Peter Gabriel

Think it's fair enough to wonder what's going on with some of these guys (see also Bryan Ferry to an extent) when their studio output dries up in early middle age...a curiosity, rather than entitlement (hopefully)

wonder why he's not on Spotify.

Bryan Ferry has actually been pretty prolific lately. I think he works like Gabriel does, starting sessions in fits and starts with various combinations of musicians, then spending a ton of time in the studio combing through the different takes and shaping the songs from them, which takes a lot of time. That's why they have such superstar credits. It's not like those cats are in the studio all at once, just dropping by for a day here and and a day there. I doubt they even know if they're on the record until the end, and even then, I wonder if they can always hear themselves.

Check out the credits of Ferry's latest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avonmore_(album)#Personnel

Then check out the credits on Gabriel's Up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_(Peter_Gabriel_album)#Personnel

He's always worked like this, but this is clearly an epic conflation of several different sessions cobbled together into an admittedly cohesive but maybe sort of inert album.

There's some great, great stuff on Up so I wouldn't say he's lost it. To me it really does go back to the rhythm. His more recent stuff is often more loop-y and plodding, less naturally dynamic.

The orchestral stuff I think it some of the dullest music ever made. His arrangements of his own music are dull, his covers are daft - why rearrange familiar songs into such radically new forms by jettisoning the melodies and arrangements, but keeping the lyrics? If he had just written new words no one would have known they were covers. Makes it seem gimmicky.

Gabriel covering Elbow is like Will Smith covering Richard Blackwood's 'Who's Da Man'

"Think it's fair enough to wonder what's going on with some of these guys (see also Bryan Ferry to an extent) when their studio output dries up in early middle age...a curiosity, rather than entitlement (hopefully)"

I don't think it's that unusual, I think it's entirely natural that people's creativity slows down in middle age. People like McCartney are a real exception.

i guess I never paid attention to the credits on Up, I had no idea Tdchad blake or peter green were on it

His accent is weird, speaking voice that is. It's obviously a 'posh guy trying to lose his posh voice' accent but it's ended up coming out really odd. I'm trying to think what it's like but all I can come up with is a South African trying to impersonate Brian Eno.

I'll rep for his cover of "Listening Wind" on the orchestral album, the lone bright spot to me. It sounds like a Security-era experiment, and even the original could have come from PG 3.

The documentary SlimandSlam referenced is called The Sweatbox. Really terrific stuff! Buried for years, but a bootleg with a time odd was uploaded earlier this year.

Gabriel strikes me as being like Paddy McAloon of Prefab Sprout and Matt Johnson of The The in that I'm sure he has an enormous cache of unreleased material that had never been bootlegged

Really? I have honestly never thought I'd Gabriel that way at all. Does he usually release a lot of b-sides or anything that would suggest that?

he probably has an enormous cache of unfinished stuff.

"Think it's fair enough to wonder what's going on with some of these guys (see also Bryan Ferry to an extent) when their studio output dries up in early middle age...a curiosity, rather than entitlement (hopefully)"

I don't think it's that unusual, I think it's entirely natural that people's creativity slows down in middle age. People like McCartney are a real exception.

ahahahaha... wait... can't tell if serious.

I never would have predicted it, but the Peter Gabriel/Sting show tonight was pretty awesome.

i watched some youtube clips of this and then was sad that I'm going to miss it, because it looks pretty good. also sting sings Dancing with the Moonit Knight!

Yeah, part of it, at least, before Message in a Bottle. I was really impressed by the format, with combinations of Sting singing Sting, Gabriel singing Gabriel, Gabriel singing Sting, Sting singing Gabriel, and both often backing the other. Sting in particular seemed like he was having more fun than I've seen him have for years, often super happy just swinging his arms back with the backing singers, or playing bass (as he did on Big Time, with Tony Levin handling the synth bass). A lot of the times the guys not playing were still hanging on stage, singing and dancing and having a good time.

Back in the first couple of Lollapalooza iterations they made a big deal of acts guesting with each other, and certainly this kind of thing happened back when Gabriel and Sting were on the Human Rights Now tour, but it's been a while since I saw a collaborative tour, with this sort of musical chairs going on.

wow both the new songs that have come out recently (The Veil, today, and I'm Amazing, a few months ago) are not very good. They aren't terrible but they're hardly memorable or breaking any new territory. I'd like to think he's holding back on great things for the album but these give me zero hope, and I'm a huge fan.

His catalog is finally on Spotify. Listening to the car album now.

I
WILL
FIND
OUT

Why are all the songs on Us marked “explicit”? Did he go back and add a bunch of obscenities to bring it up to date?

he says the word sex in digging in the dirt.

He went with the remixed versions, all of which feature DMX.

“Kiss That Frog”!

man, Passion is close to topping my list of his best.

It's the last album he made where I don't skip at least one track.

I like Passion Sources even more.

His whole catalog is on Bandcamp now - and when I say his whole catalog, I mean it; you can even get the German-language versions of the third and fourth solo albums.

I saw someone mentioning Peter Gabriel just now, and I was reminded how much I enjoyed his tour with Sting. On paper it's a cash grab, but in practice it was something I wish more bands would do. There were Peter Gabriel sections and Sting sections, but what I remember most were the long stretches that fused both bands on stage and often featured Sting in a supporting role: playing bass, or lined up with the backing singers, or helping out Gabriel in the front. It was just a nice thing, and it was the most fun I think I've ever seen Sting have on stage. Here's a clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjhLD8LZ-Hc

Well, Sting has made clear Peter Gabriel's one of the few artists of his generation he genuinely likes or disturbs his chronic self-regard.

(An aside and not for this thread, but Sting's tour with Paul Simon sounded the same way: combining bands, covering each other's songs.)

I remember this because of Brexit - I think right after the ill-fated vote, Sting trashed it while introducing an appropriate Gabriel-era Genesis song. (Forgot which, but I'm sure fans can probably guess.)

I *think* he sang a snippet of "Dancing with the Moonlit Knight."

(Answer: yes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1voIdykzHk

Late 80s Peter Gabriel is kind of hilarious.

I just two-listened to Passion as a result of this thread and … with 2022 ears it sounds like every Hans Zimmer/Gladiator-style score I’ve ever heard. Lots of mysterious, Shankar violin drones, Nusrat banshee cries trailing into Real World’s cutting edge Lexicon reverbs, and so, so much tribal percussion.

Then you have “A Different Drum,” which sounds like he couldn’t help but add some of his own vocal stylings to the brew, which appears to employ some kind of Lyric Generator about rivers flowing and whatnot. IIRC, this is also the scene where Jesus is walking alone and one-by-one his disciples and followers appear next to him, as if he’s Steve Perry and Journey filming a music video on a shipping dock.

Also, I completely forgot that Shaking the Tree has a title track – which combined with the jaunty piano groove sounds a bit like Peter Gabriel and His Heavy African Friends.

I love Manu's playing on the title track.

I have to admit, Passion's become my favorite Gabriel, thanks to that combination of genuine respect for local sources + keyboard and percussive schlock + New Age quieter passages.

“Led Zeppelin? meh, just sounds like a cornier Greta Van Fleet amirite?”

also note PG invented tribal percussion in 1980 when he decreed that Phil Collins was not allowed to touch his cymbals

u rite abt “shaking the tree” tho. i play it once a year for my partner on International Women’s Day and she throws stuff at me.

xxxp yeah it's a great soundtrack. The Criterion DVD or Blu-ray has a nice bonus feature that was made in the late '80s or '90s where Gabriel goes over the whole creative process. I spend so much time watching films that I've stopped listening to soundtracks - it's probably best to hear most of them within the context of their respective films anyway - but Gabriel's was definitely one that held up well as its own album.

saw this the other day, peter gabriel with liz fraser and paul buchanan from the blue nile:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca-ZTr_e0LM

Is that from that Ovo thing? I forgot all about that!

it is, yes. they sing on two tracks of that - 'downside up' and 'make tomorrow'

Passion is phenomenal and I won't hear otherwise

Yeah what the hell Passion invented what would later become clichés. It had an amazing effect on 1989 me, may have been one of those formative listening experiences.

^^ this

My path for contemplating 80s Gabriel is comparing "I have the Touch" with "Come Talk to Me." I like both songs, and they have some lyrical themes and musical flourishes in common.

His approach was almost always agglutinative - building up thin layers of harmony that become orchestral in the aggregate.

You see the way he foregrounded of drums and percussion, and pushed guitars to become textural and atmospheric because they don't have to do as much song-shaping work.

So this track seems funky, spiky, listenable pop song that can still be plausibly called a little weird. The grainy underproduced making-of style video is retro-charming.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0cYreDaYFg

A decade later, a similar sentiment is expressed inna mature stylee. It's more confident, more sweeping, less anxious. But the core is the same: a shy Englishman yearns for connection over a lush synth pad and a thuddy quasi-tribal drum line.

People like the album version with Sinead, people like the Secret World version with Paula Cole. I am a corny-ass sentimentalist and sometimes gravitate toward the live one with Melanie Gabriel (for whom he wrote the song for in the first place).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyD04YMYUzk

That "I Have the Touch" has to be the best fan-made video I've seen yet. Excellent.

I Have the Touch is incredible. Jerry Marotta absolutely dominates.

Come Talk to Me is Divorcée Biko.

It's pretty wild how Marotta has played on so many of my favorite Peter Gabriel records, but he's also a big part of Hall & Oates. Less surprising now, but before I became familiar with their '70s-era experimentation (including Hall's work with Fripp), I only knew H&O through the big '80s hits.

Come Talk to Me is Divorcée Biko.

― Naive Teen Idol, Saturday, January 22, 2022

you say that like it's a bad thing

Yeah, Marotta is an absolute stud and was supposed to be in the 90s Crimson before pulling out. He’s also epic on Songs from the Big Chair.

Re. Passion, I said it on another thread but even as I never quite give up on him there’s always been something missing for me about Gabriel that is hard to put my finger on. Yes, his voice is magic. Yes he has great melodic sense and a nose for electronic arrangements. But there’s something kind of facile lurking under the surface that I think Xgau may be trying to get at here in his typically inscrutable way:

If Gabriel can't resist orchestrating his rock and roll, better he should lay on third-world rhythms than simulate first-world themes. But self-conscious primitivism hasn't cured his grandiosity--lyrical protestations notwithstanding, the only time those rhythms are around him and inside him, in control and in his soul, is on "Shock the Monkey," which has a good old first-world hook. Only Gabriel probably doesn't want to be cured--bet he admires African music not because it flows like a stream but because it taps the divine, and while he may know in his head that animists can't have one without the other, he's not about to become a believer.