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Peter Gabriel

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Peter Gabriel (born February 13, 1950) is an English musician. He first came to fame as a member of the progressive rock group Genesis, but has had a long and successful career after leaving the band in 1975, with his position as lead singer then filled by drummer Phil Collins.

His first solo success came with the single "Solsbury Hill," an autobiographical piece regarding his thoughts on leaving Genesis. Although early on he achieved critical success and some commercial success (e.g. "Games Without Frontiers" from his third album and "Shock the Monkey" from his fourth), Gabriel achieved his greatest popularity with songs from the So album.

Gabriel's song "Sledgehammer" was accompanied by a visually stunning music video, which was a collaboration with director Stephen Johnson, Aardman Animation, and the Brothers Quay. The video won numerous awards at the 1987 MTV Music Video Awards, and set a new standard for art in the music video industry.

Gabriel has been interested in world music for a long time, with the first musical evidence appearing on his third album. This influence has increased over time, and he is the driving force behind the WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance) movement. He created the Real World Studios to facilitate the creation of such music by various artists, and he has worked to educate Western culture about the work of such musicians as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Youssou N'dour. He has also recently been interested in multimedia projects, creating the Xplora and Eve CD-ROMs. He has a long-standing interest in human rights, and launched the Witness program to supply video cameras to human rights activists to expose abuses.

Gabriel's song "We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)" from So refers to Milgram's experiment, and in particular the 37 out of 40 subjects who showed complete obedience in one particular experiment.

It has been reported that he has bipolar disorder.





BIOGRAPHY (CAREER) One of very few performers to emerge from a full-blown '70s art-rock group and become a critical favorite, Peter Gabriel (born February 13, 1950, England) is a remarkably creative singer and songwriter whose dedication to music of all forms--particularly world music--ranks among the very highest. From 1966 through 1974, Gabriel was the lead singer of Genesis, and with his animated, theatrical style established himself as the most charismatic frontman of the progressive rock era. Upon his departure from the group following 1974's The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, many expected his solo career to simply echo his earlier work; instead, Gabriel shifted into an experimental pop mode and aligned himself with several of the U.K.'s most admired members of the rock avant-garde. Displaying marked artistic growth which each successive release, the singer was wise enough to take advantage of the growing importance of rock video and--even wiser--never forget that all great pop songs need distinct melodic hooks. With his artistic ambitions running closely parallel to his considerable songwriting talents, Peter Gabriel has recorded some of the most distinctive and revelatory pop music of the last 25 years.

Gabriel's 1977 solo debut, Peter Gabriel, was the first of three consecutive albums by the singer to bear that name; the fourth was titled Security by Geffen Records upon its 1982 U.S. release, but internationally stands as his fourth eponymous set. "I thought it would be like a magazine cover," he explained later, "something like Time or Newsweek. You have the same format and the same logo, only a different picture. Sort of like, 'Well, who's on the cover this year?...The only difference is I'm on the cover every year." Where Genesis's lyrics had often taken focused on mythological and fantasy-based concepts, Gabriel's own seemed much more reality-oriented, often shaded with a subtle but noticeable apocalyptic tinge. "Home Sweet Home" from his second album, for example, was based on a newspaper account of a young British mother who leapt to her death from her high-rise apartment, holding her baby in her arms.

It may forever be to Atlantic Records' regret that the company refused to issue Gabriel's third album in 1980; though they had deemed it too non-commercial, Mercury Records didn't--and when that company finally released it, the album was the singer's first to crack the top 40. Fueled by the radio hit "Games Without Frontiers," a top 5 hit in Britain, the record also featured "Biko," Gabriel's homage to murdered South African activist Steven Biko, which has since been covered by Simple Minds and Robert Wyatt and become one of the singer's signature tunes. Gabriel's ascension to the mainstream continued with 1982's Security, which boasted his first ever U.S. top 30 hit, "Shock The Monkey," a compelling song that became an MTV standard due to its remarkable video, one of the genre's finest. By the next year, Plays Live--a double-LP concert set recorded on the singer's 1982 North American tour--served as a fine retrospective of Gabriel's career to that point, and allowed him to move on to other, more esoteric concerns.

With the 1984 soundtrack to Alan Parker's film Birdy, the singer made a bold artistic move that essentially signaled a new phase of his career. Bearing a notation on its back cover reading, "WARNING: This record contains re-cycled material and no lyrics," the album was a fascinating combination of older material that Gabriel had pilfered from his back catalog, remixed without the vocals, and combined with a few new instrumental tracks. It was one of the first indications that the singer was shifting his critical attention to sound, rather than simple songs. So, officially the first Peter Gabriel album bearing a title, remains the singer's all-time bestseller, a triple-platinum collection highlighted by the singer's number one hit "Sledgehammer," the top 10 hit "Big Time," and "In Your Eyes." His most fully realized work, So blended the danceable pop of his hits with soft, melodic material such as "Mercy Street," dedicated to poet Anne Sexton, and "Don't Give Up," which prominently featured singer Kate Bush. It sold over 5 million copies worldwide, and became Gabriel's last pop album for over six years.

In the period that followed, the singer put his rock star career on the back burner and became involved in an extraordinary number of activities centering on music and political issues, including Amnesty International (he was part of its 1988 Human Rights Now! tour), and further work with WOMAD (World Of Music Arts And Dance)--which he co-founded in 1980, and with whom he established his Real World Records world music label in 1989. And though he stopped making pop records, Passion, his beautiful, sonically adventurous 1989 soundtrack to Martin Scorsese's film The Last Temptation Of Christ, won a well-deserved Grammy in 1989.

In 1992, Gabriel made his long-awaited return with Us, and found himself in such demand the album debuted on the charts at number two. While tracks such as "Digging In The Dirt" were being played hourly on MTV, he lined up the first American WOMAD concert tour; headliners on the 10-city tour were typically eclectic, including Crowded House, P.M. Dawn, Ziggy Marley, Sheila Chandra, the Drummers Of Burundi, and Russian folk artists the Terem Quartet. Also performing, of course, was Gabriel himself--who had brought Sinead O'Connor along on the tour to provide accompanying vocals (she contributed to Us's "Blood Of Eden") and sing her own material. "There is more 'world music,' as it is known, here than in other countries," Gabriel told the Los Angeles Times at the time, "yet it's more segregated than in any other country I can think of."

Following 1994's tour-documenting Secret World Live set, Gabriel's involvement in multimedia grew, resulting in several highly lauded interactive projects, and the fascinating Ovo project, featuring music he'd composed for Britain's Millennium Dome Show. In 2002, Gabriel produced the soundtrack for the film The Long Walk Home and finally--after what seemed an interminable delay to fans--Up, his official "follow-up" to 1992's Us. A highly theatrical show accompanied the album's release and was warmly received by critics--most of whom continue to see Peter Gabriel as that rare artist to whom commercial success simply matters less than personal satisfaction.





INTERVIEW The Millennium Dome, an enormous contraceptive cap built by the side of the River Thames as the focus for London's Y2K celebrations, is filled with bright and noisy exhibits--part educational, part entertainment, part commercial (imagine hippies taking over McDonald's and sponsoring walk-through theme park rides). Every day, four times a day, its 150-foot high, 12,000-capacity central arena (currently seating about 300; the Dome isn't too popular) hosts a half-hour show featuring more lights, props, and dry ice than a Kiss concert, with 200 dancers, trapeze artists, and acrobats performing to music composed by Peter Gabriel. An extended version of this show can be heard on OVO: The Millennium Show. Though not an official new Peter Gabriel album (he's one of the seven vocalists name-checked in the track listing), fans will welcome OVO as the first disc containing all-new Gabriel material since 1992's Us.

"I am very slow," Gabriel smiles apologetically, sitting in the breakfast room of his 200-year-old converted water mill in West England (HQ for his Real World studios, multimedia, and record company). "I've always been that way. Why? Because there's a lot of stuff that I don't think is good enough, and it takes me a long time before I reach the point where I can say, 'That's how it should be, it feels ready.' And because now I own more stuff and I've got more possibilities for diversions and displacement activity."

Gabriel was hard at work in his computer-filled loft studio on the real follow-up to Us, his new album Up (tentatively scheduled for release way before R.E.M.'s Up, it now looks like it won't be out until 2001), when another one of those diversions--the Dome project--came up. The combination of free artistic license (his story, his visuals, his music) and enormous budget (around $40 million) was simply too good to ignore: "Here was this huge playpen and a big sandbox where you could go in and build your sandcastle. That was the attraction." Another attraction was that, with a New Year's Eve 1999 opening date, the Dome project had a "big fat concrete deadline, which is something I think I need. The worst thing you can ever do to an artist is say, 'You can do anything you want.' If you say, 'I'm going to put you in this tight little box, now find your way out of it,' the artist responds really well." But the biggest hook was the chance to play around with an idea that's been haunting Gabriel for years: "trying to form an alternative theme park--a kind of Disneyland designed by the most interesting artists and scientists of our time." The Dome, in its planning stages, not only bore a resemblance to his Real World Experience Park, but had also consulted some of the same architects, designers, and technicians.

Twenty years ago, Gabriel came up with the vision for a technologically advanced, New Age utopia with artistic, educational, and spiritual theme-rides, enclosed in a dome with its own weather system. He discussed ideas and mapped out plans with everyone from David Byrne and Brian Eno (about creating an aural underground forest), to psychologist R.D. Laing (about designing a phobia-confronting "Ride Of Fears"), to numerous computer geniuses, including the inventor of virtual reality. Attempts to get funding to launch the theme park in Australia, Germany, and, most recently, Spain failed, but Gabriel, undaunted, is still working on it. "Perhaps in the end, when it finally does happen, it will keep more of its integrity intact because it has evolved slowly," he rationalizes. Meanwhile, he has raided the ideas for use in his many other projects, from his annual WOMAD world music festival to his CD-ROM, Eve.

By the sound of it, Gabrieland would have been a darned sight better than the Millennium Dome turned out. Admits Gabriel, "I would have done it differently if I'd have had that budget"--over $1 billion--"and the Dome has certainly been the most unpopular project in Britain, probably in my lifetime. But in a way that was also, perversely, an attraction. I always find interesting the struggle between two potentially opposing forces."

Such struggle is certainly something Gabriel knows a lot about, as a man who started out as a soul drummer and became the singer in a progressive rock band; a superstar who quit Genesis to be alone but has constantly surrounded himself with collaborators ever since; a nature-loving former hippie ("my hippie past is no secret--I mean, I'm someone who dressed up as a flower!") who loves computers and virtual reality; and a self-described "tight-assed Englishman" who has regularly indulged in the highly un-English pursuit of psychotherapy (where the most important thing he learned is "that you probably can't find happiness until you find sadness..."). His whole life and art, Gabriel says, have been a battle of opposites.

"I think that comes from my mom and dad. My dad's an electrical engineer, an inventor--reserved, shy, and analytical. My mom's more instinctive and emotional--music, classical, is her big thing. And I've got both. I have a depressive part of my nature and a hopeful, energetic side, more loving life and laughter. There is a sadness in a lot of the music I like, and I've always found it much, much easier to write miserable music than joyful music, but I'd love to do a bit of both."

Judging by his next album's title, Up, and by "Father, Son"--a tranquil hymn written after a powerful "breakthrough" week spent alone with his father ("he's getting old, and I felt I hadn't really bonded with him as much as I wanted...") that was originally intended for Up but requisitioned for OVO--Gabriel would appear to have done just that. "I am more comfortable with myself than I used to be. I got to what I felt was a light place--but only by pushing out the gunge," he smiles, adding, "It still oscillates between moments of depression and moments of joy and happiness."


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