes major international success, and the former flower-costumed singer transforms into one of the most powerful and credible political rock stars on the international scene.

The following IV - which has gone down in history also as Security - is instead Gabriel's personal contribution to the struggles for identity, freedom and equality being fought across half the world. And its emblematic track is "San Jacinto", an imaginary place, an artistic fiction - just as world music itself is, according to the musician from Chobham. An alchemy forged in the studio, where distant places and cultures converge, where age-old traditions meet the latest, most futuristic breakthroughs in music technology. The goal is not to depict reality. As Paul Klee put it: "Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible what is not always so". Unveiling - that is the aim of "San Jacinto" and the other abstract geographies of "IV". The holistic spirituality of Native Americans, the cultural emptiness of steakhouse America, the anguish of the battle between two invading armies fighting over a land that belongs to neither: all these images merge in the hermetic verses of "San Jacinto", conveying the full tragedy of an ancient civilization wiped out in an instant, swept away like the bison from its prairies. So that "I hold the line" of the chorus - the anguished voice of the Apache who feels his senses fading after a snakebite - becomes that of the soldier who knows he is doomed yet resists with all his strength, and suddenly becomes the voice of an entire Native American nation desperately trying to keep itself alive.

"Wallflower", which tackles the theme of the Desaparecidos of South America, follows in the vein of "Biko" from the previous album and chimes with the similar activist efforts of Paul Simon on "Graceland". But its coda goes well beyond general political solidarity; it is an artistic manifesto, the moving statement of intent from a musician who refuses to resign himself to the decimation of the world's cultural wealth at the hands of Western society: "Though you may disappear, you're not forgotten here/ And I will say to you, I will do what I can do". That was 1982: two years earlier, Gabriel had launched WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance), an independent festival promoting cultural diversity through music. In 1989, he would found Real World Records, still today home to a long series of projects bringing together artists from all over the world and every musical background. For Gabriel, saving a tradition does not mean sealing it off in a reservation where it can be preserved just as it once was. On the contrary, it means letting it live in the present, giving it the chance to engage with other traditions. And even to project it into the future. That is why Real World releases are never more or less faithful reconstructions of some lost, original style, but bold musical explorations that start from traditional backgrounds while embracing the very latest expressive tools. And for the same reason, "IV" itself is right at the forefront of sonic experimentation, both in its instrumentation and in its compositional structures.

Among the first buyers of the hugely expensive Fairlight CMI computer/sampler, Gabriel makes pioneering use of it on "IV". Essentially the first commercial synthesizer to combine additive synthesis, 8-bit processors and advanced numerical computing techniques (fast Fourier transform), the Fairlight is the absolute star of the record. Rather than using it as a luxury "orchestra simulator" or as just another galactic keyboard monster to add to his post-'70s arsenal, however, Gabriel pushes the instrument into completely uncharted musical territory. The Fairlight becomes a "miracle machine" capable of turning into music what had never been music before: noises, breaths, crashes, every kind of draught and clatter. A film from the era shows the artist wandering over a hill of industrial scrap armed with a microphone, delighting in capturing the strangest sounds, later assembled into the feverish mantra of "The Rhythm Of The Heat".

"IV" also develops innovations already introduced on the previous album. "I Have The Touch", "The Family And The Fishing Net" and "Lay Your Hands On Me" refine the use of the gated drum sound devised for "Intruder" (a combination of reverb, compression and noise gate that gives the kick drum a particularly "dark" and powerful effect), while "Kiss Of Life" extends the technique with further filters to obtain ever more "tailor-made" drum sounds. The album's sound is made even more dynamic and shape-shifting by bassist Tony Levin's use of the Chapman stick, a ten-string instrument played percussively using the tapping technique.

The atmospheres of "IV" are thus a world away from the glittering refinement of other bands that were, at the time, also dabbling with synths like the Fairlight. On the contrary, they are restless, molten, haunting. The nervous mood is heightened by the use of odd time signatures ("Kiss Of Life", with its chorus in 10/4), disorienting Middle-Eastern-derived minor scales, and interlocking parts closely related to the King Crimson of "Discipline" and the David Bowie of "Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps)". Everything seems geared toward evoking tension, sending shivers down the listener's spine. What Peter Gabriel brings to the surface on "IV" is a deep soul, an atavistic spirit that breathes through the artist's voice, the synthetic, cavernous cry lurking behind "The Family And The Fishing Net", and that can be felt in the backing vocals of Peter Hammill on "Shock The Monkey" and "Lay Your Hands on Me". This is the true object of the "unveiling": the collective unconscious, the "shadow" that, according to Carl Jung, unites and accompanies every human being. The opening "The Rhythm Of The Heat" takes its cue precisely from an experience the Swiss psychologist had with tribal percussionists; its working title was, in fact, "Jung in Africa".

"IV" is not just a celebration of humanity's cultural richness, nor merely an unmasking of Western superiority complexes: it's a portrait of our species through its customs and unconscious reactions - an animal devoured by instinct in "Shock The Monkey", craving the trust of the pack and physical contact in "I Have The Touch" and "Lay Your Hands On Me", blindly trusting intricate marriage rituals in "The Family And The Fishing Net", possessed by music in "The Rhythm Of The Heat", seized by trance in "Kiss Of Life", led to paradise by pain, natural visions and crystalline synths in "San Jacinto".

Gabriel's fourth album will sell millions of copies, breaking into the American market – where it will be released under the title "Security" – thanks to the single "Shock The Monkey". It will open the doors to the world music boom and exert an enormous influence over many other musical territories thanks to its revolutionary use of instrumentation. But its uniqueness lies elsewhere. More than the lyrics, even more than the sounds and structures, it's perhaps a single image that symbolizes it most effectively: the singer's face painted with the features of a monkey, as throughout the long tour that accompanied the album's release. A bestial mask that writhes, moans, screams, exults at the sight of its own kind, in a tangle of uncontrolled emotions that, more than anything else, reveals the deep, common, immortal nature of our roots.

It's during this period that Gabriel also begins composing film scores. One of the most ambitious is the one recorded for Birdy by Alan Parker (1985), together with Jon Hassell (one of the founding fathers of world music), Larry Fast, David Rhodes and Tony Levin.

In 1986, however, his return to the studio is another disarming move from the former Genesis leader. By now credited as a prophet of political rock and uncompromising world music, Gabriel starts flirting with mainstream pop, backed in the producer's chair by Chris Hughes and Daniel Lanois. And once again – needless to say – it's a triumph. So shows how an artist's depth and originality aren't measured only in their chosen field, but can be a gift precious enough to be reapplied even beyond the most unpredictable frontiers. Tackling catchy, melodic, appealing pop songs, England's Archangel proves once again incapable of producing anything banal or predictable. Just listen to the opening "Red Rain" to be convinced: a dark prophecy wrapped in dense layers of electronics, with the stormy drumming of ex-Police man Stewart Copeland and a sound never so complex and layered, one that its author would struggle to translate into a live setting on subsequent tours (the lyrics, meanwhile, recount a new nightmarish adventure of Mozo, the wandering stranger who had appeared on the singer's first two solo works).

Is the hit "Sledgehammer" too easy a target? Maybe, but not with that rhythm'n'blues inflection that makes all the difference (inspired by the music of Otis Redding, with his trumpeter Wayne Jackson playing the horns), with that bamboo Shakuhachi flute thrown in to disorient, and with a beat that is itself a hammer, for an all-too-explicit sexual proposition ("I wanna be your sledgehammer... come on help me do"). And what sets "Big Time" apart from any ordinary chart hit? Perhaps that syncopated rhythm, careening wildly, with Levin pounding the strings of his fretless bass while Marotta strikes them with drumsticks; or that unsettling, insistent voice, or those sonic twists ready to wrongfoot you behind the simplest of refrains (alternating between A minor in the chorus and A major in the verses), that lyric which is a cynical, irreverent fable about success. Not to mention the videos, where Gabriel remains firmly at the cutting edge, producing sped-up, disorienting bonsai clips that draw on all the most advanced animation tricks of the era, with David Daniels's claymation creations.

Then there's always the more contrite, intimate Gabriel, the one who sits at the piano to sing the desolate "Mercy Street", and the one who embraces Kate Bush in the memorable duet "Don't Give Up" amid rolling drum patterns; the roles are clearly defined: he plays the defeated, disillusioned man ("I am a man whose dreams have all deserted... no-one wants you when you lose"), she embodies the strong woman, a safe harbor of comfort and encouragement (“You worry too much/ It’s going to be alright/ When times get rough/ You can fall back on us/ Don’t give up/ Please don’t give up”). A romantic exchange that conceals a social subtext: a critique of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, blamed for causing a rise in unemployment. A white-hot intensity that is renewed in the grooves of "In Your Eyes", a ballad where love for one's woman mingles with love for God – as per African tradition – for a polyphonic gem enriched by the vocals of Youssou N'Dour and Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, contributions as valuable as the dazed, otherworldly ones of Laurie Anderson on the paranoid "This Is The Picture".

Electronic technology, pop melodies and ethnic flavors intertwine and merge in an album that will remain a pop institution of the decade, cementing Gabriel's chart success too (certified five times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America and three times platinum by the British Phonographic Industry, with the single "Sledgehammer" climbing all the way to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100).

Sealing a magical season, another masterpiece arrives, in the form of a new film score, Passion (1989), which collects the music for Martin Scorsese's film "The Last Temptation of Christ". A syncretic, monumental work, in which Gabriel takes on the role of a world-music Brian Eno, drawing on a wealth of folk sounds, mostly originating from Asia and Africa, and reworking them in the studio. Musicians from far-flung countries such as Pakistan, Turkey, India, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Bahrain, New Guinea, Morocco, Senegal and Ghana contribute to the record. Particularly notable are Shankar's violin, Kudsi Erguner's Turkish flute, Hossam Ramzy's tabla, Fatala's percussion, the Armenian duduk of Vatche Housepian and Antranik Askarian, and the vocals of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Youssou N'Dour and Baaba Maal.

The result of such heterogeneity is a Babel of sounds and (poly)rhythms, with Gabriel as its architect. Many tracks are simply reworkings of Armenian, Egyptian and Kurdish themes hundreds of years old. Yet nothing here sounds familiar; if anything, the impression is of witnessing a gigantic futurist musical: the electronic pulses and "ambient" textures manage to transform these timeless melodies into the ideal soundtrack for a journey into the world music yet to come.

The album is built as a crescendo, an ideal ascent from the most unbridled pagan tribalism up to Arab and Eastern mysticism, before arriving at the solemnity of the Christian Passion. In the film, Scorsese wanted to portray the struggle between the human and divine sides of Christ in a harsh, provocative way. The tracks of Passion tell this conflict through a spectacular alternation of mystical meditations and martial symphonies, raga-tribalism and torrential jungle dances, Arabic litanies and mournful Morricone-esque melodies.

The album opens, and right away... "The Feeling Begins", as the opening track reveals. Credit goes to its mysterious opening synth drones, followed by a gradual accumulation of instruments: octobans, surdo, skins (all courtesy of Manny Elias), but also tabla and cymbals, guitar and double violin (played, of course, by the extraordinary Shankar); the doudouk, meanwhile, is entrusted with interpreting a traditional Armenian melody (renamed in English "The Wind Subsides"). More than the start of an album, it feels like a caravan of dervishes setting off on a journey into the desert.

The garden of "Gethsemane" is the place of prayer: a brief, one-minute-25-second interlude of chamber music, taking the first steps of a long mystical ascent; Gabriel's virtuosity here lies in building an entire piece out of electronically altered flute samples. And while the ghostly Arabic lament of "Of These, Hope" vibrates above all with Massambla Dlop's "talking drum", simulating a ride through the desert, the piece "Lazarus Raised" celebrates the miracle of resurrection over the celestial notes of a traditional Kurdish melody for duduk and tenbur (dedicated to the unhappy love of a young woman for the legendary warrior Bave Seyro). Gabriel, for the occasion, tries his hand at the evocative Akai piano. It almost feels like watching Pink Floyd play inside a mosque.

The mystical, trance-like atmosphere is soon broken by the sonic storm of "A Different Drum" – perhaps the most "Gabriel-esque" of the tracks – with the former Genesis leader's majestic baritone intoning a kind of jungle chant, surrounded by organ drones, dense tribal percussion and exotic vocals (courtesy of David Sancious). It's a classic example of Gabriel's ethno-dance: an exhilarating cross-pollination between the modern technological pulse of the West and the "primitive" rhythms of deep Africa. It is instead in a refined minimalism, worthy of a world-music Glass, that the appeal of "Zaar" must be sought, a tender piece resting on a piano backdrop, woven through a web of tambourines, duf, tabla, cymbals and triangle, and subtly threaded with the restless strings of Shankar's violin. The "tribal" techno-funk of "Troubled" leads into the mantra-like hymn of "Open", an improvisation between Shankar's violin and Gabriel's piano with a psychedelic flavor, helped along by Shankar's own disorienting vocals. We're now in the territory of mystical trance, as confirmed by the following "Before Night Falls", dominated by Kudsi Erguner's ney (the Turkish "oblique" flute).

"With This Love" marks one of the album's most moving moments: a poignant oboe melody, worthy of Morricone at his best, magically comes to life, while the embroidery of Shankar's double violin intertwines with the piano and the Fairlight, Gabriel's synth-computer that lends the arrangements a delicately electronic timbre. We're not far removed here from the most evocative pieces of baroque music. Through a sandstorm marked out by Moroccan percussion and tabla ("Sandstorm"), we arrive at another station on the via crucis of Passion: "Stigmata", in which only Mahmoud Tabrizi Zadeh's kemenche and Gabriel's voice create a "cosmic" suspense.

The album now ascends toward its mystical peak: the title track, which celebrates the Passion of Christ with the solemnity of a requiem and the mysticism of an Indian mantra. Gabriel's muezzin-like chant joins Nusrat Fateh's solemn soprano and N'Dour's unmistakable vocals, while Hassell's menacing trumpet, the tight cadence of Brazilian percussion and the dark interweaving of keyboards all help heighten the sense of universal liturgy. The ghostly choir of the reprise of "With This Love" can then seem like the voices of the women mourning the dead Christ, awaiting resurrection. Kudsi Erguner's ney flute and Gabriel's synthesizers keep alive the fragile sonic sketch of "Wall Of Breath", which borders on the most rarefied ambient music, before the jolt of "The Promise Of Shadows". The hint of rhythm in this last track turns into a percussion solo on the obsessive "Disturbed", where African drums and tabla duel it out, pushing Shankar's violin into the background.

But the time for mourning is over, the resurrection is coming, and it's celebrated with the utmost solemnity by the symphony of "It Is Accomplished", with almost Wagnerian cadences and a triumph of instruments (from percussion to tambourine, from arghul to Hammond organ, from bass to keyboards). The work fades slowly away on the languid whistle of "Bread And Wine", the listener barely able to notice that Peter Gabriel's musical miracle has just come to an end.

Passion, which marks Gabriel's debut on his own Real World label, will captivate critics the world over, win a Grammy for "Best New Age Album" of the year, and even manage to chart in the US and Britain. Momix, the dancer-illusionist company directed by American choreographer Moses Pendleton, will turn it into the soundtrack of a striking stage show. This work will spark the rebirth of Gabriel-branded world music, which over the years will go hand in hand with producing a multitude of records for Third World musicians and a series of international projects, such as Womad, created to give visibility in the West to the traditions of the world's lesser-known places, and turned into an annual, traveling event.

The following album, Us (1992), is a more intimate, personal record, the bitter fruit of Gabriel's failed relationships, including his divorce from wife Jill, followed by his turbulent relationships with Rosanna Arquette and Sinéad O'Connor. The "Us" of the title refers then to romantic relationships, but also to universal ones, among all human beings in every corner of the planet. The sound, meanwhile, blends the technological pop-funk of So with the ethnic syncretism of Passion, thanks to the by-now-consolidated partnership with Lanois in the producer's chair and an all-star cast, with Tony Levin (bass), David Rhodes (guitar) and Manu Katché (drums) forming the band's backbone, and a host of guests taking turns on the tracks: Brian Eno, Shankar, Sinéad O'Connor, Peter Hammill, plus a multitude of folk musicians from Argentina, Egypt, Senegal, Russia, Kenya and Turkey.

"Come Talk To Me" opens the album with O'Connor's shimmering voice joining Gabriel in a heartfelt plea addressed to his daughter Melanie, who had stopped speaking to him in the wake of his divorce: an invitation to release their shared pain together and reconcile. The result is a track of extraordinary power and emotional intensity, lightly spiced by an exotic instrument like the duduk. Sinéad's prized voice again blends with Gabriel's on the aching ballad "Blood Of Eden", where the evocation of the Garden where it all began serves a reflection on the inevitable, indispensable union between man and woman (the song would also appear, in a different version, on the extraordinary soundtrack to Wim Wenders' film "Until the End of the World"). This is a suffering Gabriel, in need of love ("Love To Be Loved", with Eno as guest star), his voice grown even denser and more solemn: pure pathos seeping under the skin in the open-hearted confession of "Washing Of The Water", a cathartic piano-and-voice cleansing in which water embodies a yearning for complete purification.

There's no shortage, however, of the usual rhythmic jolts, like the funky "Steam", natural offspring of "Sledgehammer", its explosive energy renewed on the single "Digging In The Dirt", a blistering electric number with Hammill on backing vocals, which continues the work of purification by "digging in the dirt" to sweep away every trace of evil hidden in our souls: "Like a dog digging deeper and deeper, layer after layer of dirt is removed until the only thing that remains is the devil in all of us." Still in uptempo mode, the nursery-rhyme cadence of "Kiss That Frog" – inspired by Bruno Bettelheim's child-psychology book "The Uses Of Enchantment" – draws subtle parallels between fairy tales and sexuality, reaffirming the conviction that anything is possible if backed by iron will, while the mini-symphony of "Secret World" closes the album with a quiet reflection on the past, urging silent listening (the track would also lend its title to the hugely successful tour that followed, which also stopped in Italy).

Fusing the excellent pop achievements of So with an international ethno-folk spirit born of years of encounters and cross-pollination around the world, Gabriel hits another major milestone with Us, consolidating his singular electro-rock songwriting, unmatched anywhere for complexity and power. Perhaps slightly underrated at the time, it would in time become one of the undisputed classics of the Nineties.

In the years that followed, Gabriel focused mainly on developing the Real World project, until 2000 brought Ovo, a grandiose rock work spanning a wide range of styles and instruments: from percussion to synthesizers, from Indian violins to techno rhythms, from Celtic melodies to flashes of industrial music. It's a futuristic fable in which the characters mirror humanity's ambition to master nature, even at the cost of destroying it. Three generations of a family move through an undefined span of time, depicted across three stages: prehistoric, industrial and technological. "Ovo" is the family's final heir, the one entrusted with the task of achieving balance between technological knowledge and moral knowledge. An easily digestible fable with environmentalist aims, in which it's the music that gives the story depth and perspective.

Alongside Gabriel, notable voices and musicians include Richie Havens, the unforgettable Woodstock performer, Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins, Neneh Cherry and Paul Buchanan, singer of Blue Nile, as well as Jocelyn Pook, who wrote some of the music for the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut", and the Egyptian ney-flute master Kudsi Erguner.

The hugely anticipated Up (2002) largely disappoints both audience and critical expectations. The single "The Barry Williams Show" is a bland little tune, almost a faded copy of the glorious "Shock The Monkey". But even the experiments scattered throughout the album miss the mark. "Sky Blue", for instance, is as catchy as it is predictable; "My Head Sound Like That" and "More Than This", however meticulously arranged, fail to stir any real emotion.

Better, if anything, are the opening "Darkness", which starts out with a King Crimson-style march before giving way to a lovely piano-and-voice melody, "Growing Up", where the mellotron introduces a contagious rhythmic progression, the two ballads "No Way Out" and "I Grieve", intense and melancholic in Gabriel's finest tradition, and finally "Signal To Noise", the album's "ethnic" peak, which manages to wed the Eastern flavors of Passion (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's vocals are captivating) with the most epic, theatrical symphonic writing. Yet the impression remains that Gabriel tried to make up for a compositional shortfall, already evident on the previous Ovo, with painstakingly meticulous arrangements.

In 2008, released under the name Peter Gabriel, Big Blue Ball is the result of three years of jams, sessions and encounters that took place in the early Nineties under the English composer's supervision. Passing through the Real World studios was a roster of artists signed to Gabriel's label alongside a fair number of prominent names from world music and related fields.

The album had sat on the shelf through a long process of reworking and production. The result of fifteen years of tinkering is a record that feels contrived, if not outright kitsch, joining Ovo and "The Imagined Village" on the list of recent all-star disappointments put out by Real World.

Many tracks bet everything on sound, neglecting the compositional side. Among the rest, a few things hold up. There's "Habibe" (Natacha Atlas, Hossam Ramzy, Neil Sparke), a seductive arabesque of faint harmonic mists, strings and chill-out pulses. "Exit Through You" (Joseph Arthur, Peter Gabriel, Karl Wallinger) is a pleasant funky nursery rhyme with the usual atmospheric/emphatic break. Then there's Sinéad O'Connor singing "Everything Comes From You", a counting-rhyme that evolves into morbid romantic brooding and fades out on an obsessive vocal call-and-response. Billy Cobham, Jah Wobble and Vernon Reid, on the other hand, can do little to salvage the tracks they appear on.

While waiting for the new album of original material, early 2010 brought Scratch My Back. It's a covers album: twelve tracks by as many artists, who would in turn commit to recording a version of a Gabriel song. Some choices come as no surprise: Paul Simon, David Bowie, Talking Heads, Elbow. Others are harder to guess, and reveal a certain attentiveness on Gabriel's part toward the current scene: Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, Radiohead, Regina Spektor.

The album is entirely orchestral and dominated by a dark, even post-apocalyptic atmosphere. The emotions feel distant, washed-out; resignation pervades both voice and notes in an improbable blend of intensity and detachment.

As with the bleakness of late-period Talk Talk, here too a little light filters through now and again. Flickers of warmth, eddies that seem to appear as if by magic and dissolve in an instant, leaving a faint trace of enchantment in the air.

On New Blood (2011), Gabriel reworks 14 of his own compositions with the help of a full orchestra, taking care to strip away both guitars and drums. There's no more rock, no more blood left, or rather, it's new blood that flows from these tracks, mystified for the benefit of that marketing-defined demographic that goes by the unlovely name of "adult contemporary". This isn't music for the young; these are daddy's songs, tunes for comfortable, bourgeois family men (see "Wallflower").

Hearing again the vocal climbs of "The Rhythm Of The Heat" is as thrilling as it was the first time, but here it's merely a return to familiar ground, adding nothing to the greatness of the Bath-born artist. And sitting through a whole album of rising-and-falling strings and horns isn't exactly a pleasure for those who staked everything on the sledgehammer blows of "The Knife", the endless "Supper's Ready", or the indispensable ending of "The Musical Box": ah, blessed youth!

In some cases we're dealing with demanding arrangements that produce results quite different from the originals, with the added pathos of a full orchestra at hand. But "Intruder", stripped of its initial rhythmic drive, loses all of its extraordinary impact; "In Your Eyes" rendered this way becomes a dreadfully ordinary song; with "Mercy Street" we struggle to resist hitting skip; while listening to "Red Rain" and "Don't Give Up" we almost want to end the agony early, not to mention the "The Nest That Sailed The Sky"/"A Quiet Moment" pairing, which racks up around nine minutes of almost total pointlessness.

Perhaps seen live, during the tour a few months back, these versions might have had some vague appeal, but on record they fail to leave a mark. One of the last gasps of an artist who, alas, really does seem to have nothing (new) left to say.

After a twenty-one-year wait, on December 1, 2023, Peter Gabriel finally gives his fans the long-awaited return with a brand-new album of original material.

i/o is the title of the new project, parts of which date back, in some of their early stages of writing, all the way to the '90s.

For his artistic reappearance, the histrionic musician from Chobham chose a gradual approach, stretched out over time, opting to release the twelve tracks - or rather thirty-six, as will be explained shortly - that make up his tenth studio full-length, on a strict monthly schedule. After announcing in November 2022 that everything was set for the release of a new collection of original songs, as far back as January 6, 2023, with the release of the first single titled "Panopticom", Peter Gabriel's comeback began to take tangible shape.

Not merely for the sake of accuracy, it is however necessary to clarify a bit the particular method the artist used to create and, above all, distribute this sprawling project.

Each track is presented in three different mixes, each crafted by different producers and engineers: the "Bright-Side Mix" overseen by Mark 'Spike' Stent, nicknamed "the painter" for his distinctive ability to bring sounds to life, almost turning them into images, and the "Dark-Side Mix" produced by Tchad Blake, dubbed "the sculptor" for his clear knack for building sonic journeys with a high degree of drama. Added to these is the "In-Side" mix crafted by Hans-Martin Buff, tasked with giving the material three-dimensionality, which is why it was chosen for the Blu-ray release.

As mentioned, the rollout of the various tracks was scheduled on a monthly basis, and here's where it gets interesting. Timed precisely to the rising of each full moon, starting last January, all twelve tracks on the record arrived one at a time. On top of that - and keeping up with it all is no easy task - each track was paired with a piece of visual art chosen by Gabriel himself, as had already happened with the previous albums "Us" and "Up", created by painters, sculptors and contemporary artists including Ai Weiwei, Olafur Eliasson, Tim Shaw, among many others.

The three versions in which the tracks were presented don't differ much from one another, except perhaps for the "In-Side" arrangement, in which Hans-Martin Buff added a few instrumental sections where appropriate, of course with Gabriel's full approval.

The tracklist moves in several directions, which this writer breaks down into four categories.

From the section that could be labeled the darkest and most varied come tracks such as "Panopticom", which deals with the subject of sharing, and "The Court", polished by the beloved Arabic-tinged percussion summoned to carry themes like justice and the power granted to people.

From the same family also come "Love Can Heal", ethereal and shadowy in its unfolding, with fluttering violin painting a picture that recalls the story of British MP Jo Cox, murdered by an extremist just days before the Brexit referendum, and "Live and Let Live", with a strong cohesion between modern sounds and classical-leaning arrangements (the best evidence of this on the LP), used to explore forgiveness as a remedy for pain.

Along the way we also find more intimate passages, where conceptual reflection goes hand in hand with the sounds the author had in mind.

On tracks such as "Playing For Time", which tackles subjects like mortality, memory, and the passing of time, and "So Much", which, along much the same lines, examines how seductive it is to live fully in the present while still keeping one's feet firmly on the ground, it's the more chamber-like arrangements (piano and strings) that take center stage, with Gabriel's distinctive voice ready both to bite and to offer bursts of sheer drama.

There's also no shortage of nods to pop in its more commercial sense, a field in which he has always managed to excel while retaining a very high degree of elegance. Joining hits like "Sledgehammer", "Red Rain", and before them "Shock The Monkey", "Solsbury Hill" and "Games Without Frontiers", right up to "Steam", are - admittedly without quite reaching those heights - compelling tracks with particularly well-judged choruses, such as "Olive Tree", which reflects on themes like growth, transformation and connection with others, and "Road To Joy", which, despite its driving aplomb, deals with subjects like near-death experiences and situations in which people are unable to communicate or move naturally.

The sum of all this is reflected in those tracks that draw on nearly all these traits at once, finding their strength in harmonic breadth and compositional variety.

Within songs like the title track, "Four Kinds of Horses" (centered on certain tenets of Buddhist doctrine), "And Still" (dealing with loss and the longing for loved ones no longer present – in this case, Gabriel's mother) and "This is Home" (about finding comfort and refuge in love), all the flavors savored throughout the individual tracks converge into a single whole, drawing together numerous facets of the artist stemming from virtually all of his historic professional and personal experiences.

In conclusion, i/o marks the long-awaited return to the public eye of one of the most influential artists of the last fifty years, and that alone is enough to rank this news among the most important of this stretch of 2023.

The album doesn't add anything new to his repertoire, it must be said, but it vigorously consolidates his standing as a true master of the craft.

i/o is a fresh, conflicted, magnetic album, dense with content and stylistic solutions, one that shows little trace of the manipulations and reworkings carried out over its extremely long gestation.

There's a real need for records like this one, especially in a historical moment where the race for results, achieved by any means necessary, seems to be the only goal, not just in music. Whether people speak well or ill of it doesn't matter. What matters is that the vigorous seventy-three-year-old Peter Gabriel is back, and has shown once again that he has so very much to say.

In 2025 Gabriel released in digital format In The Big Room, a document of an intimate live performance held in 2003 at his Real World Studios, in Box, a remote village near Bath, in Somerset.

Contributions by Marco Sgrignoli (“IV”, “Big Blue Ball”, “Scratch My Back”), Claudio Lancia (“New Blood”), Cristiano Orlando (“i/o”)

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