Peter Gabriel

Anyway, "Moribund the Burgermeister" is a great, weird number, but there's also not much separating it from past work. "Modern Love" is a no frills rock tune, very much no way he would play something like that today (sadly; he could use an injection of livelihood on his last albums), "Excuse Me" is a semi-comic relief number with barbershop quartet opening. "Humdrum" is also very Genesis-like, but I think it's the best tune on the album.

The second album I've actually never heard, in all my years of being a fan. I keep meaning to pick it up, especially since everything's been remastered. People say it's pretty underrated...

I never really liked his third album, myself. The songs just never really clicked with me, except maybe "Intruder".

i've never heard the simple minds version, but Robert Wyatt covers it, and beautifully at that

For me, "San Jacinto" and "Rhythm of the Heat" come damn close...

So!

"Red Rain"!

Oh yeah man, I have totally been on a Red Rain trip of late. Just can't get away from that song at all.

Listened to it driving through the farmland surrounding Bristol, VA in bright, bright sunlight following a hotel morning today. 100% arcadian.

Listen to the sound of the drums before the break!

xpost

Fantastic! I grew up in VA.

I <3 Daniel Lanois 4-ever.

Yeah, "Red Rain". "Mercy Street" too. Something about that line: "swear they moved that sign."

It's funny, because I was browsing YouTube and had just finished watching this when I saw this thread. These two have always struck me as two sides of the same coin, both following a particularly English trail of slightly ethereal slightly mad overflowingly creative whimsy.

Peter looks so young there!

Were he and Kate ever in a romantic relationship with one another? I thought I remembered reading this, but I can't find anything confirming it. I must have made it up.

Doesn't he? I'm not sure, but it would be kind of weird, like siblings making out. Which is also creepily awesome in their case (and only in their case, right?).

aaaaaaahhhhh! It's the performance of "Another Day"! I haven't seen this in awhile. WOW. Thanks!

No really, this has made my night. Oh my god.

I know. Mine too.

New album is called "Big Blue Balls"!!

Here Comes The Flood

http://i307.photobucket.com/albums/nn306/Floridian_20/GabrielCatII.jpg

IS HE GOTH OR NOT? LOOK AT THAT PICTURE!

He's going to marry Kate Bush and they're going to rein as king and queen of the desert island. And we're all going to be happy. Just you wait.

Peter Gabriel is even more heavenly than Brian Eno, and that's saying something.

Here Comes The Flood

― Sleep Tundra (Bimble Is Still More Goth Than You)

Here comes the late-night revive of the borderline goth thread by drunken Bimble, amirite?

hahahahah too right

HCTF = epic

whoa kate in the clip

As good as that is, the version on Fripp's Exposure is ten times better.

I saw PG live on the So tour, which was some big poppy stuff amid a lot of other stuff I didn't really get. And yet it was still a quasi-religious experience, although I couldn't really tell you why.

san jacinto KILLIN me right now

BLAST FROM THE PAST:

Is it just me, or does Pete look more than a little like Ed Helms in that HCTF clip?

SAN JACINTO
SAN JACINTO

Just to take me to heaven on that live album, goddamnit, wings, take me...take me there

Solsbury Hill.

HERE COMES THE FLOOD

"White Shadow" is awesome! Are there any other songs in this world where pedal steel sounds so epic?

not a rhetorical question btw

Passioni: walloping beats, Fairlights backing violin lines, something called "Arghul drones," * a boys choir singing "With This Love," a track called "It is Accomplished" waiting to become a pop song. I love this album.

* I learned much about music by studying Peter Gabriel instrumental credits.

It's a good'n'.

Sharing "your eyes" with a stranger at a bar

It must be hard holding that jukebox up over your head.

Someone tell Axl that it has been 12 years since the last Peter Gabriel album of original material.

he said recently maybe he'll be done soon. yeah right!

PG is part of a group that teaches the world how to take better videos when filming brutality as a firsthand witness.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/teaching-citizens-shoot-better-video-witness-brutality/

Aw he's a good guy

Birdy ost is my favorite pg album now. No words just vibes for miles.

Has Gabriel ever spoke about Gary Brooker from Procol Harum as being an influence? Listening to A Salty Dog right now and man sometimes the melody and phrasing and even tone of his voice reminds me of Gabriel (or I guess it could be an coincidence or even vice versa as they are essentially contemporaries)

He supposedly has brought him up as an influence, though I don't know when/where. At the least Brooker (and most of Genesis, a couple of years later) all went to Charterhouse.

And, ha!, I've never heard this before:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct_R6CPD5-o

So as a record for eight-year-olds kinda jibes with my feelings about PG.

lol what

Kids Bop version of Mercy Street

in your daddy's arms

what 8 year old wants to sing "we do what we're told to do"

Not gonna happen in this century

So I listened to So a lot when I was 8 or 9 because every kid loved the Sledgehammer video. And it was one of four CDs my parents owned (the others were Brothers in Arms, Equinoxe and Marriage of Figaro)

All I remember about Peter Gabriel when I was a growing up was thinking he was the middle-aged guy who crooned "In Your Eyes." Later on when I found out he was in Genesis (who I associated with "We Can't Dance") and saw a picture of them back in the '70s with Gabriel in complete make-up and costume, it was like "wuuuut?"

Fun little gem dropped on his Bandcamp subscription today -- a rough 1981 studio mix of "I Go Swimming" with the vocals.

New rarity up for the subscribers:

This version of Biko, was recorded in June, 1980 with The Looking Glass School, in Wellow, Somerset.
The school, formed in 1979, was an arts and crafts focussed primary and middle school founded by the British-American artist Jann Haworth, a leading figure in the British Pop Art movement and pioneer of soft sculpture.
Haworth is also the co-creator, along with her then husband Peter Blake, of the The Beatles 1967 Sgt. Pepper’’s Loney Hearts Club Band album cover and is an advocate for feminist rights, especially for the representation of women in the art world.

“I’d known Jann and Peter and their alternative school and I was very interested in the way they experimented with education. I kept in touch and was invited to do a project with the kids which is when this version of Biko was recorded" - pg

Recorded at Crescent Studios and Wellow School, Avon, Somerset on 11 June 1980.

Didn’t know he had a Bandcamp???

Yeah Real World set one up a long while back and his solo catalog has been on there forever, plus he's been using it via a subscription service to share out both rarities and new tracks -- he dropped everything from i/o on there month per month before its release. We talk about it all upthread!

I think I ignored those since I’m not really interested in his current music but I’m game for rarities from the vault.

i/o is really good, its insane it got like no critical attention

It definitely didn't help to release it after the tour, which prematurely drew most of the attention.

I am not used to this feeling of not being able to hear something I want to. I think it's a good thing?

Are you talking about his follow up to "i/o," on track for a 2031 release?

Ha. I meant that Biko version. But that works too.

Been continuing to drop more older rarities via Bandcamp; meantime, he'd been releasing one song a month for a while from a 2003 fan club show, and now a slightly edited version of the whole thing is up (this removes various song intros and there might be one extra track, but I'd have to double check)

https://petergabriel.bandcamp.com/album/in-the-big-room

Correct! This was the subscriber album: https://petergabriel.bandcamp.com/album/lunatics-in-the-big-room, that did not have Darkness.

A little bit of bonus for both! (As a subscriber I got both the separate songs and this new version so win-win.)

https://petergabriel.com/news/live-at-womad-1982-announced-2/

They don’t use the classic font on the record sleeve!

the text is in the wrong place too

.. I love this. Because all these songs were still unknown to the audience at the time (PG 4 would only be released a couple of months later) this sounds more live than the polished versions on Plays Live.

but they cut out Shosholoza (between The Rhythm Of The Heat and Kiss Of Life)

Iirc Plays Live features lots of studio fiddling and overdubs, as is Peter's wont.

I spent zero time with the album proper but it bears repeating that the Dark Side mix of “Road To Joy” is really peak PG. The expensive Chapman stick groove on the verse followed by the organ stomp release after Gabriel wails “Walking down the road to joy” in the chorus is really everything I want from him.

By contrast the Bright-Side mix shows how much these big So-like productions rely on getting all the elements just right. That version feels like it just misses and it’s hard to say why as it’s just as overstuffed.Perhaps just leaving a little more space for Levin matters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xkTWLR8vLE

Trying to ride the dual-language version coattails of Nena, Falco and the Beatles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmjnK4zTBhM

A 15 minute video to explain that Peter Gabriel recorded an album in German?

here comes the dud

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0zQaWEvUKo

Announcement via his subscription service just now:

I’m delighted to say that tonight, at the full moon, we will be beginning another year of full moon releases under the name o\i.

The songs are a mix of thoughts and feelings.

I have been thinking about the future and how we might respond to it. We are sliding into a period of transition like no other, most likely triggered in three waves; AI, quantum computing and the brain computer interface. Artists have a role to look into the mists and, when they catch sight of something, to hold up a mirror.

These are my lumpy bits – i/o: the inside has a new way out and o\i: the outside has a new way in.

We are not, and have never been, the exclusively self-determining, independent beings that have been given the run of the world. We are something else, a part of nature, a part of everything and feeling a connection, shaking our booty and giving and receiving some love can help us find our place - and put a big smile on our faces.

Some of these songs are going to form part of the brain project that I’ve been exploring for a number of years, and some just make me feel happy. I hope you like them.

I'd like to say a special thank you to all the full-mooners who have stuck with us through this time. In the period in between the records we've been more focussing on older, archive demos and different versions, and now that will shift back with o\i into stuff around these twelve songs...

he'd been teasing new album all week with oblique images that looked like Os and Is, glad suspicions were confirmed.

In the period in between the records we've been more focussing on older, archive demos and different versions

Wait, what does this mean? Did I miss him releasing a bunch of archival stuff?

yeah he has been posting loads of archive stuff on bandcamp the past year

Was fun hearing "I Have The Touch" in Marty Supreme for the first time in decades.

a favorite of Bill Haley in the mid '50s.

yeah he has been posting loads of archive stuff on bandcamp the past year

Huh, anything good?

I'm not a subscriber so I lost track! But they are all listed out here. many alternate mixes, early mixes, works in progress, etc:

https://petergabriel.bandcamp.com/subscribe

Live at Womad and In the Big Room both got standard streaming-only releases, and they are more than worthy. That Womad set is exceptional actually; professionally recorded (with studio overdubs at the time so presumably considered for release back in the early 80's).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb-sOCk6BP4

Low-key but a groove.

It’s good! I was all in on I/O so I’m overjoyed about this.

So, five songs out so far on this and it certainly hasn't created the discussion i/o did. Thoughts?

I think it's ... fine. Nothing is offending me, but none of it is really surprising me very much. A tad dull, which I guess makes it, in general, kind of disappointing. Best song so far is Put the Bucket Down.

New album? Had no idea, which itself is a tad shocking. Does he still have a label? Publicist? Promotion person? Anything?

yes? it's the slow rollout he did with the last album all over again. new song every full moon.

Oh, I see, I misread your post. For some reason I thought you were saying you had heard the first five songs of the album *so far*, as in, a listen in progress, not that PG was five songs into slowly releasing the new album.

ah ha.