Every dome should have one: Peter Gabriel - Live at the O2

© Simon Poulter 2013

For a self-confessed dilettante such as Peter Gabriel, who releases new studio albums with as much regularity as ice ages, I'm a tad overwhelmed by the relative bounty of seeing him live for the second time in three years.

Apart from anything else, how has he found the time to go out on the road again? It wasn't that long ago that Gabriel was touring his New Blood show of orchestral renderings of his greatest hits.

Then, 48 years after leaving Charterhouse to form Genesis, Gabriel finally took his gap year, travelling the world with second wife Meabh and their two young sons in what he called "The Year of Interesting Things".

But even rock star sabbaticals must be paid for, so last year Gabriel celebrated (belatedly) the 25th anniversary of his hit-stuffed So album with a US tour of the record in its entirety. And now, after a further break, presumably to do more interesting things, Gabriel has returned to the day job with a much anticipated European tour that this week brought him to London's Thames-side tent, the O2 Arena.

If anything at all can claim a long history in London's 'new' East End, Gabriel and the Greenwich venue go back to the end of the last century when it was merely the Millennium Dome. Then, Gabriel co-directed the Cirque du Soleil-like Millennium Dome Show, supplying the 'soundtrack' featuring contributions from the late Richie Havens, Neneh Cherry, Alison Goldfrapp and The Blue Nile's Paul Buchanan.

So, three years after bringing the guitar and drums-free New Blood tour to the O2, Gabriel's return - for Back To Front 2013 - is a more conventional affair, calling up his most trusted lieutenants, the flush-bonced Tony Levin (a Gabriel stalwart since 1976) and English guitarist David Rhodes, along with keyboard player David Sancious and electrifying Parisian, Manu Katché, on drums, all of whom were part of the original So tour 26 years ago. The line-up is augmented by Swedish singer-cellist Linnea Olsson and her compatriot Jennie Abrahamson on backing vocals.

'Conventional' formation notwithstanding, Gabriel has never been one for conventional anything. In his Genesis days he famously donned masks, headgear and costumes that invariably impeded his ability to get songwords out.

It was a theatricality few of his peers possessed 40 years ago, Bowie being the obvious exception. But in 2012, and at the age of 63, Gabriel is still charging about the stage, acting out songs, awkwardly dad-dancing and occasionally missing his cues. He's always done it and the audience of Gabriel-faithful accept he always will. What also hasn't changed is his remarkable voice - which, for a rock artist into his seventh decade is in truly fine fettle - or his love of doing things just that little bit differently.

 © Simon Poulter 2013

Which is why the show begins with the O2 house lights fully up as Armenian duduk player Lévon Minassian takes to the stage on his own and unannounced to play the hauntingly beautiful The Feeling Begins, the opening track of Passion, Gabriel's stunning soundtrack to The Last Temptation Of Christ.

Minassian is no support act and his performance is just a prologue to the first of three sections of an evening built with typically artistic contrivance.

The first taste of the main event comes with Gabriel himself springing on stage, dressed in what looks like a dark black Mod's fishtail parka. In tow is Levin who provides gentle bass accompaniment to his Gabriel's piano on a work-in-progress, OBUT, a Randy Newman-like song being effectively demoed on the tour.

I could end the review right there: because, in just two songs, Gabriel has demonstrated himself at his most Gabrielesque - a lone performance from a Middle Eastern musician followed by a song that hasn't even been finished.

But that's the sort of idiosyncracy that keeps Gabriel going long after many of his peers - including the band that launched him - have stopped. Even for a trawl through the hits such as this show is, it is never going to be a straightforward rock concert ending with the obligatory fankuverymuchgoodnight.

It continues with the third song of the night, as Rhodes appears with an acoustic guitar and Sancious wearing an accordion. Any fears Gabriel might coming over all Mumford are soon allayed as a) no one else joins with a banjo and b) the band kick into a semi-unplugged version of Come Talk To Me, the honest-as-the-day-is-long confessional set during the singer's failing first marriage.

Gabriel is famous for his elaborate layering on record, but the stripped back approach, even in a venue as vast as the O2, works brilliantly. So goes the same with Shock The Monkey, a song even less likely to succeed semi-acoustically, but with this configuration, does so perfectly

The sparsity, with the house lights still up, continues with Family Snapshot, an old favourite from the third solo album, and concerning a lonely child's fixation with the Kennedy assassination in 1963. Always a powerful number, it marks the show's transition from semi-acoustic to the main course of full-on rock performance, as its mournful, piano-led introduction gives way to a power-chorded break that brings the house lights down and turns the stage lighting up to 11.

 © Simon Poulter 2013

It is during Family Snapshot that the amazing vocal talents of a tuneless, ability-free fucker in Seat 551, who insists on singing along profoundly off-key and at full pelt, prove unsustainable. A stern word soon takes care of his ruination of an otherwise early highlight in the show, much to the relief of everyone else in Block 404.

Vocal travesties amongst the puntership notwithstanding, Gabriel and his ensemble have hit their stride. Digging In The Dirt and Secret World, a brace from the 'divorce' album Us, rip the O2 apart, the former's restrained funk and repressed anger demonstrating Gabriel's kinship to that other member of rock's awkward squad David Byrne. Secret World's arcing theatre provides Rhodes with a platform to demonstrate how one man, in possession of a lump of wood, some strings and a plectrum can fill a 20,000-seat dome.

Having just reflected on his own marriage, Gabriel unearths The Family and the Fishing Net, a somewhat complex - and lengthy - track off his fourth solo album which, via some obscure lyrics, compares the act of getting hitched to the rituals of voodoo. Prescient in its original form, its inclusion in the set now might appear cute, but it provides a pounding springboard for another reach back into the past, No Self Control, Gabriel's hats off to greed which was even released as a single in 1980, perhaps to cash in on Kate Bush's atypically ethereal backing vocals.

The pre-So heads in the audience are, of course, besides themselves with this trawl through the distant past, and their glee is only amplified by the swirling acclamation of freedom, Solsbury Hill. Written mainly to express liberation from the restricted structure of rock star life, it fills the O2 with fresh vigour, 36 years after it was first committed to tape.

Gabriel's second act closes with another risky divert to something untried and new, as he debuts another box-fresh song, Why Don't You Show Yourself, written for the new Guillermo Arriaga film project, Words With Gods, and a tender love song that takes some of its musical cues from the orchestral work of the Scratch My Back album.

With that, and without any pause, Gabriel begins Act III - So. It has become somewhat fashionable for artists to tour complete classic albums. From Meatloaf to Kraftwerk, and Public Enemy to The Who, the heritage trail has provided a lucrative, if occasionally, uninspiring opportunity to recreate 45 minutes of vinyl for live audiences.

But as Gabriel explains, the restrictions of vinyl - and, in particular, the physical groove space occupied by bass notes - meant that many albums were something of a compromise when they were first released.

And so, the...er... So section of the Back To Front show is performed in the intended original sequence of the 1987 album which, after almost 20 years in the business, took Gabriel into the relatively uncharted territory (for him) of pop stardom.

There had been the odd Genesis single, like 1973's I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe) to bother the charts, and the likes of Solsbury Hill and Shock The Monkey had been radio hits in their day. So was a different deal altogether, where Sledgehammer's mock Stax sound and the simply joyous In Your Eyes turning Gabriel into an MTV frequent flyer. Five of its songs even found their way into episodes of Miami Vice. 

Critics have since accused it of being a "desperate bid" for commercial success, but given that So finally enabled Gabriel to realise his teenage dream of being Otis Redding, the switch of gears from his fourth album's darkness to So's radio friendliness shouldn't be held against him. And, really, the shift was not that dramatic.

© Simon Poulter 2013

Katché's frantic hi-hat teasing heralds So's thunderous opening Red Rain, with the entire auditorium bathed in a biblical red light. If anything, songs like this on So brought to the Gabriel canon a completely new energy that continued with his subsequent releases.

Who knew, when Sledgehammer came out, that an old Carthusian from Surrey could play the soul star? 26 years ago it became Gabriel's biggest hit to date, boosted by its video featuring Nick Park's pre-Wallace & Gromit animations, and by the fact it got away with cheeky references to shagging (unlike Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Relax not so long before). It was also an infectious party hit, and still is, providing the largely greying, balding O2 audience with an opportunity to test their arthritis medication.

And who knew that someone from the depths of the progressive rock movement could write a song as tender as Don't Give Up? Even more disturbing is that this somnolent Depression-era romance was originally written as a duet with Dolly Parton in mind. Kate Bush, of course, made it to the eventual album and single release, but for this live tour, Abrahamson does the co-lead, and does so with an uncannily Dolly Parton-like vocal treatment.

That Voice Again was never one of So's strongest tracks, but it's something of a contractual obligation when doing the album in its entirety, soon making way for a spine-tingling rendition of Mercy Street. Clearly still a devotee of junior school 'music and movement' classes, Gabriel performs the song about tragic poet Anne Rice lying flat on his back. It is, we assume, intentional, and not the result of a trapped nerve. As he sings, stagehands push WALL-E-like lighting pods into place over him. It's all very theatrical. And, if I may, I'll use that word again - Gabrielesque.

© Simon Poulter 2013

Back on his feet, and the entire band get to test their funk chops again with Big Time, the wry swipe at fame which was recently covered by the equally wry Randy Newman on I'll Scratch Yours, the reciprocation of Gabriel's Scratch My Back covers project.

Seen, at the time, as being a little too much of a clone of Sledgehammer it bumps and grinds away pleasantly on this tour, raising the collective heart rate before the dystopian We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37) recounts the electric shock experiments of Stanley Milgram on obliging human lab rats in an attempt to understand obedience.

The idea that Gabriel sold out when he made So is, however, nonsense. True, it was a lot more accessible than its direct predecessor Peter Gabriel 4, but it still contained the layered complexity that is Gabriel's hallmark, and his occasional forays into the avant garde, such as his duet with Laurie Anderson, This Is the Picture (Excellent Birds). It was an obscurity on the album, even left off the vinyl release due to space constraints, but nevertheless part of the original album tour. Resurrected, 26 years on, it's still rather hard to nail down, but Rhodes adds a Nile Rodgers touch to it (ironic, seeing as Rodgers played on So), giving it an unexpected groove.

So's exposure to a wider audience was aided, in some small measure, by the American airplay of In Your Eyes as well as it's appearance in John Cusack's rom-com Say Anything. When Gabriel played the So show last year at the Hollywood Bowl, Cusack appeared at the side of the stage, a boombox held aloft as it was in the film's pivotal scene. Alas, no such showbusiness here, but there is little need for any peripheral adornment.

In Your Eyes is an uplifting, warmly infectious festival of a song and even after all these years of hearing it done live, and being a repeat fixture on Gabriel's live albums, it never fails to raise a grin, and certainly doesn't on this particular evening. As the intended conclusion of So it closes the third act, the band quickly reassembling for the evening's epilogue.

© Simon Poulter 2013

The Tower That Ate People, part of the Millennium Dome Show, brings the event to a spectacular finale, with Gabriel literally disappearing into a corkscrew tower that springs up out of a lighting ring.

Gabriel's tour for the Up album featured all sorts of elaborate staging like this, and until this point the Back To Front show has been somewhat devoid of such amusements.

That's not a complaint, however. After the bicycles, revolving stages and Zorb balls of Gabriel's tour to promote Up, his last full album of original material 11 years ago, the relative conventionality of this show is quite refreshing.

There is, though, one Gabriel convention still to uphold: Biko. Written about the 1977 death in police custody of South African civil rights campaigner Steve Biko, it has, since the 1980 tour, been an expected, no - demanded fixture of the live show.

Promoting the South African cause might seem dated now, 23 years after Nelson Mandela's long walk to freedom, but Biko remains one of the most powerful, neck hair-rising anthems about humanity ever-written. Live, it still chills, driven by its thumping dum-dum-DUM, dum-dum-DUM rhythm and industrial-buzz bass notes, and the massed clench fist-salute of solidarity that accompanies the chorus.

Biko may have been written out of hippy idealism by one of rock's finest idealists, but it closes a show as memorable as any I've seen over the last 26 years since I saw Gabriel in concert for the first time, when So was 'just' his fifth solo album.

Hopefully there will be another next year and, who knows? Perhaps a return to the big tent parked on a bend in the Thames at Greenwich?

Say it isn't So - Gabriel's landmark turns 25(ish)

Such is Peter Gabriel's habitual delinquency that even his 25th anniversary release of So has slipped by a year.

He has a good excuse. Well, good excuses - namely the tale end of his New Blood project, along with the usual disparate interests and causes that have a habit of slowing his progress like weeds dragging a boat.

But, finally, So 25 is here, in a number of commemorative forms, from the basic CD reissued through a treasure chest of a box set, more of which in a moment.

Let's first consider the original form, released in the late spring of 1986, just as I was taking my A-levels. It was an album that turned Gabriel into a superstar, transforming him from that bloke who'd had slightly eccentric hits like Solsbury Hill, Games Without Frontiers and Shock The Monkey, and who, further back, had worn a variety of bizarre costumes as lead singer of Genesis Mark I.

The path to So had taken many forms. His first four title-free solo albums (later named by their Hipgnosis cover art to help confused Americans), were each like pieces of molten metal being banged into shape by a master blacksmith, perpetually hammering to find the optimum form.

The first ('Car'), released two years after leaving Genesis, was the freedom album, symbolised by Solsbury Hill (about leaving Genesis, the band he'd formed at school) and its sibling Excuse Me, a cod-barbership number which begins: "Excuse me/You're wearing out my joie de vie/Grabbing those good years again/I want to be alone".

The second ('Scratch') in 1978 had an edgier feel, thanks to Robert Fripp's production and staffing by predominantly American musicians, including Bruce Springsteen's keyboard player Roy Bittan, which fused an odd hybrid of punk and West Coast rock. For the third ('Melt'), Gabriel changed direction once more as he embraced his own version of synth-rock New Wave with guest spots by Kate Bush, Paul Weller (guitar on And Through The Wire) and former bandmate Phil Collins on cymbals-free drums (thus giving birth to the gated reverb sound that would become his signature as a superstar in his own right).

This third album, more experimental and slightly less accessible than the first two ended with Biko, the fist-pumping anthem about South African civil rights leader Steve Biko, and arguably the first example of a western rock star embracing what we now call "world music". This continued on Gabriel's fourth solo album ('Security'), which opened with the tribal drumming of The Rhythm Of The Heat and contained the story of Native American mysticism, San Jacinto (beautifully rearranged for orchestra on New Blood, Gabriel's recent symphonic retread).

Three years, a live album of the fourth album's tour, and the soundtrack to Alan Parker's Birdy had elapsed by the time Gabriel started work on So. Incredibly he'd been a recording artist for almost 20 years, having cut his first album with Genesis while at Charterhouse as he still harboured ambitions of being a drummer and soul singer (he was a passionate Otis Redding fan, a feature that lay largely publicly suppressed until So came along with the obvious Stax pastiche, Sledgehammer).

The years separating So from its predecessors may have been decades. With the assistance of Daniel Lanois, the Canadian who'd just produced U2's Under A Blood Red Sky with Brian Eno, Gabriel and an eclectic cast (including Stewart Copeland, Otis Redding's trumpeter Wayne Jackson and other members of The Memphis Horns, Senegalese superstar Youssou N'Dour, Simple Minds' Jim Kerr, performance artist Laurie Anderson and Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers), Gabriel stepped out of the artistically-worthy but commercially flimsy shadows to become a proper, breakfast telly-patronising star, especially in America.

So wasn't, however, some crude attempt to go pop. It was an album made, still, on Gabriel's trademark awkward terms, but musically it took the singer further towards layered songwriting and recording than he'd ever attempted before.

Armed with new toys like the Fairlight CMI sampling keyboard, Gabriel indulged his laborious passion for texturing and, in particular, rhythm, which dated back to his schoolboy soul band drumming. Coupled to a voracious appetite for (and consumption of) oddballstories, the more obscure the better, and you had the makings of the most multi-dimensional album Peter Gabriel had recorded to date.

So's opener, Red Rain depicted a vision of vulnerability, though many have wrongly assumed it's a direct comment on the ecology. 26 years on, it is still powerful, even more so live, and its recent orchestral treatment by Gabriel for the New Blood project gave it an even greater sense of the epic.

For an album written and recorded in 1985, amid yuppies and the decadent red braces and puffball skirts of Thatcher's supposedly loadsamoney Britain, Don't Give Up was as caustic a song about Thatcherism's cause and effect as Elvis Costello's Shipbuilding had been about the leaderene's Falklands adventure. Featuring Kate Bush - whose memorable embrace with Gabriel for the song's video led to tabloid rumours of the two being an item - Don't Give Up had been inspired by the Great Depression, hence the 1930s gospel feel. It is said people contemplating suicide changed their minds thanks to the song's sentiment. Its poignancy touches still, today.

Big Time was an oddly prescient swipe at rock superstar egotism, caricaturing pop success on an album that would turn Gabriel into a major star himself. So, he has said, "was the end of the idea of me being a sort of cult artist at the fringes of the mainstream, especially in America. There wasn’t an option to go and hide in the shadows any more."

The album reached number one in seven countries including the UK, and went on to sell five million copies in the US alone. It regularly shows up in lists of the best albums of all time. Part of this success is down to one song in particular.

Even he'd wanted to, Sledgehammer would ensure his place in pop history forever. With its unreservedly simplistic Memphis soul sound, and borderline BBC ban-sexuality (remember, the BBC were still blacklisting records in 1986 for the slightest hint of deviance. Shame they weren't applying the same prurience to their presenters....) Sledgehammer blasted Gabriel onto charts around the world.

It gave Gabriel his first ever US No.1 single (which was, ironically, later knocked off the top by his old band's Invisible Touch), helped significantly by the stop-frame promo made by a then-unknown animator from Bristol called Nick Park. Today, Sledgehammer is still the most-screened video in MTV history.




Sledgehammer and Big Time may have been the album's tempo tracks, but Gabriel's interest in the obscure was never far away. Mercy Street took So into a colder space than Sledgehammer and Big Time, focusing on the story of troubled poet Anne Sexton, and her struggles against depression and suicide. We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37), in a similar vein, recounted the controversial electro-shock obedience experiments by Yale scientist Stanley Milgram, while This Is The Picture (Excellent Birds), a collaboration between Gabriel and performance artist Laurie Anderson, took the album into Gabriel's occasionally abstruse areas of departure.

For the most part, however, everything about So seemed to say "different" and "new". Even the choice of a simple, black and white cover shot by Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn suggested a clean approach for the 36-year-old Gabriel. As his old band Genesis had found, making the transition from mythical creatures and Victorian whimsy to saying "I love you" in a song hadn't been easy for these former English public schoolboys and their somewhat repressed backgrounds that had been liberated by The Beatles, the Stones and Motown.


Having seemingly avoided emotion on any of his previous works, Gabriel ended So with one of the 1980s' most uplifting songs about romance, In Your Eyes. Combining jaunty, danceable African rhythms with a backing chorus featuring Youssou N'Dour, it coincided with Paul Simon's Graceland (released just three months after So) as one of the first mainstream pop records to reach into Africa for inspiration - and be a hit. Gabriel had been involved in the burgeoning World Music scene for some time, having launched WOMAD in 1982 (nearly bankrupting him in the process) to provide a showcase for music from the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

In Your Eyes became a bigger hit thanks to Cameron Crowe's rom-com Say Anything. During a pivotal scene, in which John Cusack holds up a boombox to Ione Skye's bedroom, he plays In Your Eyes. In America, at least, it remains a song to fall in love to.

A couple of weeks ago, Gabriel's Back To Front tour of the US to celebrate So's anniversary came to the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, during which the performance of In Your Eyes prompted a cameo from Cusack...and his music machine...

What makes So remarkable, 27 years after it was written and recorded, is just how timeless it sounds. So much from the 1980s has dated; rock songs with over-chorused guitars, dance songs with fake brass as if played on a My First Botempi keyboard, and the sheer party streamer fakery of it all. Sledgehammer had real, Stax horns on it; Don't Give Up had a genuinely supportive warmth to it; and In Your Eyes remains, to this day, a song to lift the spirits.

So why re-release it? Good question. With record sales in terminal decline, rock's biggest stars are plundering their libraries and exploiting the heritage appetite left-right-and-centre. Hardly a classic album can pass a major milestone anniversary without it being re-packaged, re-boxed and re-toured.

For So's slightly belated anniversary, Gabriel has produced a similar choice of packages as Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones and others have done with their reissues, offering a choice of remastered version of the original album, a three-CD pack containing the original plus a double live album from the So tour, or, for the über fan, the So 'immersion' box set, comprised of the remastered album, the So DNA CD - a "unique insight" into So's creation featuring bits of tracks while they were still in development, the Live in Athens 1987 DVD executive produced by Martin Scorsese, the So - Classic Albums DVD documentary, along with a high quality vinyl version of the album, a 12-inch disc containing unreleased songs, a high-definition digital download and a luxury book about the album.



The ideal Christmas gift? Maybe not for some people. Blogger Paul Sinclair recently wrote an open letter to Gabriel to complain about the lack of 5.1-channel mixes of So, amongst other absent format choices. Gabriel wrote back, at length, ending: "While I accept we may not have made all the right decisions, I do resent any implication that this is a cynical or exploitative project."

Gabriel concluded by writing: "It's something that all of us involved are proud of, and I really hope will be appreciated for what it is".

While you can debate the merits of artists going to such elaborate lengths to repackage such epoch-making albums, there is certainly something to celebrate about So. An '80s album that was of its time but hasn't aged one bit. Now, how is that so?