Peter Gabriel

Latest Release

Essential Albums

  • Us (Remastered)
    Us (Remastered)
    Us (Remastered)

    Six years after the blockbuster success of the multi-platinum So, Peter Gabriel returned in 1992—somewhat less commercially minded, but no less sophisticated—with his sixth studio album, Us. It was recorded in his state-of-the-art Real World Studios, featured an extensive roster of musicians, and demonstrated Gabriel’s seemingly limitless appetite for pan-global rhythms and textures. But the elaborate sound of Us belies the lyrical content of the singer’s most open and confessional album. As its title implies, Us is the album in which Gabriel reaches out for love and connection, exploring his urges and desires over prismatic arrangements. Gabriel explores his emotions after a tumultuous period: His first marriage ended after more than 15 years, leading to a new relationship with actress Rosanna Arquette, as well as a brief romance with Sinead O’Connor (who lends her gorgeous, crystalline voice to “Come Talk to Me” and the vulnerable duet “Blood of Eden”). “Come Talk to Me” is one of Gabriel’s most exposed moments, a plea to his teenage daughter, with whom he’d had trouble communicating after the divorce. Elsewhere on Us, tracks like “Love to Be Loved”, “Blood of Eden” and “Secret World” all explore the nature of romantic love with Gabriel’s masterful balance of the grandiose and the intimate. But despite the deeply personal subject matter, the arrangements explode in grandiose colours, thanks to co-producer Daniel Lanois, Senegal’s Babacar Faye Drummers, the vocals of Moscow’s Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble and the reedy sounds of bagpipes and the Armenian duduk. Following the runaway success of “Sledgehammer”, Gabriel was back to his horn-soaked tricks on the single “Steam”, another slice of Stax-style R&B that ended up being a Top 40 hit. The cheeky come-on “Kiss That Frog”, meanwhile, gets its groove from drum programming, synth bass and a loop of London’s Adzido Pan African Dance Ensemble. And the single “Digging in the Dirt” has a powerful pulse, courtesy of the rubbery bass by long-time Gabriel low-end Tony Levin. Emerging from self-reflections from recent therapy sessions, the song finds Gabriel exploring his shadowy side and his thoughtful side all at once. A chart success worldwide, Us would be followed by the ambitious Secret World Tour, a lengthy road trip that culminated in a headlining performance at Woodstock ’94. He wouldn’t return with a proper follow-up until nearly a decade later, leaving Us as his sole album of the 1990s. But it spent those years as a prime example of Gabriel as diarist, hitmaker, global unifier and ambitious studio visionary.

  • So
    So
    So

    Exploring his love of R&B and soul music for the first time, Peter Gabriel reinvented himself on 1986’s So, his fifth album. It’s the album that transformed the once shadowy, sinister, secretive art-rocker—by now in his mid-thirties—into an unlikely pop sensation. For the first time, Gabriel’s songs were stripped of their layers of sonic trickery and cubist textures, while producer Daniel Lanois coaxed the singer into finally letting his drummers use cymbals and hi-hats again. And, for the first time, Gabriel’s face even appeared unobscured on the album cover. The resulting album would go platinum five times over, turn Gabriel into an MTV fixture and grant the singer a unique burst of total pop dominance—one that was never experienced at this level by fellow travellers like David Bowie, David Byrne, Bryan Ferry or even post-Police Sting. The album’s lead single, recorded almost as an afterthought, was “Sledgehammer”, an avant-garde R&B throwback powered by big synths and even bigger horns. A chart-topping hit in the US, “Sledgehammer” moves along via a one-take recording of drummer Manu Katché’s incredible groove (he’s been a staple of Gabriel’s band ever since). Similarly, the combustible funk-rock of “Big Time” features a big beat from Police drummer Stewart Copeland, as well as veteran Gabriel drummer Jerry Marotta tapping on Tony Levin’s bass with drumsticks. The success of “Sledgehammer” served as a gateway to the rest of So, exposing millions to Gabriel’s sui generis world of arresting ballads, vaporous atmospheres and omnivorous appetite for global rhythms. Though absolutely drenched in synthesisers, “Don’t Give Up” is something of Gabriel’s attempt at Americana, taking inspiration by Depression-era photographs. He originally sought Dolly Parton for the duet, but ultimately tapped Kate Bush, who supplies one of the album’s most intimate and chilling performances. The slowed-down Brazilian forró rhythms of “Mercy Street” floats like a fog, while “In Your Eyes” features the gymnastic, ecstatic voice of Senegalese mbalax superstar Youssou N’Dour, along with Katché’s absolutely wild drum fills. So was nothing short of a sensation, staying on the US album charts for an astonishing 93 weeks. Gabriel ended up nominated for four Grammys, three American Music Awards, and eleven MTV Video Music Awards—and the wildly ambitious video for “Sledgehammer” is regarded as a peak moment of the entire art form of music video itself. So would become even deeper engrained into the cultural firmament after John Cusack threw a boombox over his head to play “In Your Eyes” in the 1989 film Say Anything.

  • Peter Gabriel 3: Melt (Remastered)
    Peter Gabriel 3: Melt (Remastered)
    Peter Gabriel 3: Melt (Remastered)

    “I felt I wanted to write music for the 1980s, and that the place to begin was the rhythm track,” Peter Gabriel once said. “Rhythm being the spine of music, if you change the spine, the shape of the body changes as a matter of course.” Armed with a primitive drum machine, Gabriel took a sharp compositional detour for his third album, Peter Gabriel 3: Melt, letting his songwriting process lead with rhythm instead of chord changes. The sparse, percussion-driven album, released in 1980, became the place where his artistic ambitions finally coalesced, resulting in a peculiar and ominous piece of shadow-lurking art-rock that nonetheless spawned a pop hit. Traditional sounds were eschewed across the album. Gabriel banned the use of cymbals and hi-hats for drummers Jerry Marotta and Phil Collins, which explains such austere, atmospheric tracks as “Intruder” and “No Self Control”. But the in-studio innovations didn’t end there: Gabriel and Collins—working with producer Steve Lillywhite and engineer Hugh Padgham—also experimented with the explosive, cavernous sound that would be known as “gated reverb”, which would soon come to define the decade. Melt was also one of the first to use the Fairlight CMI synthesiser, a sampling keyboard whose trademark sound would take flight across the decade on records by Art of Noise, Herbie Hancock, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Tears for Fears. Rhythmically inspired by the soundtrack to the 1965 South African film Dingaka, Gabriel composed protest anthem and perennial set-closer “Biko”, a soaring tribute to activist Steve Biko that would help bring global attention to South African apartheid, and would directly inspire Steven Van Zandt’s Sun City project. But Gabriel’s forward-thinking musicianship on Melt scared record execs. The album dealt in strange, supposedly uncommercial sounds, and featured dark lyrics sung from the perspective of assassins (“Family Snapshot”), perverts (“Intruder”) and the generally alienated (“I Don’t Remember”). Sensing a commercial disaster, Gabriel’s label in the US dropped him. It was a disastrous decision: After Mercury picked up Melt, the album became Gabriel’s biggest-selling to that point, and spawned a legitimate hit single in “Games Without Frontiers”. Featuring background vocals from Kate Bush, the anti-war tune became a top 10 smash in the UK and Canada, and a minor chart hit in the States—officially kicking off the former prog-rocker’s journey toward becoming a heavy player in the MTV era.

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About Peter Gabriel

Peter Gabriel is one of the first artists to bring art-rock and world music into the mainstream. A key figure of the ’70s and ’80s, the British-born artist/activist started his career as the frontman of Genesis while still a teenager, helping forge a high-concept, restlessly ambitious sound that made the band a cornerstone of progressive rock. (Gabriel himself often changed costume multiple times during live shows, telling fantastical stories to hold the audience while the band re-tuned their battery of instruments.) Gabriel left Genesis in the mid-’70s and embarked on a solo career that shaped his arty tendencies into increasingly pop forms, culminating in 1986’s era-defining So. Along with fellow Genesis alum Phil Collins, he became one of the few progressive rockers to survive the cultural transition to punk and New Wave, turning out a series of singles (“Solsbury Hill”, “Shock the Monkey”, “Games Without Frontiers”, “Sledgehammer”) by turns rhythmic, sophisticated, elusive and complex, not to mention establishing himself as a regular face on MTV. A champion of world music, he also co-founded the annual WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance) festival in 1980, later launching a label, Real World Records, dedicated to pushing international music onto a global stage. Relatedly, Gabriel has thrown considerable weight behind humanitarian causes, particularly in South Africa (his 1980 single “Biko” was named after anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko)—a legacy that led Nobel Peace Prize Laureates to award him a Man of Peace in 2006.

HOMETOWN
Chobham, Surrey, England
BORN
13 February 1950
GENRE
Rock

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