Most people’s first acquaintance with Peter Gabriel probably dates back to the mid 1980s, where one award-winning video in particular brought a touch of class to the rapidly expanding MTV era and dropped him right into the laps of a new CD-owning generation. If only the telly viewing public had realised the Sledgehammer in question was a metaphor for his penis they might not have been so welcoming.
As with many of his British contemporaries whose commercial peak exploded in that eighties era of excess (Rod Stewart, Elton John, David Bowie), Gabriel had been making music since the sixties, in fact, beginning his career as flute-playing frontman with Charterhouse chums Genesis. He walked away from the band and his decidedly prog-rock persona in 1975, effectively forcing some little drummer called Phil Collins to step up to the mic following the recording of 1974’s sprawling concept album The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway.
Solo, Gabriel’s music combined peculiar ideas with popular appeal. He‘s covered The Beatles, Leonard Cohen and Marvin Gaye, duetted with Kate Bush (they didn’t date) and Sinéad O’Connor (they did) and contributed to the soundtracks of films as varied as The Last Temptation Of Christ, The Rabbit Proof Fence, Birdy, Wall-E, and the Oscar nominated That’ll Do for Babe 2: Pig In The City.
Most contrarily, in what he termed “magazine format” PG increased the marketing hassle factor by giving his first four albums the same name (his own, conveniently). Under duress from his label, the insertion of edition numbers beginning with the second set didn’t help matters much, which is why we have 1 = Car, 2 = Scratch, 3 = Melt, 4 = Security. Confused much?
Sticking with the long-playing oeuvre, PG reckons he has enough material for five more albums. I hope that’ll be over a span of 20 years not 50. Why? Because as he celebrates his 75th birthday, time is possibly not on his side, and the world is infinitely a better place with his contributions.
Here’s his ten studio albums, ranked, then.
Scratch My Back (2010)
Several years in the making, Scratch My Back was something of a wasted opportunity. The premise was endearing enough: a “song exchange” where Gabriel would rework some of his favourite tunes with the help of an orchestra; in return, each featured songwriter would return the favour (or “scratch Gabriel’s back” so to speak) by covering something from his own catalogue.
Though a few artists did pay their due respects, including buzzy indie acts like Arcade Fire, Elbow and Bon Iver (Justin Vernon dashed off a particularly spirited take on Us’s Come Talk To Me), the I’ll Scratch Yours companion was mostly a wash-out, hampered by three of the covered acts — David Bowie, Neil Young and Radiohead — declining to participate.
The project is most successful when it stays close to the originals, tapping into the emotional power of The Magnetic Fields’ The Book Of Love and Lou Reed’s The Power Of The Heart. Ultimately, though, Scratch My Back is Gabriel’s patchiest, fussiest album to date: a good idea hampered by uninteresting or predictable song choices.
All told, Scratch My Back is a noble yet occasionally unedifying experience. There’s something depressingly academic about the whole affair, while John Metcalfe’s stately but soporific string arrangements blunt the impact of Gabriel’s gravelly delivery, not always fitting the material, as is the case with the lethargic rendition of Paul Simon’s The Boy In The Bubble or Bowie’s “Heroes”.
New Blood (2011)
After the botched experiment that was Scratch My Back, Gabriel wasted no time plotting his next move — as hardly anyone wanted to cover his songs, he decided to do them himself. Armed with a well-rehearsed string accompaniment (arranged by John Metcalfe once again), he measured his entire body of work, re-interpreting 14 of his most malleable tracks to varying degrees of success.
A largely pointless exercise in nostalgia (coming just months after Kate Bush’s similarly divisive Director’s Cut), fortunately, PG steered clear of most of his greatest hits, largely working with the material best suited for an orchestral facelift.
1982’s San Jacinto (already one of his most masterful tracks) is remarkably emotional here, building to a seismic climax; Downside Up (featuring a lovely vocal turn from his daughter, Melanie) is transformed from new-age schlock to moody epic.
The low-points are probably In Your Eyes, in which its thrilling world music flourishes become a morass of classical cliches, and a steroidal take on Don’t Give Up, which is somewhat marred by Ane Brun’s obtrusive vibrato. I‘m sure Brun is a fine artist in her own right, but she should have a “thou shall not replace Kate Bush“ clause in all her future recording contracts. Interestingly, on New Blood all previous PG LPs are covered, except for this next entry.
Peter Gabriel (2, or Scratch) (1978)
On paper, Scratch, this sophomore solo set, seemed like a great idea. For one thing, it showed that Gabriel hadn’t done anything about reining in his astonishingly varied creative impulses. He brought in guitarist Robert Fripp, on hiatus from King Crimson, to help with production, which gave Scratch a crisp sonic feel that tends to unify even its wildest musical side trips.
Fripp produced an impressive album with Daryl Hall around the same time, but PG2 often sounds raw and rushed – the singles are surprisingly mainstream, while the themes are all hard surfaces, leaving no one surprised that this album yielded no hits. Instead, Scratch feels more introverted, even less accessible, but that’s why it invites further scrutiny. Same with Gabriel himself. He was still in search of an identity, but he was getting closer.
DIY is AOK in its elasticated spivness, and there’s at least a pair of decent deep cuts in the tender piano balladry of Mother Of Violence and White Shadow displaying some hints of Gabriel’s prog-rock roots. Nicely incisive cover all the same.
Peter Gabriel (1, or Car) (1977)
The best idea Peter Gabriel ever had was to leave Genesis. His abrupt departure was occasioned by a confluence of personal and professional factors, but the bottom line was he was no longer in sync with his bandmates. As it turned out, the secession was a win-win for both camps, with 1976’s A Trick Of The Tail and his own Car receiving positive reviews and a smattering of commercial success. Heck, Gabriel even won the French equivalent of a Grammy, le grand prix de l’Académie Charles Cros for his efforts.
Being a resident of France, I’ve always suspected the surprise gong had something to do with the schizophrenic production approach used to record the debut. Gabriel helms the quieter, more “European” pieces while Bob Ezrin (Pink Floyd, Lou Reed, Alice Cooper) handles the American rhythm sections and overtly rock passages.
With PG’s feverish and occasionally oddly focused creative urges running riot, the first album is an exceptionally diverse collection of sounds and styles (Rolling Stone called it a “grab bag of songs that bear little resemblance to one another”) performed by a roll-call of top tier musicians headed by Robert Fripp and Tony Levin.
Despite the lack of a unifying theme, the NME’s usually caustic Nick Kent called Car (I’ll stick with secondary titles for the sake of convenience) “a fine record with at least one 24-carat irresistible classic in Solsbury Hill.” Named after an epiphany atop a grassy knoll in Somerset, Solsbury Hill was Gabriel’s only solo hit of the ’70s and would become one of his signature songs. It’s a deceptively complex piece; all pastoral compound rhythms overlaid with a beautifully addictive 12-string acoustic guitar.
Almost half a century on, it still sounds spiffing (just avoid Erasure’s criminal cover at all costs), which is more than can be said for the LP’s other notable, the magnificent melancholy ballad Here Comes The Flood. Gabriel felt this slightly histrionic arrangement was emblematic of the album’s overwrought production, and would record superior stripped down piano-based takes on Robert Fripp’s Exposure and his own Shaking the Tree: Sixteen Golden Greats.
i/o (2023)
LP10 was a lunar phenomenon from the get-go. Like its predecessor Up, Gabriel started constructing i/o in the mid-’90s, meaning it took almost three decades to arrive. Even its release took time. In a surprise move, the marketing plan threatened to drain away any impact by releasing every one of the songs as stand-alone singles every full moon prior to the album dropping. Then there were also potentially distracting “night” and “day” remixes. (Each song was issued in two mixes, a light-side and dark-side version, making a 66-minute record even longer.)
You’d think this ceaseless tinkering with traditional structures would’ve harmed its commercial prospects yet i/o (it’s worth noting that the title refers not only to the expression in/out, or input/output, but also to one of Jupiter’s moons) was the first Peter Gabriel album to top the UK charts since So, and it’s closer in spirit to the 1986 LP than his other work, too, with world textures augmenting accessible pop/rock songs, some of which were produced with U2 producer and former Roxy Music sound stylist Brian Eno.
Despite the marathon running time LP 10 is often strong, with highlights such as the earwormy title track, the intense Four Kinds Of Horses, and the pretty opener Panopticom. Often quiet and always involving, the themes include PG’s deeply moving ruminations on finding human connection in the post-COVID environment, grappling with technology, and that sense of looming mortality again.
Gabriel’s music exists on a cosmic timescale now, governed not by human trends but by the rotation of celestial bodies that will still be there when all that’s left of us are charred ruins. It was worth the wait.
Us (1992)
Us was inevitably compared with its blockbuster predecessor So. In between, however, Gabriel had produced Passion, a soundtrack for Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ, and the sixth studio set was something in between those two projects, at least musically. Topically? It was so startlingly direct, and like nothing Gabriel had ever attempted.
Save for Fourteen Black Paintings (the only explicit offering that touched on PG‘s penchant for the political), the subject matter focused on the wreckage of two past relationships (one of them the woman he left his wife for, American actress Rosanna Arquette). With a focus on atmospheres, the melodies often weren’t clearly stated, even if the lyrics were so often earnestly honest. That friction gave Us its lasting intrigue.
With yet another round of pioneering pop promos, Digging In The Dirt (cathartic) and Steam (basstastic) were the lead 45s (is it reductive to call the latter a ham-fisted Sledgehammer rehash?) and Blood Of Eden, a union of evocation featuring then squeeze Sinéad O’Connor was a thing of beauty. Also of note was the low-key Secret World, an emotional atmospheric closer that was not only the crowning climax but provided a dramatic end to the main set on the tour of the same name, with Gabriel and the band members exiting the stage one by one.
Up (2002)
A decade on from Us, Up features a cast of thousands including some additional production via rock meets synthpop soundscapes from the two Steves: Steve Osbourne (U2, Suede, Placebo) and Stephen Hague (New Order, Pet Shop Boys, Erasure).
I have a sentimental attachment to PG’s seventh studio set, as its the record that reawakened my admiration for all things PG, and its initial recording was undertaken in the unlikeliest of venues: an alpine chalet in Méribel, a ski resort in the French Alps, from where I pen this piece.
Deceptively downbeat, Up delivers a moody and sombre set of very long songs (only the bleak and bare closer The Drop halves the usual running time of six minutes+) in Gabriel’s conceptualist way, the overriding theme being about life and death, ie essentially moving on from mortality and hoping and praying the direction we are headed in is an upwards direction. Coupled with an adventurous armoury of sonic experiments, it’s striking how many parallels there are with David Bowie’s post 9/11 album Heathen, which was released earlier that summer.
Darkness sets the mood within seconds, a timid opening broken by a jolt of abrasive NIN-esque noise. The atmospheric electronica of Growing Up is a tad more optimistic, a mediation on the challenges of growing both physically and emotionally. Sky Blue is another gem, a serene piano ballad aided by a sea of sonic textures and gospel choir where the union of the archangel Gabriel’s voice and the Blind Boys Of Alabama prove a poignant combination.
So, a solid set of songs sprinkled with bits of next-gen electronica, though why The Barry Williams Show (a Fatboy Slimmish Jerry Springer satire) was chosen as lead single remains a conundrum. With much of Gabriel’s attention taken up with the Up underperformed commercially, and it hardly helped that three of the strongest cuts were available elsewhere, with Signal To Noise being used by Gangs Of New York, Sky Blue a component of The Rabbit Proof Fence, and I Grieve a feature of City Of Angels a good four years before. Nevertheless, a textural triumph.
Peter Gabriel (4, or Scratch) (1982)
The fourth and final album in his self-titled quadrilogy (amusingly, a frustrated David Geffen added a sticker saying Security in the States), much had changed on the inside as Gabriel began exploring the newfangled Fairlight CMI.
Depthlessly dark, the synthesizer provided the sonic underpinning for much of LP4, even as its sampling function allowed him to add new wrinkles. Something more subtle, but ultimately more important, was also happening: PG’s emerging penchant for dabbling in African and Latin rhythms would ultimately help make 1986’s So a career-changing smash, which we’ll get to in a bit.
Gabriel’s flair for theatrics was evident since his Genesis days, but the video for Shock The Monkey, PG4’s lead single, absolutely takes the cake. With a atmosphere that evokes The Avengers, that Twilight Zone voodoo episode you must remember and Bowie’s Ashes To Ashes, it’s a stunning piece of drama that made plain the album’s theme of a modern man lost in a primal world. How bizarre that Gabriel was all over the radio with simian shock waves, while at the same time his old drummer boy Phil Collins was chirping his remake of the Supremes’ You Can’t Hurry Love. Equally disturbing, in their own ways.
Also of note is the Caribbean Santeria of The Family And The Fishing Net, with David Rhodes and future Stranglers axeman John Ellis battling it out with some Bowie Fashion-esque guitar; the powerful Afrobeat Rhythm Of The Heat, with its frenzied percussive crescendo; and what would prove to be something of an anthem during the COVID lockdown era, the album‘s second single I Have The Touch. The version of the latter is somewhat sterile and lightly industrial, though Peter Walsh’s ’83 remix is far defter, as it balances the song’s disjointed giddiness with its worldbeat sensibilities. The mix would later appear as the B-side to the non-album Walk Through The Fire, a filmic 45 produced by Nile Rodgers, who conveniently pops up as a guest musician on this next blockbuster PG LP.
So (1986)
An impressive display of radio-friendly versatility, the first non-eponymous LP is a time capsule of everything that turned a former Genesis guy into arena-filling solo superstar Peter Gabriel. A fabulous fusion of pop, soul, art rock and world music, So was also a perfect gateway to one-word wonders (though they didn’t extend to its own track titles for the first time on a Gabriel album, curiously): Lanois, Bush, Anderson, N’Dour, Sexton, Sledgehammer.
The only silly-convincing Otis Redding homage by an English public school graduate was quite a thing in 1986. Joe Public bought So for that huge MTV hit (it was a North American chart-topper, followed by the US-only In Your Eyes, which went gold) and to a slightly less extent Big Time (the latter being the first CD single I ever bought, trivia fans), both of which advanced multimedia with eye-popping, inventive videos. Though they never earned the ubiquitous airplay of that poptastic pair, for my money the resonant 45s were the slower, more poignant pieces, Red Rain and Don’t Give Up, as well as the sublime dreamtime of Mercy Street.
A desolate duet with Kate Bush, Don’t Give Up has an unusual and hypnotic time signature: it‘s essentially regarded as a waltz, however because the chorus is 6/8 with kick accents on 1 and 6 (so they follow each other) they make the 6/8 of Kate’s section less waltzing. Either way, the song boasts tour de force vocals from both sides, with Gabriel really showing his choirboy meets gospel soul singer chops as he bursts into an impassioned falsetto (“Going to stand on that bridge / Keep my eyes down below“) at three and half minutes in.
Spellbinding and so, so good.
Peter Gabriel (3, or Melt) (1980)
No one could accuse Gabriel of a lack of creativity by the turn of the decade. His first two solo sets were simply bursting with ideas. Unfortunately, they weren’t fully formed ideas. Enter Steve Lillywhite, who became the first in a series of U2 producers to have a sweeping impact on PG’s sonic footprint. Together, they reframed the artist’s often-menacing vision in a far more musical way, though a few sharp edges remained. They also pioneered the thundering gated-drum sound that helped define Phil Collins’ early career. Not a bad day at the office then.
There’s a brand new wave influence, with The Jam’s Paul Weller and XTC’s Dave Gregory contributing, while the controlled menace of Intruder takes its cue from Bowie’s Low’s Speed Of Life as an unbelievably outré way to open an album, often cited as the first prominent use of the gated reverb cymbal-free drum sound that would dominate much of the 1980s.
For an album so popular, it’s remarkably dark. Even minor hits Biko, No Self Control and I Don’t Remember are far from cheerful, their chart potential spiked with paranoia, murder and suspicion, insulated in austere introspection.
Armed with two different videos, Games Without Frontiers became a No. 4 smasheroo in the UK (tied with Sledgehammer as his highest placed Brit hit) and was the first 45 from LP3, commonly referred to as Melt after the ghoulish cover image which depicts Gabriel’s face dripping like wax. One of the era’s most chilling Cold War songs, it was built around an angular guitar riff over insistent overlapping keyboards and a tense electronic rhythm. Hugh Padgham provides the whistles, and Kate Bush warbles the title in French, Jeux Sans Frontières.
It’s a knockout indeed. HB2UPG.
Steve Pafford
