Then I got all embarrassed and thought that nobody would care about my fairly non-valid opinions on such an old record anyway, and went off and wrote other things for a while, as that year’s phase of rediscovering Peter Gabriel faded away.
However, I’m currently experiencing this year’s phase of rediscovering Peter Gabriel, having worked my way through “Scratch My Back” and “And I’ll Scratch Yours” back in May and then rediscovering “Peter Gabriel” (the third album) on CD earlier on this month, as well as exploring “Us” and “Real World Live” after I found them wallowing in the big box of CDs waiting to get back on those shelves I keep putting off building, and getting myself a copy of “Up” to see what the old boy had been up to about twelve years ago when I was not paying him all that much attention. So, with all that going on, and a copy of “Hit” still in transit, those thoughts seem to have become ever-so-slightly valid again.
Also… I suppose that, in a very tiny way, I’ve recently been revisiting the twenty-three year old version of me, which is the version of me that first bought this album back in the heady, scary days of the 1980s when I still had ambitions despite the evidence which was already accumulating that such ideas might be severely misplaced in my case.
It was a time when Peter Gabriel looked
less like Gandalf, or indeed a flower wearing a leotard, and more like some bloke in a suit who might have looked a
bit like me (if the lights were down very
low and I was wearing a suit) because in those days he even had hair and everything…
After the success of his first four solo studio
albums, “Peter Gabriel”, “Peter Gabriel”, “Peter Gabriel”, and, er, “Peter
Gabriel”, Peter Gabriel released his latest album which, thanks to his record company, had to have a “proper”
title, and so, because of a tendency Mr Gabriel had towards minimalism when it came to such matters, “So” was born…
Despite the fact that I haven’t bothered to check whether the track listing order matches the vinyl version on that well-buried shelf, the CD version of the album (because, kidz, I may be the last person in the universe who still prefers to get his music that way) opens with “Red Rain” which is a thumpingly good track that seems born out of the same cold war angst that most of us not then in the government were feeling at the time.
The all-conquering smash hit “Sledgehammer”
is next, possibly the rudest ever song to get regular airplay on the American
music stations, and, possibly, the track most associated with Peter Gabriel by the general public, not least because of the amount of airplay that impressive video got back in the day…
“Don’t Give Up”, the now well-known and slightly mournful duet with Kate Bush (whoever she is…) is next up and remains a haunting triumph of a song about unemployment , especially as it bursts out, as indeed it did, from the cynical “Me! Me!” years of the mid-1980s…
The rest of the album is possibly less familiar to many, once they’ve got the hit singles out of the way in this era of downloads, but I do like “That Voice Again” and “Mercy Street” despite their low key approach. There’s something about the latter song that always makes me feel like it’s about three o’clock in the morning and I’ve just arrives at a service station. It’s that slightly “dead” sound that it makes on the eardrums, if you can understand what I mean by that, because it’s not mean as a criticism.
Meanwhile, of course, those lyrics are sublime... “The tremble in the hips…”
This leads us into the powerhouse of “Big Time” a critique, I believe, on the whole of celebrity culture made a couple of decades before celebrity culture became the monster it currently is, and which I always like to persuade myself is really about Phil Collins, but it probably isn’t.
The album concludes with the lyrically beautiful mournful chants of “We Do What We’re Told” and the slightly surreal “This Is The Picture” which is a collaboration with Laurie Anderson whose “Big Science” album remains an avant-garde favourite from the slightly less mainstream end of my old vinyl collection. To be fair, that particular collection is so mainstream, that it might just be the one album sticking out like a sore thumb, but there you go.
The final track, “In Your Eyes”, has been described (not by me, but it has been said…) as the best song that Peter Gabriel has ever written, and it’s certainly a bit of a doozy, and appears to have become one of the concert-closing anthem favourites in recent years, if the two live recordings I now have of it are anything to go by. They sound pretty impressive, of course, but still aren’t ever going to be quite enough to persuade me to start attending live rock music events any time soon.
Concerts all just look so hot and sweaty, and full of all those wretched people… and I maintain that I’ll always prefer the studio sounds made in a controlled environment over the rough and ready concert versions, especially with all of those people joining in and bellowing away tunelessly and ruining the songs, and making it impossible to hear the person I would be paying to hear if I went (which I won’t…)
After all, you don’t get a fiddler bringing along their fiddle to join in at the Philharmonic, do you…?
Last week “New Blood” arrived, and has really blown me away with its combination of PG and an orchestra. The opening track, an astonishingly bombastic and theatrical version of “The Rhythm of the Heat” almost made me want to go back to the theatre and offer to direct something, just so that I could use it for the intro because it really seemed to be that impressive.
So, I felt that I simply had to order up “Hit” because, whilst it covers much old ground, there’s some other stuff in there that I might have missed, and my completist instinct is tingling again and that might just keep me away from getting all of those obscure soundtrack recordings…
For a while, anyway.
The rest of the album is possibly less familiar to many, once they’ve got the hit singles out of the way in this era of downloads, but I do like “That Voice Again” and “Mercy Street” despite their low key approach. There’s something about the latter song that always makes me feel like it’s about three o’clock in the morning and I’ve just arrives at a service station. It’s that slightly “dead” sound that it makes on the eardrums, if you can understand what I mean by that, because it’s not mean as a criticism.
Meanwhile, of course, those lyrics are sublime... “The tremble in the hips…”
This leads us into the powerhouse of “Big Time” a critique, I believe, on the whole of celebrity culture made a couple of decades before celebrity culture became the monster it currently is, and which I always like to persuade myself is really about Phil Collins, but it probably isn’t.
The album concludes with the lyrically beautiful mournful chants of “We Do What We’re Told” and the slightly surreal “This Is The Picture” which is a collaboration with Laurie Anderson whose “Big Science” album remains an avant-garde favourite from the slightly less mainstream end of my old vinyl collection. To be fair, that particular collection is so mainstream, that it might just be the one album sticking out like a sore thumb, but there you go.
The final track, “In Your Eyes”, has been described (not by me, but it has been said…) as the best song that Peter Gabriel has ever written, and it’s certainly a bit of a doozy, and appears to have become one of the concert-closing anthem favourites in recent years, if the two live recordings I now have of it are anything to go by. They sound pretty impressive, of course, but still aren’t ever going to be quite enough to persuade me to start attending live rock music events any time soon.
Concerts all just look so hot and sweaty, and full of all those wretched people… and I maintain that I’ll always prefer the studio sounds made in a controlled environment over the rough and ready concert versions, especially with all of those people joining in and bellowing away tunelessly and ruining the songs, and making it impossible to hear the person I would be paying to hear if I went (which I won’t…)
After all, you don’t get a fiddler bringing along their fiddle to join in at the Philharmonic, do you…?
Last week “New Blood” arrived, and has really blown me away with its combination of PG and an orchestra. The opening track, an astonishingly bombastic and theatrical version of “The Rhythm of the Heat” almost made me want to go back to the theatre and offer to direct something, just so that I could use it for the intro because it really seemed to be that impressive.
So, I felt that I simply had to order up “Hit” because, whilst it covers much old ground, there’s some other stuff in there that I might have missed, and my completist instinct is tingling again and that might just keep me away from getting all of those obscure soundtrack recordings…
For a while, anyway.
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