Tag: johngiblin

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, Peter Gabriel 3 (1980)

In this 1980 recording, a massive drum sound and sharpened songwriting lead to the discovery of a new voice.

Album of the Week, March 14, 2026

It’s the drums that hit you first. The booming sound, enormous and then cut off, of the opening snare on the first track of Peter Gabriel’s 1980 album (also called Peter Gabriel), might be the most iconic of all 1980s percussion sounds, and it immediately arrests your attention—as does the crackling sound of fingernails on guitar strings that follows. You begin to understand why Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records (who had distributed Peter’s first two albums in the States), asked upon hearing the album, “Has Peter been in a mental hospital?” But that rhythm-centered sound and the lyrical unease were the key to unlocking Peter Gabriel’s most successful period of songwriting, and it’s all here in the first few seconds.

Peter was continuing to look for new sounds, and he found them here, starting with the idea that he would write “rhythm first.” Keyboard player Larry Fast had introduced him to the PAiA Programmable Drum Set, which allowed Peter to build his own rhythms so that he could write his songs around them during the songwriting process.

Part of the magic of the album was the cast of musicians. In addition to Collins, the core band of Tony Levin, Jerry Marotta and Larry Fast were all back, joined by David Rhodes, recently of Random Hold. Robert Fripp was out of the producer’s chair but still contributed hot solos on three of the tracks; also in the guest guitarist chair were Dave Gregory of XTC and Paul Weller of The Jam. Jazz artist Dick Morrissey brought saxophone to a number of the tracks. John Giblin, who had joined the British jazz-fusion band Brand X alongside Collins, played a fair amount of electric bass on the album. And appearing on two tracks with guest vocals was Kate Bush (who we briefly met at the end of our discussion of Peter Gabriel 1); at age 21 she had two albums under her belt (including a Number One hit in the UK), and was working on her third.

All together the musicians produced a recording that, while met with puzzlement by Atlantic Records (who distributed Peter’s music in the US and ultimately passed on the release, causing him to switch to Mercury Records), stands as one of his most original and enduring. Let’s dive in.

“Intruder” (with Collins on drums) brings forward all the unique aspects of Gabriel’s songwriting that defined this album: the heavy rhythmic focus, the paranoia and alienation, and the painstaking focus on aural textures. Opening with that immense gated reverb sound in the drums, Gabriel’s narrator confesses to disturbing crimes: “I know something about/Opening windows and doors… Slipping the clippers/Slipping the clippers through the telephone wires.” There’s a new sense of artistic confidence in Peter’s voice; the lyrics are terse, the chords stabbing, and that thunderous drum sound all combine to terrifying effect, culminating in the final verse: “I like to feel the suspense/When I’m certain you know I am there.” Also noteworthy is the percussion part in the midst of the song; Peter has said that he was hugely influenced by Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and its marimba textures, and the sound of the marimba would feature at several other key points in the album (here played by composer Morris Pert, who had also spent some time in Brand X). The whistled melody at the end is the chilling cherry on top.

“No Self Control” opens with a guitar hook that is panned hard in the stereo mix, alternating between the left and right channels, courtesy Robert Fripp. But the main story of the song is the textures behind the verse: Pert’s marimba, wordless choruses of backing vocals from Kate Bush, an unassuming piano part, and then going into the chorus a massive build up in Phil Collins’ gated snare that sounds like the apocalypse arriving. The lyrics reference compulsive behavior (“Got to get so food, I’m so hungry all the time… Got to get some sleep, I’m so nervous in the night/And I don’t know how to stop”), but the real story may be the connecting thread of implied violence in a relationship, picking up where the last verse of “Intruder” left off: “You know I hate to hurt you, I hate to see your pain/But I don’t know how to stop, I don’t know how to stop.” The song is a superb miniature where all the parts work together

We get a breather from the intensity thanks to the jazz interlude of “Start,” which combines synthesizer and sampling keyboards with a grade-A rock saxophone solo from Dick Morrissey. It builds up to a hard cut into “I Don’t Remember,” powered by Jerry Marotta’s thudding backbeat and a killer guitar sound from Dick Gregory, alongside Tony Levin’s Chapman Stick and a falsetto vocal intro that seems equally influenced by disco and Middle Eastern chant. More alienation here, with verses that could be read both as immigration to a strange land and to interpersonal communications breakdowns: “Strange is your language and I have no decoder/Why don’t you make your intention clear/With eyes to the sun and your mouth to the soda/Saying, ‘Tell me the truth, you’ve got nothing to fear.’”

“Family Snapshot” puts us in the mind of an assassin with a twist. There’s a quiet introduction on the keyboard as the narrator surveys the crowded street awaiting the arrival of his target, and anticipating becoming part of the story: “Today is different/Today is not the same/Today I make the action/Take snapshot into the light… I’m shooting into the light.” The band takes off with excitement as the action deepens: “The governor’s car is not far behind/He’s not the one I’ve got in mind/‘Cause there he is, the man of the hour/Standing in the limousine.” It’s at this point that the song takes a twist as the narrator makes it clear his action has nothing to do with his feelings about his target, but about being abandoned and anonymous. By shooting his victim, he reclaims some part of his own narrative, even through infamy. And then the final twist: “All turned quiet, I’ve been here before/A lonely boy hiding behind the front door… Come back mum and dad/You’re growing apart, know that I’m growing up sad.” Gabriel would later write honest songs about the pain in his relationship with his father; here for the first time he explores that dynamic of interpersonal relationships leading to tragic outcomes in one five-minute epic. It’s deeply moving and instantly memorable. Small wonder that when Gabriel’s nascent Internet fan club asked members to write in their favorites for his 2001 WOMAD performance in Redmond, Washington, that this song made the cut.

“And Through the Wire” stays focused on relationships, this time through the lens of communication and introduced by the crunch of Paul Weller’s guitar lead. Though it has the sharper focus and songwriting characteristic of this higher level of Gabriel’s artistry, its combination of 7/4 and triple meter is a reminder of his progressive rock roots. But with that insane guitar and Marotta’s drumming, you hardly notice the rhythmic complexity. It’s a breath following “Family Snapshot” and an effective closer for a stunning Side 1.

Side 2 doesn’t let up, either. Peter counts in the intro and “Games Without Frontiers” kicks off with a vaguely disco-feeling drum machine, heightened by the combination of David Rhodes’ lead guitar, Marotta’s percussion and, most of all, Kate Bush’s high backing vocals as she sings “jeux sans frontières.” The lyrics are playful with an undercurrent of menace as “Hans plays with Lotte/Lotte plays with Jane” yields to “Adolf builds a bonfire/Enrico plays with it.” But it’s all somehow danceable and weirdly singable, and it yielded his first top 10 UK hit.

“Not One of Us” starts with Peter’s ululating vocals and a Robert Fripp guitar solo that sounds like shredded glass. John Giblin’s bass is a lead character in the song as Peter sings about racism, first telling the immigrant “A foreign body and a foreign mind/Never welcome in the land of the blind,” then telling the racist “All shades of opinion feed an open mind/but your values are twisted.” Between the two verses, the chorus—“You may look like we do, talk like we do/But you know how it is/You’re not one of us”—inverts its meaning. In the coda, the last minute-plus of the song becomes a monster driven by a massive four-note hook in the guitar and bass and Jerry Marotta’s frenetic, polyrhythmic drumming. It’s among the most intense music Peter had ever created to that point, and he would return to it later in the 1980s.

After the climax, “Lead a Normal Life” seems to offer a respite in the cool tones of Morris Pert’s marimba. But the marimba pattern refuses to settle in tonality, playing on an open fifth indefinitely, and the synth lead is similarly unsettled, wandering past but never landing on the tonic. A distorted cry accompanies the bridge but then we return to the music of confinement, which repeats three times and then suddenly drops into tonality. But what initially sounds like a refuge reveals itself to be even more of a trap: “It’s nice here with a view of the trees/Eating with a spoon, they don’t give you knives/‘Spect you watch those trees blowing in the breeze/We want to see you lead a normal life.” And the menacing music of what is now revealed to be an institution returns, with a reprise of the distorted cry, with guitar distortion that subliminally builds in the background into a constant weeping. It’s masterful and deeply discomforting.

The final track, “Biko,” prompted Ahmet Ertegun’s other unfortunate comment about the album: “What do people in America care about this guy in South Africa?” Peter had been deeply moved by the story of the death of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko in the custody of the South African police in 1977, and wrote the final song of the album as a eulogy. It opens with an excerpt of “Ngomhla sibuyayo” and segues into a massive two-tone drumbeat on the Brazilian Surdo drum (played by Collins), with an emphatic David Rhodes guitar drone above which Peter sings about Biko’s death: “September ’77, Port Elizabeth weather fine/It was business as usual in Police Room 619.” He sings in Xhosa “Yila moja” (Come Spirit), invoking the continued presence of Biko’s cause even as he sings “The man is dead” over the sounds of bagpipes. In the last verse he warns, “You can blow out a candle/But you can’t blow out a fire/Once the flames begin to catch/The wind will blow it higher… And the eyes of the world are watching now.” This first Western protest song against the inhumanity of the South African apartheid system would have been sufficiently noteworthy; its incredible anthemic quality and singability made it a totem of a new movement.

Gabriel found his voice on this third self-titled album, and found a connection to the broader outside world. “Biko” in particular led to performances with Amnesty International later in his career, but it would also bring him into contact with a world full of musicians who would radically shape his music even as he brought them to wider attention. We’ll explore some of those connections in a few weeks. But next week we’ll listen to the work of a future Gabriel collaborator who brought a different kind of artistic sensibility to the unlikely world of pop music.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Peter had found German audiences receptive on his late-1970s tours, apparently, because he did a version of Peter Gabriel (1980) in German, with him singing translated lyrics over the original backing tracks from the album. Here’s “Keine Selbskontrolle”:

BONUS BONUS: “Biko” became an enduring part of Peter’s musical legacy and has been played many, many times live. Here’s an early one from the very first WOMAD festival in 1982 (about which, more later…):

BONUS BONUS BONUS: Peter’s 2010–2013 project of cover songs yielded a bunch of fascinating Peter Gabriel cover versions of some great songs (Scratch My Back), and some reciprocal covers. In exchange for Peter’s cover of the Talking Heads song “Listening Wind,” David Byrne recorded this fascinating take on “I Don’t Remember” which led off the compilation And I’ll Scratch Yours: