whatdavidbowiewoulddo-ThinkProgress: Solsbury Hill

Showing posts with label Solsbury Hill. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Saturday, August 17, 2013

From Lake Havasu City, AZ to Santa Monica, CA - Desert, some more desert, even more desert, and then the sea

I couldn't have scripted it any better. I'm rolling down Santa Monica Boulevard, the final bit of the final leg of the journey that started out eight days ago on a sweltering Friday in Chicago, and Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill comes on the radio.

As anyone who knows me will attest, it's one of my favourite songs by one of my favourite musicians. It's a song about freedom, and in many respects, more about Route 66 than even Bobby Troup's tribute.

Reaching the Pacific was the dream for many who drove Route 66 when it provided escape from poverty, from the Dust Bowl devastation, or simply from the moribundity of Midwestern life. Today, California is still the end of the line. It still welcomes the wannabes, the desperate hopefuls and the dreamers, or those who simply want to be left alone out in the searing heat of the Mojave Desert, surrounded by car junk, rattlesnakes and scorpions, and their own musings.

The irony of reaching the end of Route 66 is that this last 400 miles have been more arduous than any of the previous 2000.

To maintain some semblance of authenticity, I rejoined 66 on the Oatman Road, a stunning but nerve-wracking 42-mile "scenic" route that takes you into the Arizona desert, up over a high peak and down the other side and through Oatman, a once deserted mining town that 66 ran through.

Today it is home to a hippyish collection of tourist shops - the arts and crafts merchants I would normally go out of my way to avoid - and, for no apparent reason at all, staged cowboy gunfights and a strolling mariachi band. To add to the surrealism is a small herd (if that's the correct collective noun) of burros wandering aimlessly about the town.

The outside temperature gets up to 116 degrees. In the comfort of a modern, well air conditioned car, it is bearable. But it makes you wonder how people drove this section of 66 before cars were so luxuriated.

As a test, I switch off the AC (a sensible idea, in any case, to stop the drain on fuel) and wind down the windows to see if a little of Nature's own air conditioning will have the same effect. The Eagles may have felt a cool wind in their hair on the desert highway, but here it is like having a large hairdryer set to Kill in your face. And a very old, overheated hairdryer at that. Think Sir Alex Ferguson at full blast.

After allowing myself a small measure of much needed 21st Century modernity - and properly cool air - by rejoining I-40 near Yucca, I pick up Route 66 again just over the California stateline at Needles, and remain on it for what seems like the next several hours.

This is a part of the route I've driven before. It is, on the one hand, stupendously tedious - quite literally an epic, foot-to-the-floor bolt over almost 200 miles, with the scenery barely changing. On the other hand, it is unusually calming. The Indian tribes who populated the desert have long held beliefs about the desert being a living thing, despite its apparent lack of animal or plant life.

The Mohave Desert is the perfect antidote to Los Angeles when its sprawl and urban chaos becomes too much. There is something mystic about the place, which also explains why it has drawn weirdos, hippies, society dropouts, gun nuts and the Manson Family to it. But rarely do they congregate in the same place.

Ever since the western desert started to unfold on Route 66 in Arizona, the result of violent eruptions in the Earth's crust have been evident all around, the topography so dramatically different to the gentle, rolling hills of the Midwest earlier on the route.

Near Amboy - which, in the 2000 census, recorded a population of just four - is what looks like, from the road, a large pile of black soot. On closer inspection it is the Amboy Crater, an extinct volcano which also informs you you're in one of the most notorious areas of seismic activity on the planet. Indeed the entire desert plain along this part of Route 66 is an enormous lava field.

In the distance you catch sight of weird wind eddies in the dust, mini-tornadoes that look like tall thin wisps. Further in the distance you see the distinct dust trails of military vehicles out on exercise from the US Marine Corps training base at Twentynine Palms (another entry in the list of obscure places to be mentioned in song - in this case, one by Robert Plant).

Eventually I arrive in Ludlow. I have a particular fascination with this town (Population: 10) as I began my professional career in Ludlow, England. That Ludlow, though, is located in beautiful Shropshire countryside, with a castle, a reputation for being a foodie's paradise (it has the highest number of Michelin-starred restaurants per head than anywhere else in the world) and it is where I lost my curry virginity on my first Saturday night in town, at the Shapla Tandoori.

Ludlow, California, is now particularly unremarkable, mainly a fuel stop along I-40 which Route 66 meets up with here. Originally a mining town that became a water stop for the railroad (which continues to come into view), today it offers the inevitable Route 66-themed cafe and a couple of convenient gas stations.

Some years ago it was also the epicentre of a large earthquake that shook the entire southland. I was 300 miles away in Mammoth Lakes when it happened, and felt it there.

In Las Vegas, 150 miles away, all hotels on The Strip were evacuated as precaution. When the all-clear was sounded, many of the hotels' guests returned, not to their rooms, but the hotel casinos at 5am.

Seeing TV news footage of people in their bathrobes desperately playing one more hand of poker, or another spin of the slotswas an amusing snapshot of what Vegas was, at least then, all about.

Amazingly, I am still only at the halfway point of this final leg. There are still more than 200 miles between me and sea air. Not that the next two waypoints warrant much lingering: Barstow is a relatively large (for the region) town and key transportation hub, having been founded by a railroad magnate. More recently it has become the meeting point of the I-40 and I-15 freeways, and another huge US Marine Corps depot. That, and a much needed fill-up of fuel, is all there is to say about this dry, ugly town.

Victorville, further down Route 66, is no better. Another large transportation hub, it is a city beset by crime, unemployment and homelessness. There isn't much of a plus-side to it, except that, with the sun starting to set in the West, and the final 100 miles still to cover through the enormous Los Angeles hinterland at rush-hour, I reluctantly join the freeway to make some progress to the end of the line.

LA, as you probably already know, is a region in its own right. Famously and perfectly described by Alexander Woollcott as "Seven suburbs in search of a city", it is an interwoven patchwork of urban sprawl. As I enter what is technically 'Greater Los Angeles' at San Bernardino, I know there is a tough grind ahead, negotiating LA's aggressively driven freeways at heading-home time on a Friday night.

Most of the traffic is heading out of the area - off to weekend destinations - but not having experienced a multi-lane city freeway system since Oklahoma City (and that was a relatively small one), it's a shock. Bacharach really hit the money when he wrote "LA is a great big freeway" on Do You Know The Way To San Jose? (and, yes, I do: take the 101 or I-5 or, for the ambitious, Highway 1, north).

Route 66 - as a historical experience - gets going again in pretty Pasadena, the town nestling in the eastern foothills above Los Angeles. Coming off the 210 freeway here is only to be recommended for Route 66 completists. And if you do, do it during daylight when you can actually see how picturesque this famous old town is.

From Pasadena on into LA, Route 66 is, like many other cities on the road, occasionally signposted. With a little homework, I know that I need to get myself onto Sunset Boulevard, then Santa Monica Boulevard.

Which means driving right the way through LA. This is not a city you can pass from one side to the other in 30 minutes. Driving through LA means start-stop-start braking as traffic lights perpetually disrupt your momentum.

Following 66 through LA does, though, bring you through some of the neighbourhoods that make La-La Land the draw it is.

Route 66 as Sunset Boulevard commences in Echo Park, the district being raved about as Los Angeles' most up-and-coming. It is a bustling area, but crawling with 'hipsters'. Hordes of them, with beards longer than Abraham Lincoln's, smugly organic, free-thinking lifestyles and skinny jeans, cramming sidewalks in search of a macrobiotic cafe in which to drone on about Mumford & Sons. Counter culture is, thankfully, still alive and kicking in California.

Route 66 leaves Sunset Boulevard for Santa Monica Boulevard, cutting through West Hollywood - which is essentially one long restaurant - before reaching Beverly Hills, at which you can't help allowing yourself an Axel Foley chuckle as you roll past the famous police headquarters.

As you might be able to tell, there is a note of tedium creeping in here. Over the last 21 years I've been in and around LA, and have driven down these very streets, so many times I've lost count. However, they have always been part of the LA experience. I've never experienced them as the end of a journey.

And so, as I enter the seaside familiarity of Santa Monica, Solsbury Hill on the radio, I know that at the very end of Santa Monica Boulevard will be the pier and the end. I should, as I arrive, be cracking a bottle of champagne. Instead, I just want to take my pictures and get to the hotel for the night.

This may sound downbeat and anti-climactic, but it isn't. The drive down Route 66 was to see an America I've not seen before, to glimpse parts of its past I know only from American culture. In that, it has delivered in spades: Chicago's friendly ambience and blues music; the summery fields of Illinois, the Midwestern heartland charm of St. Louis; the wide open agricultural enormity of the prairies of Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas; the appearance of the West in New Mexico and the desert heat of Arizona and the Mojave Desert.

Driving from Chicago to LA in the insane mid-August heat that cooks up the American heartland might have been a long, sticky ride. But it hasn't. It has been a fascinating journey through varying physical and economic topographies, from city sophistication through rural simplicity to city sophistication again.

Thus, to close, let me reveal something unimportant to you but significant for me: for the most part, dear reader, I have been wearing shorts. Chicago was blistering when I left it, and the temperature has remained between the mid-70s to oppressively north of 100 for much of the 2,524.1 miles I've driven. As I reach the sea, however, it is a distinctly frigid 67F. I am going to have to wear jeans.

Welcome to LA.