Tag: geffenrecords

Peter Gabriel, Us

The artist’s most emotionally direct album digs in the dirt to yield a richly organic collaboration featuring some of his most enduring songs.

Album of the Week, August 15, 2026

When Peter Gabriel released his new album Us on September 28, 1992, it seemed like an eternity had passed since his last pop album, So, in 1986. (How little we knew!) Over the past weeks we’ve looked into some of what he was doing during the period—the Passion soundtrack and sister album Passion – Sources, massive world tour, WOMAD, and starting the Real World label and launching the western careers of some of his key contributors. But it has to be said that part of what he was doing was recalibrating. For the former art-pop auteur, life could never be the same after So. He had to find a new way to make music.

He also had to come to terms with himself. His marriage to Jill Gabriel, long strained, ended in divorce in 1987 in the middle of the massive world tour. He was famously linked with actress Rosanna Arquette for some time after his divorce, but the relationship was not long lasting. The dissolution of his marriage resulted in depression and therapy, which continued for six years. The divorce and his therapy both influenced the songwriting on Us, his most personal album to date.

To make the album real, he turned to a group of collaborators both familiar and new, many drawn from the sessions in the massive state-of-the-art studio he built in a former mill building complex in Box, Wiltshire, England. There was the core band, by now familiar: Tony Levin, Manu Katché, David Rhodes, producer Daniel Lanois, engineer David Bottrill; frequent collaborators like Shankar and Peter Hammill; collaborators from Passion including Hossam Ramzy, Doudou N’Diaye Rose, Kudsi Erguner, Assane Thiam, Manny Elias, and the Babacar Faye Drummers; and collaborators drawn from the nascent Real World label including many of the Passion names, the Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble, and Ayub Ogada. There were also some brand new faces, including Meters guitarist Leo Nocentelli, Lanois’ producing partner Brian Eno, ascendant electronic producer William Orbit, duduk player Levon Minassian, and incandescent vocalist Sinéad O’Connor.

“Come Talk to Me” begins in a silence that builds to a shout: layers of keyboards crescendo up to a bagpipe solo over the bass, thundering drums courtesy of the combined forces of Katché, the Babacar Faye Drummers, and a 1980 drum loop from Doudou N’Diaye Rose, and a response on the duduk. Peter’s vocals are direct and intimate, reaching out to someone who has been incommunicado, asking for a bridge over which they can rebuild a relationship; he’s subsequently disclosed that the rift was with one of his daughters. The chorus features harmony vocals from Sinéad; Peter had met her doing an Amnesty concert in Santiago, Chile in 1990 and invited her to the studio, and having her very present voice on the opening track effectively signals that this album is about dialog and communication. It’s also a showcase for his collaborative work with the artists of Real World: that choir that enters after the bridge, the storied Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble, were recording their album for the label, The Wild Field, at the same time Gabriel was working on Us.

The contrast as the album flows into “Love to Be Loved” is marked. Cool where “Come Talk to Me” is hot, the second track is all about minimal groove, with both the late William Orbit and the legendary Brian Eno contributing programming and keys. Katché’s drum programming and Hossam Ramzy’s tabla (as well as Daryl Johnson’s hand drum) anchor the rhythm along with Tony Levin’s bass. And the lyrics take us on an emotional journey, starting from talking about the need for contact (echoes of “I Have the Touch”) to a startling transition in the bridge in which Peter confesses, “This old familiar craving / I’ve been here before, this way of behaving… Let it pass, let it go, let it leave / From the deepest place I grieve / This time, I believe.” But even that isn’t the end, and we get to the root of it: “Though it takes all the strength in me / And all the world can see / I’m losing such a central part of me / I can let go of it… I recognize how much I’ve lost / And I cannot face the cost / ‘Cause I love to be loved.” The track’s stark honesty about the need for physical relationships and letting go of destructive behaviors, even as other relationships are falling apart, is striking; one really feels those years that Peter spent in therapy at work here. And it’s a jam.

That brings us to “Blood of Eden,” which feels like the most primal, innocent love song Peter has ever written. It comes out of an idyllic opening with the doudouk over layers of keyboards, and Peter sings about the darkness in his heart and the “heated and the holy.” The song is surely one of the best known from the album thanks in no small part to Sinéad O’Connor’s pure vocals in the chorus duet (and the face morphing of the two singers in the video), but the lyrics are a bit of a hodgepodge, with the heated and the holy looking down from on high “so secure with everything they’re buying.” The narrator returns to “the union of the woman and the man” as a retreat to paradise even as he acknowledges the worm at the heart of the apple: “All the while the distance grows between you and me.” There are echoes here of “Don’t Give Up,” both in the duet structure of the song and the plight of the narrator, but the catastrophe seems more emotional than economic here. This was one of the songs that underwent the longest gestation, with multiple versions and arrangements extant; the liner notes hint at this when they credit Richard Chappell for the mix from which the bridge section was drawn, and another version of the song appeared even before the album was released on a soundtrack (see the bonus section below). Other versions have been released to Peter’s fan club on Bandcamp.

“Steam” underwent a similar evolution, with a stunning “Quiet Steam” appearing as a b-side to the album’s first single. But there’s plenty to recommend the released version, starting with the funky guitar of Leo Nocentelli of the Meters. The horns aren’t given quite as much prominence as they are in the song’s spiritual predecessor “Sledgehammer,” but they’re still pretty tasty, and the Babacar Faye Drummers add an edge to the percussive energy that is otherwise all Motown. One fun thing to listen for is Peter’s keys, here easily distinguished because he’s switched from the airy synth sounds of the Prophet to a fairly convincing Hammond organ soundalike, adding to the sweaty funk of the mix.

“Only Us” returns to a more open, idyllic sound, with a duet between Peter and Kenyan musician Ayub Ogada. This is another track with contributions from William Orbit, but here the vibe is organic rather than chill. Shankar and ney flautist Kudsi Erguner contribute to the feeling of limitless nature, and Peter’s lyrics signal the song’s centrality to the album’s overall concept as he refocuses on relationships and people: “Seduced by the noise and the bright things that glisten / I knew all the time I should shut up and listen / And I’m finding my way home from the great escape… Yes I can read you loud and clear … The further on I go, oh the less I know / Friend or foe, there’s only us.” I realized as I was relistening to the album that this was a track that had slipped under my radar, but it repays listening to again.

The second half of the album starts with “Washing of the Water,” easily Peter’s most gospel song starting with just bass, snare and piano accompanying Peter’s unvarnished vocals. This too has echoes of “Don’t Give Up”—we could be over the same river that flowed through the earlier song. But here the protagonist gives in to the lure of the water, choosing to accept the call to immerse himself in grief as he mourns the loss of the relationship. The horns under the bridge as Peter sings “Letting go, it’s so hard / The way it’s hurting now / To get this love untied / So tough to stay with this thing / ‘Cause if I follow through / I face what I’ve denied / I’ll get those hooks out of me / and I’ll take out the hooks that I’ve sunk deep in your side.” The acceptance of the dissolution of the relationship, the unhooking and the desire to finally sleep, feels like a brutally sad step, but also like emotional honesty and progress as the narrator names the pain that is at his core.

The progress of Peter’s emotional journey is most vivid in “Digging in the Dirt,” a metaphor for the hard work of therapy as Peter allows himself to express anger as well as sadness and grief. The rage of the narrator boiling over in the chorus—“Don’t talk back, just drive the car”—is shocking when it comes to the surface, the “something in me / dark and sticky” rising like Sting’s monster crawling to the surface of a dark Scottish loch. Significantly, though, the narrator doesn’t stay stuck in this moment of rage; he takes a step back, asking, “Stay with me, I need support,” and goes digging to “find the places I got hurt.” By the end of the song (a fantastic slow groove built atop Babacar’s djembe, Assane Thiam’s tama, and Hossam Ramzy’s surdu, with Leo Nocentelli joining David Rhodes, Manu Katché, and Tony Levin plus more background vocals from Ogada, this time joined by Peter Hammill and Richard Macphail), the narrator has even opened up his area of concern to “find the places we got hurt,” acknowledging the difficulties he’s caused his partner. I remember watching the video for this song live, introduced by Gabriel on MTV, in a student lounge and thinking, “I guess Peter’s been in therapy”; the vivid claymation of Peter sinking into the grass covered by insects and worms is among the most memorable video images of him in his entire ouevre.

“Fourteen Black Paintings” follows. The longer CD format allowed Gabriel to expand beyond the 45-50 minute limit of an LP, and this composition, which reads like a cross between Passion and “We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37),” is the beneficiary, as it surely would have been cut for time otherwise. Yet it’s significant in its own way; Peter’s only known collaboration with Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, the song is an echo of “Biko” in its call for the people to embrace their power and bring about change. There’s also some vivid percussion from Babacar and Assane Thiam alongside the doudouk and electric violin that build the atmosphere of the song.

All of which makes “Kiss That Frog” even more of a shock. A playful metaphor-song that plays as a straightforward fairy tale, Peter’s lyrics have rarely been so direct, and his singing is unusually free, especially in the scat choruses at the beginning and end of the song. If “Steam” is a lesser shadow of “Sledgehammer,” I’d rate “Kiss That Frog” as a superior successor to “Big Time.” Both more open and more generous in its worldview, it’s also downright funny: “Let him sit beside you / Eat right off your plate / You don’t have to be afraid / There’s nothing here to hate.” When Gabriel shifts perspective from the narrator to the frog, croaking “Kiss that frog / You may get your prince,” it’s a laugh-out-loud moment. When I was a cynical, critical teen I disliked the song for exactly the same characteristics that make it enduring (and endearing) now: the extended metaphor, the straightforward pop, the echoes of gospel and R&B in Peter’s harmonica and “fake organ” and Marylin McFarlane’s backing vocals. This is one of the few songs on the record that doesn’t have an extensive list of guest musicians, just programming by David Bottrill and Richard Blair, a percussion loop from the Adzido Drummers and shakers from Manny Elias, and David Rhodes’ guitar.

The album closes with “Secret World,” another contender for the theme song, as Peter sings with open regret, but “no guilt and no shame, no sorrow, no blame,” about the dissolution of the relationship and about moving on: “All the places we were hiding love / What was it we were thinking of?” The song, again built on a drum loop from Doudou N’Diaye Rose (the album’s secret MVP), is an open ballad sung with regret but also with forgiveness, and with a sort of intimacy not present in the singer’s earlier works: “So I watch you wash your hair / Underwater, unaware / And the plane flies through the air / Did you think you didn’t have to choose it? / That I alone could win or lose it?” After many works berating himself for the dissolution of the relationship, Peter dispassionately observes that it wasn’t only up to him, and allows himself to absolve some of the guilt, shame, sorrow and blame. It’s probably the most mature reflection on the end of a relationship in pop music, certainly in Peter’s work, and it puts truth to Peter’s dedication to Jill and to Rosanna Arquette in the liner notes: “To Jill, for giving up so much in all the time we were growing up together. To Rosanna for all her love and support that I didn’t properly acknowledge.” And it’s all wrapped in a tasty groove, with one of Tony Levin’s most sinuous bass lines as the foundation.

Us in many ways is clearly a direct successor to So in terms of the ambition, artistic scope, and stadium-readiness of its sound. But where its 1986 predecessor is the slickest thing Gabriel has ever recorded, Us embraces the organic, acoustic, and human side of music making. The collaborations from Passion and the experiences producing and recording—and singing alongside—so many great world musicians seem to have opened Peter up to a more human way of making music. It also evolved his songwriting in ways that opened new opportunities in his career; when we check back with some of his later work we’ll explore that thought some more. But first we’ll listen to another voice on his Real World label, one who didn’t participate in the making of Us.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: “Blood of Eden” appears in a different version, based on an earlier approach to the song, in Wim Wender’s great 1991 film Until the End of the World, accompanying a scene that hints at nuclear catastrophe — or at least an EMP. Here’s that scene (but you should really watch the whole movie):

BONUS BONUS: “Washing of the Water” would seem to be a non-obvious choice to perform on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno” to promote this album, but that’s where Peter went in this incredible performance with Shankar, Joy Askew on keyboards, Tony Levin on acoustic bass—and with Branford Marsalis, who was music director for Jay’s band at the time, sitting in on soprano sax:

BONUS BONUS BONUS: Much of the b-side material that came from the Us sessions consists of alternate takes of the album tracks, but “Bashi-Bazouk” is the exception. An instrumental that feels a bit like Passion given a dance floor treatment, it’s got a shocking opening and a mean groove:

BONUS X 4: Just as Passion – Sources served as a Real World sampler for the artists appearing on Passion, so there was Plus From Us. Sadly the compilation has never been released on vinyl, but there’s a lot to like here: Ayub Ogada, the Meters, solo tracks from Rhodes, Levin, and Katché, and more.

Peter Gabriel, Big Time

Peter’s singles provide a good excuse to linger in the world of “So” a little longer.

Album of the Week, May 23, 2026

The album cycle for Peter Gabriel’s So went on for quite a while. The first single, “Sledgehammer,” hit the streets on April 14, 1986, about a month before the album was released. There followed “In Your Eyes” in August, “Don’t Give Up” in October, “Big Time” in March 1987 and “Red Rain” in June.1 That’s a lot of releases, and by extension a lot of opportunities for B-sides.

I love B-sides.2 They’re a glimpse of what else was happening when the album was recorded (or, sometimes, some other album, as we’ll see today). Sometimes they illustrate where else a song could go. And sometimes they’re just dance mixes. And the great thing about there being huge markets for pop music in both the US and the UK is that sometimes you got completely different B-sides!

If the above discursion and the picture have led you to think that I’m using these facts to just talk about a bunch of Peter Gabriel rarities, you would be correct. I’m going to pull from three different releases of “Big Time”: the 12″ US single, the 7″ UK release, and the CD maxi-single, which is the one that I first owned back in the day. (Shhh.)

The 12″ opens with “Big Time (dance mix),” which is what it says on the tin. It’s mixed by Tom Lord-Alge, a recording engineer who had previously crossed paths with Peter on “No More Apartheid” on the Sun City compilation, and who had also engineered or mixed for the Force MDs, Jeff Beck, Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, David Johansen, Sly Fox, Steve Winwood’s Back in the High Life, OMD’s “If You Leave,” and Billy Crystal’s “You Look Marvelous.” This cavalcade of 1980s sounds perhaps explains the low-end drum machine and handclaps that get spliced onto the beginning of the track. I do love the way that he pulls out and isolates Tony Levin (and Jerry Marotta)’s bass line at the beginning though, as well as letting us hear the nasty (in a good way) David Rhodes guitar riff without vocals over it. The verses are largely untouched—a little extra echo here, an extra-80s guitar in the texture there—but the chorus gets a spacey reinforcement on the backing vocals that’s almost dublike. This is kicked into high gear after the second verse, where it’s just backing vocals, drum machine, and Peter going “huh!” for about 30 seconds. As dance mixes go it’s relatively harmless but also fairly unimaginative.

“In Your Eyes (special mix)” is an entirely different story. Produced by Bill Laswell and mixed by Jason Corsaro, the mix shuffles the key bits of the original recording, but also adds an entirely new opening featuring Peter singing over a low synth note, chiming thirds and fourths, and a hi-hat heartbeat: “Accepting all I’ve done and said / I want to stand and stare again / Til there’s nothing left out / All that remains there in your eyes.” The intro is punctuated by a brilliant vocal run by Youssou N’Dour, then the brilliant Ronnie Bright bass vocal. Youssou sings a bit in Wolof: “Sa bet chi lamp, chi tangaay, sa bet maangi ci biir,” meaning “Your eyes are lit, your eyes are bright, it’s in your eyes.” And then, when we think we’re going to get the verse, there’s instead an extended meditation with talking drums and synths, with more incredible Wolof vocals from Youssou and some vocalese from Peter. The chorus finally joins with even more Youssou vocals atop it. There’s an extended reverbful talking drum break, reminding us that Laswell has always been the king of dub. Somehow the complete absence of the verse pulls me into a trance listening to this mix—or maybe that’s just Youssou. This is a masterful mix and still holds up incredibly well, which is why it featured on one of my playlists years later. The twelve-inch single finishes with the album version of “We Do What We’re Told.”

The UK 7″ single, on the other hand, has a single B-side, “Curtains.” The composition here is reminiscent of Peter’s work on Birdy, but with more space around the edges. There’s an extended bit that is just a heartbeat of a talking drum with a tiny whoosh of a cymbal brush, and a panoply of synth textures giving the effect of opening doors, echoing caverns, distant bells, all leading to Peter’s vocals: “Oh, draw the blinds / we can shut out the night.” This is the most erotically direct of his love songs to this point, but even here love is filled with ambiguity and tinged with regret: “And there are lions on our curtains / They lick their wounds / They lick their doubt.” It’s a stunning miniature of a song, and I can only imagine what might have gone through the heads of the casual buyers of the single in 1987 when they flipped it over and listened to it.

“Curtains” also appears on the Big Time CD maxi-single, alongside the album version of “No Self Control.” It’s rounded out by “Across the River,” which was used as a mood-setting opener for the original 1982 WOMAD festival and which was recorded in the studio for the WOMAD benefit Music and Rhythm. It begins as an improvisation by Shankar and Peter, joined by David Rhodes, and then a thundering drum part from Stewart Copeland enters. I’ve always been captivated by the combinations of sounds, particularly the low notes from Shankar’s instrument (not a traditional Western violin), and have long wondered what a full album of collective improvisation from a group like this might have sounded like.

The relatively long period of time between Security and So, combined with Peter’s collaborations in WOMAD and with others, combined to make the experience of following the various offshoots from the album a rich musical journey. We’re going to continue following some of those connections for … well, for a while. Next week we’ll pick back up with one of those collaborators and listen to a unique live album.

BONUS: Peter brought “Across the River” back for his “Secret World Live” tour in the 1990s, with Shankar:

BONUS BONUS: A version of “Curtains” with extended vocals appears in the video game Myst IV, though I’m unsure if these were newly recorded or just an alternate take. Here’s a playthrough video showing the song in context:

Footnotes

  1. Making this the only Peter Gabriel album with a singles-to-non-singles ratio of greater than 2 to 1, regardless of whether you count the LP track listing with eight tracks or the CD with nine. ↩︎
  2. I don’t know if I have to spell this out after four years of writing about vinyl records, but just in case: songs played on the radio used to come on 7″ vinyl records that were played at a faster speed (45RPM rather than 33 1/3). The faster playback speed meant the grooves could be cut deeper for better dynamic range. The records had two sides: the A-side, aka the actual single, and the B-side, which was usually whatever the artist or the label felt like putting on there. ↩︎

Peter Gabriel, Birdy

Peter Gabriel’s first soundtrack album leans heavily on his past while pointing to the future.

Album of the Week, April 25, 2026

Peter Gabriel has always been an arty performer. From his earliest days in Genesis he leveraged visual presentation to make a bigger impact (think the fox head on Foxtrot, or the flower costume). And we’ve seen how visuals continued to be important with his solo work all the way up through Peter Gabriel 4 and “Shock the Monkey.” So it comes as no surprise that he was attracted to the art of making movie soundtracks. (He’s said on his on website, “I’ve always loved film music and at age seventeen I had the choice to go to the London School of Film Technique or following a career as a musician, and it was quite a difficult decision for me. Ever since, I’ve always wanted to work more in film, not so much at the acting end of it, but more in the creating side.”) That he started doing film soundtracks should not surprise the listener, but how familiar it sounds just might.

Gabriel also notes that he’s “notoriously slow,” which is difficult to reconcile with the time pressures associated with scoring a film. The solution for Birdy was to reuse already-recorded tracks, as well as adding new numbers that he could develop on the Fairlight. For the latter, he got a little help from producer Daniel Lanois, a Canadian guitarist who had produced an album by Martha and the Muffins, played on albums by Raffi and Brian Eno, and had just (on Eno’s invitation) finished co-producing U2’s fourth album, The Unforgettable Fire.1 Lanois brought a depth and added layer of sound to Gabriel’s textures; the combination was potent.

This isn’t a movie blog so I’m not going to try to review the film itself, only to note that: it was based on the debut novel by then-fifty-year-old William Wharton, who also wrote the novel A Midnight Clear; starred Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage near the beginning of both their careers; and is a traumatic film to watch by yourself in a library viewing booth, as I did the first time I saw the film as a first-year student in Clemons Library at the University of Virginia in 1990 or 1991.

At any rate, “At Night” is an original full of low synth tones, clattering percussion, and a deep throbbing bass tone, with Gabriel’s Fairlight sounding woodwind-like tones over the top. It’s ominous but somehow stately, even as the last minute or so incorporates a version of one of the themes from “Wallflower” (from PG4) into the bridge.

“Floating Dogs” begins with a massive surge, oriented around a half-step downward bend of the pitch of the core synth sound. But it transitions into a sharply rhythmic jam built around Tony Levin and Larry Marotta that might, once upon a time, have provided a foundation track for a PG single. “Quiet and Alone” is driven primarily by a woodwind-like tone in the synth, loping along in waltz time.

One of the most obvious borrowings from Gabriel’s recent discography, “Close Up” isolates the opening piano track from “Family Snapshot” over a subtle background of synth tones; to my ears the track gains a great deal in power for its restraint. It fades out into the low oceanic tones of “Slow Water,” a hypnotic series of pivots between V and IV intervals. The side ends with “Dressing the Wound,” more or less isolated keyboards from Gabriel and Larry Fast to start but swelling into a wordless vocal melody that could have been destined for an album cut some day.2

Side two opens with “Birdy’s Flight,” a fanfare for low and flutelike synths that swells in volume and pivots to the massive synth and drums coda of “Not One of Us.” This track had an afterlife, appearing in multiple films in the A Better Tomorrow series by Hong Kong director John Woo. It’s followed by “Slow Marimbas,” marking the return of Morris Pert to Peter’s albums. The song sets the idiophones over a cumulonimbus of synths that eventually rise to blanket the track.

“The Heat” is probably the most direct lift in the album, comprising almost the entirety of the instrumental track of “The Rhythm of the Heat.” It’s probably the reason that I’ve always found the lyrics of the original song unsatisfactory; hearing the song without words you get all the hair-raising liturgy of the ceremonial abandon, without the explicit lampshading of “drawn into a circle that dances round the fire.” Dude, your music tells us what’s going on; the words are completely unnecessary.

Despite its name, “Sketch Pad with Trumpet and Voice” only uses Jon Hassell’s heavily treated trumpet as color, accompanying another Gabriel wordless vocal over a throbbing synthesized drone. The melody, though, is something else, descending from the seventh degree of the scale downward, it twists around, echoing Islamic song forms in a way that Peter would return to again in another soundtrack. He was clearly listening to some of his fellow performers at his WOMAD festivals.

“Under Lock and Key” has a major-key introduction with a flute-like synthesizer motif, followed by a rendition of the main theme of “Wallflower” (or the second theme of “At Night”) on the electric piano. The song ends before the “Hold on” chorus, fading into ominous synthesizer chords that swell into the instrumental coda from “San Jacinto,” here retitled “Powerhouse at the Foot of the Mountain.” The album ends in an awed suspension, leaving us in an unsettled state of contemplation.

The Birdy soundtrack is not one of Gabriel’s most well-known releases—in the 1980s, I only discovered it thanks to a friend dubbing a copy onto cassette for me. But it contained roots from his past—literally—and important seeds from his future. Both Daniel Lanois and engineer David Bottrill would go on to make more—and more well-known—albums with Gabriel, and that tinge of prayer music belied a significant influence that would play a much more prominent role in his upcoming releases. Specifically, the 1985 WOMAD featured, alongside acts like New Order, the Fall, and the Pogues, a performer from Pakistan who wowed the British audience with his vocal genius and the sounds of traditional Qawwali music. We’ll hear that 1985 live performance next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: The full length film of Birdy isn’t available for free anywhere, so if you want to see it you’ll have to rent it from your favorite streaming provider. But this trailer does us the (dis)favor of undoing some of the jumble of the film’s narrative arc and telling the story of Birdy in something like chronological order. Plus: young Nicolas Cage.

Footnotes

  1. You don’t ever get to write a sentence like that one in these reviews; I could not resist. ↩︎
  2. Gabriel is known to have written many songs with nonsense syllables while working out his melodies; starting with Birdy these wordless vocalizations started to appear in some of his more ambient compositions. ↩︎

Peter Gabriel, Plays Live

Gabriel gives a definitive send-off to the sound and songs of his first four albums in his first live record.

Album of the Week, April 11, 2026

Live albums serve a different purpose for a rock artist than for a jazz musician. In jazz you’re documenting the spontaneous magic that happened on a particular night, in a particular venue. With rock you sometimes get that, but more often it’s about getting the sound of a certain era, about all the different ways an artist takes music that originated in a studio into a live performance. And sometimes it’s about summing up an era of an artist’s work, getting all the hits performed in front of a screaming crowd as a souvenir of a particular moment.

This last category is definitely where Plays Live falls, but there are elements of the other motivations as well. In particular, some early songs are revisited and updated, while others faithfully recreate their studio sound. Some of that “faithful” sound might be due to touch-ups; the notes on one of the dust sleeves say, “Although this album was compiled from four concerts in the mid-west of the United States, some additional recording took place not a thousand miles away from the home of the artiste. The generic term of this process is ‘cheating’.” Whatever the means, the album presents music from four concerts in November and December 1982 that show how Gabriel transformed the music from his first four albums into a coherent stage performance, with the stalwart help of Tony Levin, David Rhodes, Jerry Marotta, and Larry Fast.

“The Rhythm of the Heat” is remarkably faithful to the album original, with Larry Fast and Peter playing the same loops and synths used to construct the studio track. Only at the end does the performance deviate from the original, and that’s only because Jerry Marotta only has four limbs; while his drum performance is appropriately climactic, it doesn’t have the apocalyptic frenzy of the polyrhythms played by Ekome on the original track. “I Have the Touch” is slightly looser, with a combination of drums and synth percussion backing up Peter as he swaggers through the song. Peter’s outro has some vocal improvisations that carry the imprint of Motown, pointing ahead to a change of direction in future albums.

“Not One of Us” is another faithful recreation, with Tony Levin’s bass lines prominently front and center and Jerry Marotta’s drums leading into the massive breakdown at the end of the song. A quiet “Family Snapshot” has the epic arc of the original, greeted with respectful applause to close out the first side.

“D.I.Y.” is the first song of the set to have a substantial revision, with synths standing in for Robert Fripp’s guitar but carrying the same rhythmic intensity. “The Family and the Fishing Net” faithfully recreates the spooky quality of the voodoo and wedding rituals from the original, with some extra synth lines adding slightly polyrhythmic accents at the beginning and a massive choral outro with the band singing backing vocals behind. (This is a good time to shout out appreciation for the collective voices of Levin, Rhodes, Marotta and Fast, who create a great backing sound behind Peter.)

“Intruder” is great live here, with Marotta’s drums ably filling in for Phil Collins’ legendary gated reverb and Fast’s synths somewhat less ably replacing the marimbas in the instrumental. But that’s a note-perfect whistle at the end, over some sort of idiophone, presumably played by Marotta, and a massive finale with Peter taking the final line up an octave to great effect.

“I Go Swimming” is a gift of sorts, the only song here not to have previously appeared on a PG album. It’s a fun tune led off by a locked-in groove by Tony Levin, soon joined by the rest of the band as they play in the chromatic intro. Peter’s vocal on the chorus gives a bit of an Al Green feel, which abruptly switches into a more traditional Gabriel verse in 6/8. The song was apparently a leftover from the 1980 PG3 session that became a live staple, and a great break in the set.

Both “San Jacinto” and “Solsbury Hill” hew closely to their recorded versions, albeit with keys replacing the jubilant twelve-string guitar in the latter plus an extended joyous vocal coda. (Okay, not hewn quite as closely as all that.) “No Self Control” gets the most dramatic retooling of all the back catalog numbers, with a moody synth-driven groove replacing the marimba and dueling guitars of the original. Played about 20% slower than the original, it carries less manic intensity than resignation and despair. “I Don’t Remember” maintains the disco-funk brilliance of its predecessor thanks to Tony Levin’s deft playing and a wordless vocal bridge in the extended outro that raises the hackles on the back of the neck.

“Shock the Monkey” is a jittery wonder here, all funky high notes above a relentless, mechanical dance rhythm. It’s also arguably the farewell to an early Gabriel practice—the use of face paint to portray different characters in live performance (and videos). The blue make-up on the album cover (and the insert above) is a simplified version of the elaborate ritual monkey make-up used in the video; photographer Armando Gallo recalls it was actually taken during “Lay Your Hands On Me,” a track omitted from the original LP.

“Humdrum” is a pleasant surprise in the running order, a throwback all the way to PG1. The song offers the opportunity to hear how Peter’s vocals evolved during this first six-year stretch of solo performance. His low notes are richer, his high notes with a bit of sandy grit around the edges but with assurance as he takes rhythmic liberties with the line. The vocals are also mixed much further forward than in Bob Ezrin’s original, allowing the lyrics to be more clearly understood; this might be the definitive version as a result. “On the Air” is a last intense workout, with the band lending it more polish than the dry Fripp-produced original and somehow also carrying a greater intensity throughout. The audience is in it all the way, shouting their response to Peter’s sung “on the air” in the chorus. The band gets a great workout in the outro, with an instrumental workout before Peter sings the final chorus as a great shout.

The album ends, as did so many of his concerts, with “Biko.” Stripped of its opening and closing South African hymns, it plays as a more direct protest anthem, with the crowd’s singing along audible under the third verse and the extended outro. The album ends with a long fade-out as Peter calls “Good night!” and the crowd chants “Peter, Peter, Peter” in response.

Plays Live is unique in Peter’s discography for serving as a perfect punctuation mark at the end of his first four-album run. With five tunes each from the third and fourth albums and the hits from the first two, you could be forgiven for never checking back to listen to the originals. (I would strongly recommend making time for 3 and 4, both of which stand as massive accomplishments.)

In a way it was also a farewell to this portion of his career, as what came after would prove a powerful transformation for his sound and his fortunes. But before we get there, he had one last project, albeit a slightly obscure one, that revisited the sound from this period in a more unexpectedly direct way. And before that, we have one of the collaborations that began to shape his new direction; we’ll hear that next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: While “Lay Your Hands on Me,” with Peter pictured singing while crowd-surfing on the back cover, was part of the set for these concerts, it was never issued on a version of Plays Live. That makes this 1983 video from Gabriel’s performance in Copenhagen all the more interesting, if frustrating for its low resolution and high levels of background chatter at the beginning:

Peter Gabriel, Peter Gabriel 4 (Security)

Embracing both musical sounds from around the globe and modern technology produces a pioneering album that is still compelling and strange today.

Album of the Week, April 3, 2026

Two important things happened to Peter Gabriel in the lead up to his fourth self-titled album, which, thankfully for those of us who write or talk about music, his new label Geffen talked him into giving an actual title, Security, in the United States. The first was that the sampling synthesizer, the Fairlight CMI, that he had first encountered in 1979 became more powerful and able to manage up to 64 kilobytes worth of samples in memory. The second was a series of encounters with musicians from outside the UK that led to something that changed his career, and the careers of countless others, forever.

The Fairlight CMI had been invented by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, from an earlier invention by Tony Furse. Struggling to get an instrument that was easier to control than the all-analogue Moog synths which were then the kings of the market, Vogel and Ryrie hit on two important ideas: to use a microprocessor—a digital chip, rather than analog—to control the device; and—a discovery by Vogel while studying the harmonic waveforms of acoustic instrument sounds)—to use samples (short recordings of real instruments) as part of the sonic palette of the instrument. Vogel brought a first-generation Fairlight CMI to Gabriel’s home while he was working on Peter Gabriel 3, and he was smitten, using the sampling feature to record real world sounds—though he used glass breaking and other percussion, rather than piano or strings. Gabriel was so impressed that he and his then-brother-in-law Stephen Paine formed a company to sell the instrument in the UK. It sold like hotcakes, with Kate Bush, John Paul Jones, Trevor Horn, Alan Parsons, Pink Floyd’s Richard Wright, and Thomas Dolby among the early purchasers.1 By 1982, the Series II was released, giving higher-frequency samples. Gabriel famously showed the use of this feature on the BBC’s The South Bank Show in a special on the making of PG4.

The other thread would seem to be the complete opposite pole. Following the release of PG3 and based on Gabriel’s burgeoning interest in African music and politics following the release of “Biko,” he launched the first World of Music, Arts and Dance (WOMAD) festival in 1980. Artistically2 a huge success, it brought performers from India, Burundi, Cameroon and Nigeria together with pop and world music luminaries from the UK.

Gabriel continued to meet with new African musicians, some of whom appeared on his next album. They joined a cast of by-now familiar faces: Tony Levin, Jerry Marotta, David Rhodes, Larry Fast, Morris Pert (here on percussion and Ethiopian pipes)—and also Peter Hammill, who had played at the first WOMAD, and David Lord, who co-produced the album with Gabriel. For this recording they were at Ashcombe House, a 19th century manor in Somerset that had a barn that Gabriel converted to a recording studio, while he rented the main house as a domicile.

The first track, “The Rhythm of the Heat,” combines the synthesizer, sampling, and world music threads of Gabriel’s interests into a single whole. Starting with a sampled loop on the Fairlight, Gabriel utters a cry that seems to swoop from somewhere in a resonant acoustic right up next to the listener, as a giant tone sounds on the tonic against a syncopated beat in the drums. Gabriel sings about losing oneself in rhythm (“the rhythm has my soul”), as neat a summation of the ethos he was exploring in his songwriting from PG3 on as one could hope for. It’s mostly successful here; the rhythms in the main song are careful (“the rhy-thm of the heat”) and feel a little too controlled. But on the last reprise, as he sings “smash the radio… smash the watch… smash the cameras… the rhythm is around me, the rhythm has control/the rhythm is inside me/the rhythm has my soul,” suddenly the heavens break open and an avalanche of drums, courtesy the Ekome Dance Company from Ghana, carry the track away in a massive, reverberating, polyrhythmic frenzy. If Gabriel was looking for transcendence in rhythm, he surely found it.

“San Jacinto” is a different feeling, a careful dance-like pattern in synthesizers that contrasts with the story sung by the narrator, a Native American man feeling despair at the loss of his culture to modernity. Some listeners interpret the lyrics as the narration of a young man coming of age in a ritual involving a rattlesnake bite; I’ve always heard it as the narration of an older man taking his last journey to the mountaintop, where he faces the decision to live or die. The coda (“We will walk on the land/We will breathe of the air/We will drink from the stream/We will live, hold the line”) seems a declaration of revitalized intent in the face of this despair, and is tonally distinct from the rest of the song, almost a hymn to itself.

“I Have the Touch” is one of two more pop-leaning songs on the album, but it doesn’t ease up the thematic intensity; here Gabriel seems to revisit the theme of the outsider that he first explored in the nightmarish “Intruder” on PG3, only this time, instead of maliciously breaking and entering, the narrator is in the street and filled with a yearning for human contact. “I move with the movement and/I have the touch… Only, only/wanting contact/with you”: he finds some respite in the crowd, the “pushing of the people,” but knows that he cannot be happy without true human contact.

The dark reverse of this longing for contact, perhaps the ultimate “be careful what you wish for” song, comes with the last track on the first side. “The Family and the Fishing Net,” which sings of marriage as a dark ceremony that enmeshes the participants through strange rituals, seems to warn of too much of a good thing. In a college poetry seminar I brought the lyrics, with their super-specificity and descriptive language, as an example of pop music as good poetry. I’m not so sure now; the whole thing seems rather over-egged. But “moist as grass, ripe and heavy as the night” is not a good way to describe a bride to be. And the attempted intersection of Christian imagery and voodoo in the last stanza “In the darkness, as the cake is/Cut and passed around/In little pieces/The body, the body and the flesh” doesn’t land for me. Then again, it did for the unmarried me at 18, still anxious about the future, which is maybe all it was supposed to do.

Speaking of anxiety: has there ever been a stranger Top 40 hit than “Shock the Monkey”? With the music track drawing inspiration from Motown and progressive rock in equal measure, there’s a relentless beat driving Peter’s plea to an unknown lover not to “shock the monkey”—that is, not to arouse the creature of jealousy that sits in the core of relationships. But you don’t need to have the psychological background to appreciate the song; it’s a banger, even if it sits uncomfortably high in the vocal range for singalongs. (As the University of Virginia Hullabahoos discovered when they covered it on their first album, years ago.)

In a sort of through-line with “I Have the Touch,” “Lay Your Hands on Me” is a song about finding healing in opening up and being vulnerable to connection with another human. The opening, with skittering percussion and an ominous spoken narrative (that veers into silliness—“fat men play with their garden hoses… sausage speared by the cocktail satellite”), masks a real portrait of alienation, as the narrator seeks to escape the crowds and find solace in being alone, whether out of introversion or fear, or both. But the chorus—“It’s only common sense/There are no accidents round here/I am willing (Lay your hands on me)/I am ready (Lay your hands on me)/I believe (Lay your hands on me)”—roars back into an embrace, literally, of the healing power of touch. Gabriel would ultimately end live performances of the song by standing at the edge of the stage and falling backward into the crowd, trusting them to buoy him up. (I recall reading an interview in the 1980s when one of the band wryly remarked, “We all did it; the problem was, no one wanted to catch the drummer.”) Gabriel has been open over the years about the power of therapy to help heal emotional wounds, and you can hear it starting here—and in true PG fashion it arrives as a massive anthem that delivers an emotional punch with each repetition. And that bass line!

“Wallflower” is in similarly hymnic territory, but with a different subject. Sketches of the melody originated during the recording of PG3, but the lyrics didn’t come together until Peter viewed television programs sponsored by Amnesty International about political prisoners in Eastern Europe and Latin America, particularly the plight of Lech Wałęsa and of dissidents who were imprisoned in mental hospitals. In this way the lyrics feel like a merging of the lyrical concerns of “Lead a Normal Life” and “Biko” and give the former tune an additional layer of universal meaning.

There’s nothing but good times in the closer, “Kiss of Life”—at least in the massive rhythms that spur one to dance in imitation of the “big woman” who dances on the tables at the Easter feast for the fishermen, welcoming each one. And then there’s a turn: in the bridge, we learn that “there’s a body in the sand” which the big woman resuscitates: “With heat from her skin and fire from her breath/She blows hard, she blows deep/In the mouth of death.” Did the narrator have a near death experience? Whatever the narrative truth, there is an inexorable dual meaning in the final chorus of “Kiss of life/kiss of life,” with life and death dancing together—however awkwardly, with alternating 3/4 and 4/4 meter in the opening and outro.

In embracing both modern technology and non-European rhythms, Gabriel found a more consistently adventurous sound that enabled him to span between art rock and pop, and landed him an unlikely top-40 hit—all while staying true to his distinctive artistic vision. It came at a cost: the album was recorded and mixed in sessions spanning from early 1981 through the summer of 1982, with hints of the songs only peeking through in a 1982 WOMAD festival performance in which he premiered seven of the eight tunes. That 1982 performance has recently been released, and is worth a listen in its own right, as the musicians dig into tunes that would seem to be designed only for studio performance and miraculously transform them into riveting live bangers.

Peter’s future albums would gestate even longer, as touring and his growing perfectionism stretched the time between albums further and further. Fortunately for us, his collaborators were also releasing spectacular music in their own right in between these infrequent records, and we’ll hear from one of those next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s what might be the first live performance of “The Rhythm of the Heat,” from the 1982 WOMAD festival complete with the original rhythm section:

BONUS BONUS: “Shock the Monkey” is the most coverable of all the songs on the album, so it takes a lot for a new cover of it to surprise me. This one by Local H with both band members sharing a gorilla costume achieves the goal.

BONUS BONUS BONUS: A sort of cover? Here’s Peter Gabriel with Sting performing “Shock the Monkey” live in 2016:

Footnotes

  1. Horn would famously help to popularize one of the key samples from the Fairlight’s built-in set, an orchestral “hit” called ORCH5, in his work with both Yes and Art of Noise. ↩︎
  2. It might have been an artistic success, but it was a financial flop; faced with substantial debt, Gabriel reunited with Genesis for a single show, which put the festival, and his own finances, back on an even keel. ↩︎