Tag: tonylevin

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. ↩︎

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:

Peter Gabriel, Peter Gabriel 2 (1978)

The second PG album finds him experimenting, with sometimes thrilling and sometimes uneven results.

Album of the Week, March 7, 2026

Looking back at Peter Gabriel’s career, some of the consistent themes are perfectionism and painstaking deliberation. We’re talking about a performer who went from 2002 (Up) until 2023 (I/O) — 21 years between releases of original music. (There was other music of merit in that period, but that’s a different story.) So it comes as a surprise to realize that Peter Gabriel’s second album was released only 15 months after his first. Almost all of that is due to his choice of producer for the second album: Robert Fripp.

Fripp was starting to transition in his career from sideman (most notably for David Bowie on “Heroes”) and leader of the intermittently active King Crimson to producer, on the strength of his ingenious guitar work and technological inventiveness (the unique “Frippertronics” system, the first live looping solution for performers, is the best known example). Peter was looking for a specific sound texture, and brought musicians to the record who could provide it, like the redoubtable Tony Levin, drummer Jerry Marotta, and synth player Larry Fast, all of whom would appear in more PG albums. He also admired Fripp’s more improvisational and brisk working methods; he’s said about the album, “Robert Fripp was very keen to try speeding up my recording process, as many people have been since and failed, but he got closest to it.”

Unusually, the album is the second to be titled Peter Gabriel; Gabriel felt this allowed more attention to be paid to the album artwork by design house Hipgnosis (who also shot the “rainy windshield” on Peter Gabriel (1977)). I’ve also read that he thought of it almost like a magazine or periodical—“here’s the latest Peter Gabriel.” Looking at the entire discography, it’s clear he was never much of a fan of album titles, as we’ll see.

“On the Air” starts in a very different sonic landscape from where PG1 left off. Bright synthesizer lines lead to muscular guitar and bass, backed up by the massive drums of Jerry Marotta. The song is a straightforwardly driving 4/4 until the chorus, which drops into 6/8 for a few bars. And the vocals, while rough—you can hear the strain in his high notes, and his sometimes sandy tenor sounds thin and scratchy—are exciting, especially as he soars up the lines of “on the air” in the chorus. Lyrically, the subject—Gabriel’s Mozo character building a radio transmitter so that he can project his psychic energy out to the world—is obscure but the writing is taut: “Built in the belly of junk by the river my cabin stands/Made from the trash, I dug off the heap with my own fair hands/Every night I’m back at the shack and I’m sure no one else is there/I’m putting the aerial up so I can go out on the air.”

“D.I.Y.,” driven by a throbbing Tony Levin line on the Chapman Stick, is even more tautly wound. Gabriel says he was listening to punk and new wave at this time, and this song shows the influence even though it’s in 5/4 and has a complex chord change in the pre-chorus. It’s another song dealing with the aftermath of his time in Genesis: “You’re still looking for the resurrection/Come up to me with your ‘What did you say?’/And I’ll tell you, straight in the eye.” It’s short and pointed and a great song.

“Mother of Violence” is the only song in Peter’s work with a writing credit by his then-wife Jill. It’s a quiet tune with unusual instrumentation—pedal steel, acoustic piano—and a vocal that sounds a bit like late-1970s Phil Collins and ends with vocalese. It’s all in service of a lyric about difficult family relationships that is one of the more fraught bits of writing on the album.

“A Wonderful Day in a One-Way World” is an odd bit of a song, with a vocal that sounds a bit like a scratch take and a slightly proggy reggae feel, and a lyric that is reminiscent of some of the odder corners of Paul Simon, particularly in the dialog with the old man in the second verse. But it also has some of the better vocal harmonies on the album in the chorus, so that’s something in its favor at least. It’s followed with the frustratingly opaque “White Shadow,” which marries an instrumental track that could have been at home on late-1970s Genesis, circa …And Then There Were Three…. The first verse starts promisingly enough—“Ten coaches roll into the dust/Chrome windows turned to rust”—but then we’re rhyming “spirit died” with “Kentucky Fried.” Fripp’s guitar solo at the end is a thing of beauty, though, in duet with Tony Levin’s increasingly virtuosic bass, and there are hints of a synthesizer sound played by Peter that would become an increasingly familiar backdrop in his other albums.

“Indigo” is a piano-driven ballad with recorder and pedal steel, a story of an elderly man coming to terms with his impending death. The track seems to have a bunch of different ideas that never quite cohere, but the vocal is one of the finer on the album technically, with properly prepared high notes and controlled dynamics adding to the emotional affect. That’s a contrast with “Animal Magic,” which has one of the rougher vocals on the album and a lyric about proving manhood by becoming a soldier, and an anonymous guitar solo that sounds a bit like generic ’70s rock.

“Exposure,” though, is one of the key sonic pieces on the album. Driven by a mean locked in groove from Levin and Marotta, the main event here is the Frippertronics and Peter’s repeated chants of “exposure… space is what I need…” It’s the groove, though, that feels the most like a Peter Gabriel song, and we’ll hear it again in many other contexts.

“Flotsam and Jetsam” is a song of lament for a failed relationship. It’s competently written but ultimately forgettable, thanks in part to indifferent vocal recording featuring one of the few instances of an echo or reverb on the album which only serves to underscore the brevity of the song. Peter seems rather in a hurry to get on to “Perspective,” which feels a bit like a downtown 1970s New York number complete with saxophone on the chorus and a repeated “I need perspective” on the verses. Gabriel sings from the perspective of an industrial businessman to his former lover, who may or may not be the earth (“Oh Gaia, if that’s your name/Treat you like dirt, but I don’t want to blame…”)

That leads us to “Home Sweet Home,” which frustratingly sums up all the off characteristics of this second album. The songwriting feels a bit like Peter’s version of Randy Newman (last heard on “Waiting for the Big One”), the pedal steel seems like we’re in a country song, and we have another one of the indifferently recorded scratch vocals. And it’s about a man whose wife commits suicide, killing his child at the same time; despairing, he gambled with the insurance check and won big, buying a country home far away from his eleventh floor walk-up. The last verse features one of Peter’s most challenging-to-listen-to vocals, as his high vocal obbligato provides an impression of the man’s wordless sobs. It feels dark in an exploitive way. We will get much more earned dark passages in future albums, but here it feels like he’s trying on someone else’s pain.

Ultimately 1978’s Peter Gabriel is a frustratingly uneven album. There are some great songs—both “On the Air” and “D.I.Y.” are in the canon of his greatest songs, and “Exposure” is affecting, but many of the others suffer from the rapid approach to recording and writing. He took more time on the next record, and it showed. We’ll listen to that one next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Fripp connected a series of albums that he produced in the late 1970s, including Peter Gabriel, Daryl Hall’s Sacred Songs, and his own debut solo album Exposure, as a loose trilogy. He re-recorded “Exposure” for the latter album, and it’s … really something, thanks to vocals by Terre Roche of the Roches:

BONUS BONUS: The band for this tour, with Sid McGinnis in for Fripp, was a tight machine. Here’s a German performance of “On the Air” from 1978 that shows Peter had been watching punk acts:

Peter Gabriel, Peter Gabriel 1 (1977)

A former prog-rock frontman steps out of the machinery and begins the long process of reinventing himself.

Album of the Week, February 28, 2026

In 1977, Peter Gabriel was preparing to put a new face forward. He was no stranger to the spotlight; the band he co-founded, Genesis, had released six albums, with their fifth, Selling England by the Pound, reaching Number 3 on the UK Albums chart. Gabriel, the band’s lead vocalist, had become the visible face of Genesis, with elaborate costumes and stage makeup; the rest of the band grew frustrated on the tour for their last album together, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, as fans would bypass the instrumentalists and go straight to Gabriel, praising his theatrics. On Lamb, Gabriel had wanted to tell a coherent story and had taken over writing all the lyrics, where prior songwriting had been more collaborative, raising tensions within the band. Furthermore, the tour for Lamb, consisting of 102 dates, had put a strain on Gabriel’s marriage to Jill Moore. It was time to move on, in other words.

Gabriel took a year off so that it wouldn’t be perceived that he had departed on bad terms. When his self-titled debut album arrived in February 1977, about a week before Mingus and his band entered the studio to start recording Three or Four Shades of Blues, it was a very different kind of record and a different sound than he had achieved with Genesis. Instead of an album-spanning narrative, there were episodes that focused on hallucinatory flashes of insight and personal connections. There was hard rock, arty carnival music, and twisted barbershop that sounded for all the world like Randy Newman. And there was a strange little ditty in 7/4 time.

The musicians weren’t really a band, just a quiverful of studio aces. Producer Bob Ezrin, who was previously known for producing such diverse artists as Alice Cooper (14 albums over the years including School’s Out and Welcome to My Nightmare), Lou Reed (Berlin), Aerosmith (Get Your Wings), Flo & Eddie’s self-titled album, and Kiss (Destroyer)—and later Pink Floyd’s The Wall, would seem to be an odd choice to produce the former Genesis frontman. Ezrin pulled together a group of mostly US studio musicians including guitarist Steve Hunter (who had worked with Ezrin with both Cooper and Reed), Dick Wagner (ditto, also a longtime Reed associate), synth artist Larry Fast, percussionist Jimmy Maelen, keyboardist Josef Chirowski, drummer Allan Schwartzman, and virtuoso bassist Tony Levin, who would go on to a nearly fifty-year career with Gabriel. To this mix Gabriel added King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp, several months before he collaborated with David Bowie on “Heroes.” The London Symphony Orchestra appeared on several tracks as well. A minimalist production this was not.

The opening of the album suggests that this may indeed be an exercise in rock and roll excess, but with a progressive-rock core. “Moribund the Burgermeister” opens with a quietly mysterious verse over squelchy synths, describing an outbreak of disease (possibly St. Vitus Dance) in a medieval village: “Caught the chaos in the market square/I don’t know what, I don’t know why/But something’s wrong down there/Their bodies twisting and turning in a thousand ways/The eyes all rolling ’round and ’round into a distant gaze…” But in the chorus everything swells, the symphony (or at least guitars and synths) enter, and suddenly we’re in the head of the titular burgermeister: “No one can tell/what all this is about/but I will find out.” There’s more than a hint of Dylan’s Mr. Jones in the burgermeister, a figure both threatening and ridiculous, the latter especially in the song’s long fade-out as Gabriel mutters, “I will find out… Mother, you know your son, and you know I will” in an affected deep voice.

And then “Solsbury Hill.” Arguably the most beloved of all Gabriel’s solo work and certainly a highlight of his early career, the twelve-string intro is sunshine and reflection, as Gabriel narrates a story that is either about his transition from Genesis to a solo career, or about a long-stranded extraterrestrial being rescued from a hilltop by his alien friends. Played in 7/4, the longer measures contribute to the sense of reflection, as well as a perpetual feeling of being slightly off-balance.1 It’s not just the 7/4 that contributes this impression; the focal beat shifts within the measure thanks to the dotted rhythm, keeping the listener in motion as Gabriel sings the greatest line ever written about going solo: “I was feeling part of the scenery/I walked right out of the machinery.” But leaving aside all the complex backstory and the prog-rock rhythms, it’s still a joyous anthem to freedom, and clear to see why it remains among his most popular songs.

“Modern Love” feels more like it could have come out of another Ezrin production, albeit one with a love for odd metrical structures (the verse here is set with groups of three measures in common time — or one long 12/4 measure). It features a strenuous rock vocal from Peter, particularly on the chorus (“Ah, the pain! Modern love can be a strain”). According to Ezrin, this was method acting; he thought Gabriel’s vocal was too polite, so he asked engineer Brian Christian to take the musician up a ladder and duct-tape him to a pillar by his armpits to record the chorus vocal.

“Excuse Me” is easily the oddest song on the album. Opening with a barbershop quartet arranged by Tony Levin and featuring Chirowski and Maelen alongside Levin and Gabriel, the song fairly quickly mutates into a British dance hall number, with a chorus vocal that could have been sung by Randy Newman (and only the second appearance in four years of columns of the Acme siren whistle). It’s weird, and maybe the best example of Gabriel’s free exploration of different sounds on the record, once he was freed from the constraints of Genesis.

“Humdrum” feels a bit more like the band he left, if you disregard the samba. There’s a combination of a quiet intro, some Latin percussion which is interesting over the three-quarter time of the verse, odd backing instruments (harmonium!), and sweeping synthesizers on the chorus that take us into a swooning bridge and ultimately into a grand chorus, featuring a grandly disappointing lyric from Peter: “Out of woman comes a man/Spends the rest of his life getting back when he can.” This clunker aside, the rest of the song reads as a moving, if surreal (“Hey Valentina, you want me to beg? You got me cooking, I’m a hard boiled egg”) paean to love.

“Slowburn” gives us a massive Ezrin rock banger that alternates massive verse and chorus orchestration with a pre-chorus that pulls way back to focus on Gabriel’s voice and the piano. The lyrics, seemingly about a relationship slowly being eroded by drugs and each other, are opaque, but they lean into that 1970s guitar sound that Steve Hunter did so well, particularly that diminished 6th that could have been a riff from any of Ezrin’s 1970s production. The song seems destined to be unfinished, going to an unresolved supertonic that fades into nothing, but then Peter returns with an unusually direct plea: “Don’t try to make it easy/It’ll cut you down to size/Darling, we’ve got to trust in something/We’re shooting down our skies…” A sort of clockwork instrumental coda really does fade out into nothingness, leaving the plea unanswered…

… because “Waiting for the Big One” is many strange things, but an answer to “Slowburn”’s direct plea it ain’t. It’s a blues, a barroom song, a showpiece for Ezrin’s hired guns to demonstrate their professionalism, the sound of a drunkard waiting at a bar for the end of the world. Peter’s Randy Newman impression is at its peak here; it’s not one of his finest vocal moments. The instrumental breaks are arguably the best thing about the song, and they’re replete with all the bombast Steve Hunter could summon.

The apocalypse finally arrives in “Down the Dolce Vita,” with chocka-chocka rhythm guitars, the London Symphony, and motifs of drowning amid repeated declarations that “You guys are crazy!” The song is patently part of a larger epic, with characters we never really meet (Aeron and Gotham) trying to charter a boat to make it out of the harbor of a fishing village in a storm. The orchestra adds thrilling musical tension to the number, but ultimately it’s a series of empty visions; the story is too obscure and we’re left to guess at what is happening.

Out of the chaos of “Dolce Vita” comes a sublimely quiet, sad moment. “Here Comes the Flood” revisits the summit of Peter’s apotheosis in “Solsbury Hill” but in a decidedly more apocalyptic mood. The jagged imagery—starfish stranded on a beach, an old trail along a seaside cliff, a nail sunk in a cloud—leads up to the third verse, in which Peter sings of an increase in cosmic energy accompanying the nighttime surge in shortwave radio strength that ultimately leads to the dissolving of barriers between minds and the creation of a mass psychic entity. But you don’t need to know any of that; all you need is the quiet prophetic despair in the chorus: “Ah, here comes the flood/we will say goodbye to flesh and blood/If again, the seas are silent, in any still alive/It’ll be those who gave their island to survive/Drink up, dreamers, you’re running dry.” The first recorded version of the song is full of patented Ezrin bombast, with triumphalist electric guitars and soaring strings, turning the vision into something somehow triumphant. Gabriel ultimately was unsatisfied with this version and recorded it several more times (as you’ll hear below).

The uncanny metal eyeballs in the inner liner are courtesy a pair of mirrored contact lenses.

Part of the impenetrability of the second half of the album is that we’re only getting fragments of a larger story that Gabriel himself hardly knew. The being who catalyzed the departure of the boats and heralded the arrival of mass consciousness was a character called Mozo, a Mosaic figure who didn’t save people so much as inadvertently bring about massive change. Peter played with the narrative for years but never got it into a coherent shape; that never stopped him from including Mozo in several of his early songs. We’ll hear one of those next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Gabriel almost immediately re-recorded “Here Comes the Flood,” this time with Robert Fripp on Fripp’s 1978 album Exposure. This version still has a little of the bombast of the Ezrin version, thanks to Gabriel’s taking the later choruses an octave up, but generally the energy level of the song is more introspective:

BONUS BONUS: In 1978, Peter paid a special visit to Kate Bush on her BBC television Christmas special (which is a good topic for an entirely different post), and stole the show with this stripped down piano and vocal version of “Here Comes the Flood”:

BONUS BONUS BONUS: As any good child of the 1980s knows, Peter did another studio recording of “Flood” for his first greatest hits compilation, 1990’s Shaking the Tree. This one features a freer melody on the verse and is somehow even more pathos-filled:

  1. I’m reminded of Peter Schickele’s line about P.D.Q. Bach’s waltz music, which “suggests that one of his legs was shorter than the other.” ↩︎