Peter Gabriel

From progressive archangel to guru of the new electronic pop-rock of the mid-1980s, and finally to prophet of world music's global contaminations. A radical, daring metamorphosis, that of Peter Gabriel, one that very few artists — from Brian Eno to David Bowie — have managed to pull off as coherently, without squandering the aura of critical respectability he had earned. Because in rock, frequent and radical change is often seen as a sign of superficiality or opportunism, as if it were a shortcut for someone who has run out of ideas. That, however, has never been the case for the English composer, who has made eclecticism and the breaking down of every barrier between genres (and musical worlds) his very artistic reason for being.

As the leader of Genesis, he had managed to create a distinctive form of progressive art rock steeped in theatricality, sealed on stage too by his colorful costumes (including the famous flower); as a solo artist, Gabriel proved no less remarkable. His ambitious quest to integrate rock, electronics and world music led him to make consistently innovative and experimental records — even when brazenly pop — destined to leave a deep mark on the generations that followed. An artist engaged in social and political causes as well as music, and the author of theatrical works and stage productions, the former Genesis leader also helped, through his label Real World, introduce audiences to the work of "ethnic" musicians from every corner of the globe, with particular attention paid to the Third World.

Four pillars for a turning point

The story is well known. Having left Genesis at the very peak of their fame, with drummer Phil Collins ready to take over on vocals, Peter Gabriel launched his solo career with his self-titled 1977 album, the first of four chapters in a new story, each simply titled with his name and a corresponding number.

The first – also known unofficially as Car – was produced by Bob Ezrin and enriched by star musicians such as his crimson majesty Robert Fripp and Tony Levin, a key collaborator of Yes and King Crimson. A record that still retains some traces of Genesis, with solemn, impetuous sonic passages, but overall shifts sound, veering towards new, less baroque electronic horizons, with at least two instant classics: the moving "Solsbury Hill" and "Here Comes The Flood", stamped with Fripp's immortal guitar.

The King Crimson leader is also the inspiration behind the second album, "Peter Gabriel II", also known as Scratch because of the cover depicting Peter clawing at an image of himself with his nails: a darker, more experimental work, which abandons prog sonorities and hit singles alike in favour of a leaner, more urban sound, with distorted vocals, abrasive riffs, and heavy use of the Fairlight, the synth-computer that characterises much of the arrangements.

The third chapter, "Peter Gabriel III" (1980), also known as Melt because of the cover showing the musician's face dissolving, sees the former Genesis man joined by guitarist David Rhodes and, at the mixing desk, producer Steve Lillywhite, favourite disciple of Brian Eno; former bandmate Phil Collins also reappears, using here for the first time (on "Intruder") the gated reverb on drums that he would later reuse on his immortal hit "In The Air Tonight". The high point, however, is the dazed, anti-militarist nursery rhyme of "Games Without Frontiers", featuring the acrobatic vocals of Kate Bush, in her first collaboration with her friend Peter. "Biko", meanwhile, would be the first great Gabrielian political anthem (against apartheid in South Africa).

Closing the quadrilogy is the following "IV" – also known in history as Security – Gabriel's personal contribution to the struggles for identity, freedom and equality being waged across half the world. The emblematic track is "San Jacinto", an imaginary place, an artistic fiction; just as world music itself is, according to the musician from Chobham. But what will really drive the album to success, even in the United States, is above all the pounding single "Shock The Monkey", an entertaining parable on human instincts that Gabriel would also perform at the Sanremo Festival in a famous performance, complete with a Tarzan-style swing on a vine that ended with him crashing loudly onto the stage.

"IV" opens the doors to the world music boom, exerting an enormous influence on many other musical territories thanks to its revolutionary use of instrumentation. It was 1982: two years earlier, Gabriel had launched WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance), an independent festival promoting cultural diversity through music. Seven years later, in 1989, he would found Real World Records, still today the parent home of a long series of projects bringing together artists from all over the world and every musical background. It's in this period that he also begins composing film scores. One of the most ambitious is the one written for Alan Parker's "Birdy" (1985), together with Jon Hassell (one of the founding fathers of world music), Larry Fast, David Rhodes and Tony Levin. A path mapped out towards experimentation and world music? Not at all. Because the archangel of rock has no intention of giving up on performing new miracles. And this time, the shock won't be for the monkey, but for the audience who had followed his trajectory up to that point.

Slave to the rhythm

Who knows if what pushed Peter Gabriel towards pop was also the "Collinsmania" raging in the mid-Eighties. What's certain is that none of the former Genesis members could ever have expected the overwhelming success the Chiswick-born drummer-singer was enjoying at the time, with a stream of hits produced non-stop ("In The Air Tonight", "You Can't Hurry Love", "Easy Lover", "One More Night", "Against All Odds", to name just a few). "Who would have ever imagined it," bassist Mike Rutherford would later quip.

In short, the success of the tireless drummer – with whom, as we've seen, Gabriel had also collaborated as a solo artist – risked overshadowing the former leader of the very Genesis that Collins himself was steering, in those years, towards unexpected pop-rock shores. And so the British press and public amused themselves by stoking a rivalry between the two. Without ever imagining, however, that on that ring, knowingly or not, Gabriel would eventually step in for real. Landing a technical knockout blow.

Having weathered a difficult family phase – between an intense relationship with actress Rosanna Arquette and marriage counselling to patch things up with his wife Jill – the English artist devoted himself to launching his fifth album, which would also be the first to have an actual title, though not one lavish in letters. Just two: "So". "An anti-title... if anything, it might be more a piece of graphic design than something with meaning and intent. And that's what I did from then on," Gabriel would explain, reaffirming his aversion to record titles which, in his view, distract attention from the cover artwork. An apparently unassuming title, then, which nevertheless reflected the particular intensity the English composer had poured into the new project, after doing everything he could to resolve his personal problems.

That's how things stood, then, in the year 1986, for the English musician. Which is to say, as ever, continuing to demonstrate how an artist's depth and originality are not measured solely within their chosen field, but are a gift that can be precociously extended even beyond the most unpredictable frontiers.

Hailed as a prophet of political rock and uncompromising world music, Gabriel thus began flirting with mainstream pop, supported at the mixing desk by Chris Hughes and Daniel Lanois. "'Birdy' was a work built essentially on textures and sounds, and this time I wanted to focus more on the songs, to be more cheerful and less mysterious," the English musician would recall. "I was coming out of a dark period and I had to try to open myself up to the world." And he would succeed in the endeavour, crowning yet another of his spectacular transformations. Tackling catchy, melodic, obsessively appealing pop songs, Gabriel would once again prove incapable of producing anything trite or predictable.

After all, the album's aura of respectability was already guaranteed by the roster of guests and musicians involved, tangible proof of Gabriel's credibility and clout within the music scene of the time: the usual Jerry Marotta, Tony Levin, David Rhodes, the extraordinary French drummer Manu Katché, a horn section led by Wayne Jackson, and also L. Shankar, Richard Tee, Stewart Copeland (drummer of The Police), Kate Bush (already featured, as noted, on "III"), Jim Kerr of Simple Minds, and Michael Been of The Call (with whom he had already sung on "Everywhere I Go"). A prestigious lineup that would help make "So" an album comparable, in the depth of its moods and richness of language, to Sting's contemporary "The Dream Of The Blue Turtles".

Gabriel brings them all... home, setting up the recordings at his home studio in a country house northeast of Bath, in Somerset. An inexpensive recording studio, set up in the barn adjoining the house, made up of two rooms: one where Gabriel would record his voice and work on lyrics, and another where the music would instead be assembled. Also accompanying him during the sessions was his trusty Fairlight CMI synthesizer, already used on the fourth album.

The great protagonist of "So" is rhythm, which marks a turning point not only in the former Genesis man's career, but in the very course of Eighties pop, which had itself fed abundantly on electronic pulses and driving beats up to that point. As Giampiero Vigorito wrote in Rockstar, "There's as much technology as there is soul. And that soul is still called rhythm. A powerful rhythm that ends up filling the entire sonic space with the regularity of a heartbeat, the depth of an endlessly repeated spell, the simplicity and effectiveness of a gesture coming from the depths of time. The eight tracks it contains are as many hymns to the future, syncopated ballads that build a bridge towards the Nineties." Indeed, because Gabriel's genius – not unlike Bowie's, come to think of it – lies in never shying away from embracing the musical trends of the moment, while transforming that embrace into a farsighted glance cast towards the future. "So" is a record perfectly attuned to the synth-pop landscape that dominated the Eighties, yet equally free of its dogmas and projected towards everything that would happen in the following decade. Perhaps that's also why it would undergo a significant critical reassessment in later years: at the time, no one had realised just how far ahead of its era it truly was.

Just listen to the opening "Red Rain" to be convinced: a dark prophecy wrapped in dense layers of electronics, with Copeland's stormy drumming and a sound never so complex and layered that its own author would struggle to translate it into a live setting on subsequent tours. Gabriel unleashes his highest, harshest register to stage a new nightmare-adventure of Mozo, the wandering stranger who had appeared in his first two solo works: “I am standing up at the water’s edge in my dream/ I cannot make a single sound as you scream…/ Red rain is coming down”. And it's precisely from a recurring dream of the author's, in which the sea turned red with the blood spilled by men, that the song would take shape. "The story built on that image," recounts his biographer Chris Welch in "Peter Gabriel: The Secret Life", "envisioned the red sea and red rain as symbols of the thoughts and feelings repressed in human society. The red rain was the blood spilled when feelings of pain and anger stagnated in the human psyche without finding an outlet." A project, that of "Red Rain", which actually dated back to the Seventies, at the time of the aborted Mozo project, along with other songs that were later distilled into Gabriel's individual LPs, namely "Here Comes The Flood", "Down The Dolce Vita", "On The Air", "Exposure" and "That Voice Again". The latter, one of Gabriel's favourites, closes side A of the record with a reflection on the phrase "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone": “Oh, I’m hearing right and wrong so clearly/ There must be more than this/ It’s only in uncertainty/ That we’re naked and alive”. The song was originally meant to be titled "First Stone", but in the end Gabriel decided to drop the obvious biblical allusion for the final lyrics, written together with guitarist David Rhodes for a track saturated with Fairlight that explores the theme of moral conscience, examining the "words of parents in our heads that can either help or destroy us".

"Red Rain" remains the album's darkest track alongside "We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)", an almost entirely instrumental piece charged with paranoid electronics which, as Welch recounts, was inspired in Gabriel by accounts of unsettling experiments carried out in the United States. "Some students were ordered to inflict pain on patients in a laboratory and were told it was a legitimate method. Generally, the students did not stop the treatment even when the victims appeared to have reached the extreme limit of their endurance. Naturally, the subjects of the experiment were the students themselves, while the victims were merely actors simulating agony. Professor Stanley Milgram, who headed the project, wanted to find out how far men would go in obeying orders, recreating in the laboratory the conditions faced by guards in wartime prison camps." The lyrics of the track – the most atmospheric on the album – are reduced to the obsessive repetition of the cry "We do what we're told", which then flows into the line "One doubt, one voice, one war, one truth, one dream". Musically, it's a little gem: Jerry Marotta's drumming, which drives it, has been described as sounding like "a heartbeat heard from the womb", while the arrangements are enriched by L. Shankar's violin and two overdubbed guitar tracks from Rhodes.

Sledgehammer, wool, and a photo finish

The act of creation as "therapy" is the thread running through the album, and the single "Sledgehammer" distills all of Gabriel's newfound confidence and rediscovered virility. Commercial? Absolutely, but with that rhythm'n'blues inflection that makes all the difference, inspired by the music of Otis Redding, with trumpeter Wayne Jackson supplying the horns, with that bamboo Shakuhachi flute thrown in to disorient, and with a beat that is itself a hammer, all in service of a mischievous and almost too explicit sexual proposition ("I wanna be your sledgehammer... come on help me do"). Released a month ahead of the album, the track is a kind of funky parody of its author's old soul and R&B passions. A bona fide hit, one that made the more traditionalist old fans wrinkle their noses, but brought a host of new admirers to Gabriel's court, even topping the US charts for a week (the first and only Gabriel single to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, coincidentally dethroning "Invisible Touch", which had itself been the first and only single by his former Genesis bandmates to top that same chart), and selling at least a million copies worldwide.

The extraordinary video also contributed significantly to its success, standing as a landmark in the animation techniques applied to music videos. Directed by Stephen R. Johnson, who had already worked with David Byrne of Talking Heads, the disorienting, hyper-speed video is built around the technique of pixilation, which involves projecting a sequence of frames at high speed to create the illusion of human animation. Peter thus ends up surrounded by flying fruit, plasticine creations by David Daniels, and even a model steam train! Almost a short film, shot over eight days, it bears the signature of Aardman Animations, who would later create the famous "Wallace and Gromit" series. The final result, made on a budget of £100,000, is a work of genius, honored with nine 1987 MTV Video Music Awards and a 1987 Brit Award (that same year Gabriel also received the Video Vanguard Award for his career). "Sledgehammer" remains, to this day, the most-played video in MTV history.

And what sets the funk-pop of "Big Time" apart from any other chart hit? Perhaps it's that syncopated rhythm, deranged and off the rails, with Levin slapping the strings of his fretless bass while Marotta strikes them with his drumsticks; or that disorienting, insistent vocal; or those sound choices always ready to catch you off guard behind the simplest of refrains (alternating between A minor in the chorus and A major in the verses), not to mention lyrics that amount to an irreverent parable on success and consumerism. With his typical mocking self-irony, the Gabriel of "Big Time" pillories the very kind of fame he was achieving, recalling his provincial origins and taking a satirical jab at the "Big Time operator": “The place where I come from/ Is a small town/ They think so small/ They use small words/ But not me… I had it my bed made like a mountain range/ With snow white pillows for my big fat head”. And then there are the sarcastic allusions to the expansion of his whole world, bank account included: "My cars gettin' bigger... My house gettin' bigger... My bed's gettin' bigger... And my bank account". "The song is about success as the purpose of a life," Gabriel would explain. "I feel caught up in it. The craving for success is something I don't like, yet I can't give it up."

"Sledgehammer" and "Big Time" are also two playful tributes to the soul and rhythm'n'blues world that had captivated Gabriel as a boy, and to which he had even thought of dedicating an entire covers album. That's partly why Lanois's production, fresh off his successful collaboration with U2 on "The Unforgettable Fire", aims to emphasize the blaring horn sections, pushing effects and other textures into the background. "Naturally the songs are full of sexual metaphors," the musician from Chobham would recall with amusement. "The old blues tradition I drew on is built around the theme of mating - the hammer (Sledgehammer, ed.) is the star of a little harvest thanksgiving celebration."

The former Genesis man, on the other hand, would grow visibly annoyed whenever someone pointed out one too many similarities with the style of his old bandmate Collins: "It wasn't a deliberate choice, but I knew that using a horn section would invite comparisons with Phil. Ever since my school days, though, the soul music on the Atlantic and Stax labels had a decisive influence on my development. I respect Phil's music and I want my songs to reach as wide an audience as possible." Another time, however, he would snap, visibly irritated: "Enough already! By the time of my third album, Phil's music underwent major stylistic changes, but no one was honest enough to admit my influence."

Comforting fairy

But "So" isn't all celebration. There's always room for the more contrite, introspective Gabriel too. Take, for instance, the one who sits at the piano to intone the desolate "Mercy Street", bringing into focus the theme of writing as therapy, one of the unifying ideas of the whole album. The inspiration came from the poetry collection "45 Mercy Street" that poet Anne Sexton had begun writing on her doctors' suggestion after being admitted to a psychiatric clinic, later published posthumously in an anthology. Peter had been struck by those verses, full of dreamlike imagery and dominated by a constant search for an ideal father figure, whether doctor, priest, or God: "Thanks to that search, Anne lived longer than those around her," he would recall. "Her life took on meaning, and now her work helps others keep hoping."

But even in a seemingly straightforward, classic ballad like "Mercy Street" lies the seed of ethnic experimentation. The track is in fact built around one of the many forró compositions (a traditional dance from northeastern Brazil, ed.) that Gabriel had recorded in Rio de Janeiro, played back at ten percent slower than the original, so as to give it a grainy sonic quality that, according to its author, better highlighted the cymbals and guitars. Steeped in ethnic spice too is the other ballad "In Your Eyes", a polyphonic African gem in which Gabriel's hushed vocal tone, punctuated by a drum roll, is joined by the scat vocalizing of Senegal's Youssou N'Dour, singing in his native tongue. The idea traces back to the tradition of Senegalese love songs, in which love for one's woman blends with love for God, in a special fusion of the sacred and the profane.

But the emotional peak of this more intimate, reflective side of "So" lies entirely in the embrace (not just a metaphorical one, as the video shows) between Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush in the unforgettable duet "Don't Give Up". Amid the tom-tom drum patterns and Tony Levin's pulsing bass, the roles are clearly defined: Peter as the defeated, dispirited man ("I am a man whose dreams have all deserted... no-one wants you when you lose"), Kate playing the comforting fairy, strong and reassuring ("You worry too much/ It's going to be alright... Don't give up"). An emotional exchange of extraordinary intensity, behind which lay a social subtext: a critique of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, blamed for a surge in unemployment in the UK. Although the song's original spark came from a photograph - Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother", depicting a woman and child during the Great Depression in America in the 1930s. A simple yet profound ballad that would move half the world and go on to win an Ivor Novello Award.

The song's musical evolution is curious too: "Don't Give Up" was actually born as a country ballad (it's no coincidence it was initially offered to Dolly Parton), but fearing it would come across as saccharine, its author decided to overhaul it, adding a female voice with entirely different qualities.

Kate Bush isn't the only female presence lighting up the record. On the hypnotic closing track "This Is The Picture (Excellent Birds)", the wild, unhinged vocalizing of Laurie Anderson bursts in to back up Gabriel on a schizoid, picturesque piece that the American composer had already recorded with Gabriel for her 1984 album "Mister Heartbreak", with a guitar contribution from Nile Rodgers of Chic. Left off the original vinyl edition of the LP at the eleventh hour, the track would be included on all subsequent releases.

So in love

"So" is, then, the album that definitively turns Peter Gabriel into a global rock star, in an era when perhaps it was also easier to become one - the golden 1980s of MTV and lavish record-label budgets. But even what might look like a "normalization" of his style doesn't abandon his experimental ambitions, with refined, exotic sounds placed in service of social themes and reflective ideas. Fully rooted in its era, with those blaring saxophones, gated reverb on the snare, electric tom-toms, and sampled digital synths, "So" thus marks a defining turning point of the decade, cementing Gabriel's chart success too: it would be certified five times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America and three times platinum by the British Phonographic Industry (and the single "Sledgehammer", as mentioned, would storm to the top of the Billboard Hot 100), while also earning an Album of the Year nomination at the 29th Grammy Awards, where it would be narrowly edged out by Paul Simon's "Graceland".

It remains archangel Gabriel's bestseller: an iconic work, meticulously crafted down to the last detail, starting with the cover image (a portrait of the singer photographed by Trevor Key, who had also created the bell artwork for Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells"), later reworked by Peter Saville, famous for his work in the '80s with artists such as Sex Pistols, Joy Division, New Order, OMD, Ultravox, and Phil Collins.

Crowning a magical season for the British musician, another masterpiece would follow, in the form of a new soundtrack, "Passion" (1989), featuring the music for Martin Scorsese's film "The Last Temptation of Christ". A syncretic and monumental work of world music, in which Gabriel drew on a wealth of folk sounds, mostly from Asia and Africa, reworking them in the studio. But that's a whole other story.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

05/03/2026