Peter Gabriel’s i/o - slow train coming

Peter Gabriel has rarely, if ever, done things by convention. He left Genesis in 1975 just as they were filling larger venues and selling records in places other than just Belgium and Italy. When he launched his solo career in 1977 he abandoned the dull custom of titling albums by naming his first four ‘Peter Gabriel’, much to the consternation of his American record company. On the third of those albums he instructed Phil Collins to not use cymbals, purely to disrupt the drummer’s natural inclination to punctuate rhythms with them. 

For the 56 years Gabriel has been making music for a living he has seemingly trodden his own path - and at his own pace. Which, invariably, has been glacial. Those first solo albums came along at a clip – all four released in the space of five years - and even the gap between the fourth and the commercial triumph that was So was just four years. 

But then things started to slow, as a heightened celebrity took Gabriel off in different directions, and not always actually involving making music. The ‘divorce album’ Us appeared in 1992, and its successor Up in 2002, but since then Gabriel has been tinkering at this and that, side projects such as co-founding The Elders with Richard Branson and the late Nelson Mandela, and involving himself in the human rights foundation Witness. There were wildly esoteric ventures, such as Gabriel at his most Brian Pern-like, making music with bonobo apes at an ape language laboratory (apparently, they’re a thing). 

Occasionally scraps of music have been thrown out there - offcuts, apparently, gifted to soundtracks (and compiled into the wittily-titled compilation Rated PG in 2019). There have been more substantive ventures, such as Scratch My Back…, an album of cover versions twinned with responses from their originators, …And I’ll Scratch Yours, featuring creditable versions of Gabriel songs by Paul Simon, Lou Reed, David Byrne, Elbow, Arcade Fire and others. The New Blood album presented orchestral retreads of old Gabriel songs, while there has been the occasional tour, such as the surprise ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors co-headline trundle around North America with Sting. But for the most part, those who have stuck with Gabriel throughout his extended silences and dalliances with whatever-takes-his-fancy causes, there’s been nothing net-new to get stuck into. Until today. Well, until January this year, and every month since.

Picture: Instagram/@itspetergabriel

Let me explain: in October 2021 an Instagram post revealed that Gabriel has been recording at his Real World Studios complex with “a few familiar faces” - long-serving bassist Tony Levin, guitarist David Rhodes and drummer Manu Katché. And then nothing. Until last December when Gabriel’s revived ‘Full Moon Club’ digital newsletter turned up with a link to a brief video in which he declared: “I’m now surrounded by a whole tonne of new material. I’ve pretty much got an album ready, and it’s been a lot of fun playing with the band again.” 

Expectations raised, on 6 January this year Gabriel released Panopticom, the lead-in single from a new album that would be called i/o. In February came The Court, and then Playing For Time in March, but still no complete album. However, it what can be considered peak Gabriel, the releases were being timed to coincide with the lunar cycle, accompanied by an individual piece of bespoke art to add an extra dimension to the release. 

Before long it dawned on most that Gabriel was indulging in mischief. The lunar video updates, announcing the latest release were all part of a plan to put i/o out track by track, full moon by full moon (which meant that, bizarrely, there were two releases in August) - and for free.

Gabriel announces i/o on YouTube, December 2022

To add to the giveaway, each track was released in two versions - a ‘Dark Side’ mix by Tchad Blake and then later a ‘Bright Side’ mix by Mark ‘Spike’ Stent. In his last instalment Gabriel revealed that this drip-feed had been an “experiment”. Like his friend Brian Eno (who appears on the album), the studio is his laboratory, much as a real laboratory was the creative workshop for his late inventor father, Ralph. It’s where the album - named after the ‘input’ and ‘output’ connections on electrical equipment - explores the interconnectivity of everything, and the perils, pitfalls and benefits of the bigger questions being asked about technology’s future. 

Thus, i/o’s release today is something of a literal anti-climax, but there is logic to its approach. “There’s not a huge income from the streaming services,” he said of technology’s present in an interview with Mojo’s Mark Blake. “Some of the themes [on i/o] are about connecting with nature, so it felt appropriate to do something on every new moon, as our ancestors used to.” But while monthly releases via streaming platforms might be uber meta, some musical traditions haven’t been completely jettisoned: “We’re storytellers and we love stories. And there’s more of a story on an album than there is on a single track. But the world is moving in the direction of shorter, faster, and when the tide goes one way it’s attractive to go in the opposite direction. The slower, longer thing has its place, and I’m notoriously slow.” 

Listened to as a whole, Gabriel’s distinction between new and tradition makes sense. In both single and complete forms, the new music bears testament to his penchant for fastidious production, intricate layering and disparate instrumentation but, 21 years on since Up, there is a notable maturity to i/o, both in terms of the 73-year-old’s growing sense of mortality, but also his enduring fascination with a world continuing to evolve.

The ‘Dark Side’ and ‘Bright Side’ mixes of i/o

Panopticom directs that from the outset, in Gabriel’s own words positing an “infinitely expandable accessible data globe”, ‘The Panopticom’, which connects like-minded people to “see what’s going on” in order to make the world understand itself better, a notion inspired by the work of groups like Forensic Architecture, Bellingcat and the aforementioned Witness. With a similar bass riff to Digging In The Dirt, Gabriel’s confessional about marital breakdown, it combines grandeur with a singalonga chorus (though the line “Panopticom - let’s find out what’s going on” only just sits on the right side of dodgy…). As the first single off the first new album in 21 years, it sent up a bright red flare that Gabriel had not lost his mojo in terms of writing with meaning, purpose and intrigue. In fact, it’s a hallmark of the entire album, which paints alternating strokes of mood, energy and substance. 

The Court tackles the online age with a Cuban rhythm interspersed with the staccato refrain of “And the court will rise”, an acerbic reflection perhaps on the tendency for Internet platforms to be judge, jury and executioner on public discourse, and leads well into the i/o’s title track, which drives one of the album’s core themes, the philosophical consideration of human progress. The track i/o has a genuinely uplifting quality that on repeated hearings suggests an overwhelmingly optimistic view of “the interconnectedness of everything”.

Four Kinds Of Horses is one of the album’s highlights, and a dramatic, ambitious consideration of the contemporaneous themes of spiritualism and religion as they intersect with geo-politics. Developed out of a tentative collaboration with XL Records founder Richard Russell, it emotively combines an orchestral arrangement from John Metcalfe with Gabriel’s core band as well as keyboard layers from Eno. Gabriel’s singer daughter Melanie, who has toured with her father, also makes an appearance (“another lovely moment for a dad”). 

Anyone who has seen Gabriel live will attest to his dad dancing, (In Your Eyes, in particular), to which we can now add Road To Joy. It’s another big, brassy pop tune in the manner of Sledgehammer, which funks along foot-tappingly, and is blessed by backing vocals from the Soweto Gospel Choir (who previously appeared on Down To Earth, Gabriel’s theme song for Wall-E). But despite being seemingly infused with happiness, it’s not the clappy celebration of life it might appear to be on first listen. In fact, it based in another side project Gabriel is involved in, dealing with near-death experiences and ‘locked-in’ syndrome. It is nevertheless delightfully engaging. As is This Is Home, late on in the album, which started life as a suggested idea from DJ Skrillex about partying late into the night, before Gabriel turned it on its head by making it about family life, underpinned by a warming,  soulful groove.

The similarly up-tempo Olive Tree is about another ‘brain’ project, examining how interacting with nature can broaden the potential for enhancing the human experience. “Part of the theme of this song and of [i/o] really is that we are part of everything,” Gabriel explains, “but these natural worlds of non-human intelligence are out there and we haven’t yet been smart enough to understand what they’re communicating and how they communicate.” 

So Much, which features more of Metcalfe’s orchestration and Melanie Gabriel’s vocals, tackles ageing, but not in a maudlin sense. “When you get to my sort of age you either run away from mortality or you jump into it and try and live life to the full,” Gabriel explains. “The countries that seem most alive are those that have death as part of their culture.” Mortality, another theme of the album, appears in the contemplative, Randy Newman-esque ballad Playing For Time, which reflects on the passing of time. Having recorded Father, Son about his dad for the Up album, Playing For Time is a “an elegy of sorts” to Gabriel’s late mother Edith, who was his musical influence. “When my mum died, I wanted to do something for her,” he explained in the Full Moon Club release, “but it’s taken a while before I felt comfortable and distant enough to be able to write something. She loved classical music, so we have a beautiful cello playing there.” The song is full of childhood memories - ”some of which are good, enjoyable and positive and some of which are obviously sad, dealing with loss.” 

There is even more emotional heft at work in the beautiful, ethereal Love Can Heal, for me the standout song on the record. Written several years ago (and debuted on the tour with Sting, when it was dedicated to Jo Cox, the murdered Labour MP, whom Gabriel had met at a conference), it draws musically from what he calls a “sensual pallete”. It is a daringly soporific exploration of the role emotions play in human connectivity. “I know I bang on about this ‘emotional toolbox’ and how one of the roles of songs is the potential to change how you feel and change your mood according to what you’re listening to,” Gabriel says. “Hopefully, Love Can Heal has its place in this emotional toolbox.”

The core PG band - Tony Levin, David Rhodes and Manu Katché
Picture: Instagram/@itspetergabriel 

By the time i/o reaches its 12th and final track, the listener will have been through a range of emotions and music evoking a plethora of life experiences. The temptation is to think Gabriel is just another rock star in his eighth decade processing the years passed, but there is a settled acceptance to his songs, that age is just a number, and that despite the maths, there is plenty to live for. That is certainly the cause behind Live And Let Live, November’s final Full Moon release and a closing song to savour. The very last song to be completed, it’s about “forgiveness, tolerance and optimism”, but also about the positive impact music can have on the human mood.

In his Mojo interview with Mark Blake, Gabriel addressed his reputation for being somewhat dilettante: “If it’s fun and it’s interesting, I’ll do it”. i/o may have taken 21 years to release (in fact some of the songs on it go back even further in their origin), but it won’t necessarily be the another two decades before it gets followed up. “Who knows, I may just keep going,” Gabriel told Mojo, teasingly. There is even more new music in the works, though in what state of readiness - by Gabriel’s standards of perfection - remains to be seen. “I think you can over-saturate people and they get bored with you,” he said with knowing modesty. “One of the reasons I am still able to make a living doing this is that there are long periods of absence.” 

All of this might sound like Gabriel is a very serious man indeed. He is, but there has always been a twinkle in his eye. “I’m 73 now, at an age when I might as well just play around and have fun,” he told Blake. i/o may cover some complex even baffling themes, but you could never cause Gabriel of tossing off something generic or formulaic. If anything, he’s still not afraid to metaphorically walk on stage in a red dress and a fox’s head (as he did for real at a Genesis concert in 1972, much to the surprise of his bandmates). 

i/o gives firm demonstration that he refuses to become a heritage act in his dotage. “Sometimes you have to take the road that requires fear and courage,” he told Mojo. Doing things differently “makes it way more interesting for me”. He is happy to face rejection, if that’s what comes. Listening to i/o, that is not going to happen any time soon: it’s an album of rare consideration and deep thought about the world reflective of the length of time it has taken to reach these ears. While that world will have changed many times in the 21 years of i/o’s gestation, the final yards of recording and producing it have created an album of beauty, grace, intelligence and wit, qualities that you rarely come across in this day and age.  

Peter Gabriel’s i/o is released today on Real World Records

Squaring The Circle - the story of two of the most important figures in rock history

Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell and Storm Thorgerson
Picture: Hipgnosis

To men of a certain age – and it is, almost exclusively men – album covers are, or at least were, a big thing. They probably still are, but it’s actually hard to think of the last time you heard of an album cover making headlines in the age of streaming.

There was a time, though, when an album cover was almost as significant as the music contained on the vinyl within. Earlier this year I interviewed journalist Mark Blake about his book Us And Them, which tells the story of arguably the greatest purveyors of album design, Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell – collectively the design house Hipgnosis. Their work between 1968 and 1983 produced, most famously, the artwork for Pink Floyd (including their opus The Dark Side Of The Moon), but also more than 250 sleeves for artists as varied as Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, Peter Gabriel, Humble Pie, 10cc, Leo Sayer, Genesis, ELO, Black Sabbath, Olivia Newton-John and XTC. “The Hipgnosis story kind of follows the arc of the LP, and the LP ‘taking over’ from the single as the primary focus of bands,” Mark told me. “[The Beatles’] Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a game changer in that sense. So, their career follows the art where the LP was king.”

That career is now the subject of a film by Dutch director and photographer Anton Corbijn, himself responsible for iconic album art of his own, having been most closely associated with Depeche Mode and U2, as well as taking iconic images of everyone from Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen to Robert De Niro and Clint Eastwood. 

Squaring The Circle, Corbijn’s debut as a documentary maker (having previously made dramas like Control, about Joy Division’s Ian Curtis and The American with George Clooney), pays homage to trailblazing legacy of Thorgerson and Powell and how they took the concept of cover art - which, for most of the pop era had largely been portraits of the bands - to conceptual pieces of art which complimented or even extended the often progressive, lyrical nature of music they enveloped.

With archive clips of interviews with the late Thorgerson, narration throughout by Powell (who brought the idea for the film to Corbijn) as well as new interviews with the likes of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and Roger Waters, Sir Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, Noel Gallagher and Peter Gabriel, the documentary expands on the studio’s work amid the context of rock counter-culture.

Peter Gabriel’s first three, Hipgnosis-designed albums

“There was an enormous amount of goodwill towards Hipgnosis,” Corbijn told The Guardian recently about the involvement of many of Thorgerson and Powell’s muses. “People just wanted to make [the film] work. They were generous. Everyone was proud of their albums and the work they had done with them.”

“Growing up in the late ’60s and ’70s, I was obsessed with music and everything connected to it – especially the album covers,” Corbijn says as a pretext to the film, adding that “record sleeves were a huge part of my education. I clearly recall the moment I first saw the sleeve for Atom Heart Mother by Pink Floyd, and the Peter Gabriel sleeves [whose first three solo albums were untitled save for his name and an iconic image]. They just blew me away and this led me on a journey of discovery towards Hipgnosis, who designed these and some of the most memorable sleeves from that time.”

Without doubt, The Dark Side Of The Moon looms large in that pantheon, with Thorgerson and Powell knowing Pink Floyd since their school days together in Cambridge, before moving to London. “Hipgnosis were unique in these early days and they set the bar very high,” says Corbijn.

Thorgerson was very much the ‘ideas’ half of the duo, while Powell, a photographer, had a more instinctive, snappers approach. When combined with the creative freedom they were afforded by bands and their record companies, the gallery of Hipgnosis’ output deserves a chapter of its own in the history of popular music. “They conjured into existence sights that no one had previously thought possible,” says Corbijn. “They produced visuals which popularised music that had previously been considered fringe, and were at the white-hot centre of the maddest, funniest and most creative era in the history of popular music.”

Hipgnosis at work, 6 Denmark Street, London
Picture: Hipgnosis

Album sleeves, he says, during this period became a force in their own right. “In the ’80s, of course, we got CDs, so the album sleeve sort of deteriorated, and the art with it, Corbijn adds, saying that, as a photographer, he was drawn to Hipgnosis’ work by the images they used. He marvels at how they created works of art: “Before we had all the intricate things we can do now on the computer, they did it with a knife and glue, and pieces of paper,” he recently told Collider. “They made really incredible collages and made the impossible possible.”

As the film reveals, Thorgerson and Powell often went to great lengths - and expense - to produce their album art, notably the images for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album and, of course, the ‘flying pig’ cover for that record’s follow-up, Animals. It’s this ambition that inspired the documentary’s title. “‘Squaring the circle’ means doing the impossible, but it also represents the circular record going into a sleeve, Corbijn explained to The Guardian.

“One of the craziest things - it’s also in the film - is a sleeve for 10cc [for the Look Hear? album],” Corbijn recalled to Collider. “They saw the idea of having a sheep on a couch in a beautiful ocean. So they went all the way to Hawaii, not realising [there were] no sheep in Hawaii, and there were no [psychiatrists’s] couches either. So they had a couch made, and they had one sheep, they found one sheep at the university, and they managed to give it a lot of Valium and shot it.”

While Noel Gallagher quips in the film that album covers represents “the poor man’s art collection”, there’s no escaping the fact that Hipgnosis have produced some of the most recognisable images of all time, with The Dark Side Of The Moon’s light-entering-a-prism seared in culture (receiving no more prestigious a nod to the zeitgeist than being parodied in an episode of The Simpsons). “I think both of them have a complicated relationship with  Dark Side,” Mark Blake told me earlier this year. “It’s not their favourite work, but it is their most famous work. I don't think it's a very simple design, and it doesn’t have the narrative quality to it as Wish You Were Here did a couple of years later, which I think was certainly one of Storm’s favourite Floyd covers.  So, I think they're both a little bit conflicted about Dark Side, really.”

For his film, however, Anton Corbijn had to negotiate around the frail relationships that exist between the surviving members of the band, most notably the fractious dynamics between founder member Roger Waters and guitarist David Gilmour, who joined in 1967 as co-founder Syd Barrett’s behaviour became ever-more erratic. Barrett himself makes a brief appearance in Squaring The Circle, in a poignant moment when Powell recalls an overweight and almost unrecognisable Barrett visiting Abbey Road studios in 1975 during the recording of Wish You Were Here, by then succumbing increasingly to poor physical and mental health. It is, apparently, a moment that continues to move the band’s remaining members.

Hipgnosis images used for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album

“I guess everybody knows they have four managers these days – for every member there’s a manager,” Corbijn semi-joked to Collider with typically understated Dutch humour. “But I guess the love for Hipgnosis overrode all that, and they wanted to be part of this. I mean, they were not in the studio at the same, but they all said yes to it in the end.”

Pink Floyd, in particular, gave Thorgerson and Powell a platform. Their abstract, obtuse and often ethereal concepts led them to other exponents of early ’70s progressive music, like Wishbone Ash’s Argus, which in turn led to Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page inviting Hipgnosis to design the House Of The Holy sleeve (which depicted Northern Ireland’s Giant’s Causeway). That, then, attracted Paul McCartney’s attention, bringing the studio in to realise his concept for Wings’ celebrity-themed Band On The Run cover.

“I hope people see it as a fun documentary, as well as an educational one, regarding that period of music and graphic design,” Corbijn says of Squaring The Circle. However, it also addresses how the Thorgerson/Powell partnership came apart. Having moved to London during the 1967 ‘Summer Of Love’, the duo shared a South Kensington flat, first using university facilities to build their reputation for art (including their debut for Pink Floyd, A Saucerful Of Secrets in 1968) before opening the Hipgnosis studio at 6 Denmark Street - London’s musical mecca known as ‘Tin Pan Alley’. 

But by 1983 - a year after the launch of the CD - Hipgnosis as, largely Thorgerson and Powell (along with often forgotten Peter Christopherson) - they decided to call it a day. Powell addresses this in the film, breaking down in the process, much to Corbijn’s surprise. “I didn’t see it coming,” Corbijn says of the scene. “It was a beautiful moment in the film. He clearly misses Storm terribly.”

Po and Anton
Picture: Anton Corbijn

As much as Squaring The Circle celebrates an era of album covers that broadly paralleled the rock era itself, it also marks the decline of an art form, first by the introduction of the Compact Disc in 1982 (Hipgnosis gave up album design in 1983 and switched to making music videos) and more recently, by the advent of streaming. It’s a point Noel Gallagher makes in the film, highlighting the lack of appreciation for album covers shown by today’s younger consumers, which may be the result of both record companies trimming their artwork budgets, and the thumbnail formats of streaming platforms making the impact of album cover art negligible. “The importance of the record sleeve has diminished,” Corbijn agrees. “In the ‘70s, for young kids there wasn’t much else to spend money on. Yet you had to save up to buy something, so it was meaningful. Now nothing is meaningful because you can get it at the touch of a button.”

Squaring The Circle opens today in UK cinemas and via streaming services. It also be released as a collector’s edition Blu-ray Disc on 7 August.

Arc Of A Diver, my post on Mark Blake’s biography Us And Them can be read here.

A midsummer night’s dream - Peter Gabriel at the O2 Arena

Picture: York Tillyer

It’s been 21 years since Peter Gabriel last delivered a full album of net-new material. Children have been born and graduated in that time. I’m now three years older than Gabriel was when he last put out an entire collection of properly original songs. Not that he’s been a recluse: there have been contributions to soundtracks here, collaborations with other artists there, and a couple of cover version projects. But that aside, nothing box-fresh. We have, though, had six tours, of which I’ve seen five, only missing out on his ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’ double-header with Sting.

However, there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. In principle, the 73-year-old has been working on a new album for most of those 21 years, but it was only photographs this time last year of Gabriel and long-term cohorts Tony Levin, David Rhodes and Manu Katché at work at his Real World Studios near Bath that confirmed a tenth solo studio album was “on”. But, being Gabriel, and with the middle of 2023 now reached, the semi-mythical new record is still months away. 

This might be, simply, Gabriel’s customary glacial rate of progress: interests and causes constantly throw him off schedule. Or equally, he’s simply teasing. Maybe it’s the latter. There have, in fact, been new releases since the beginning of the year. Six songs, to be precise, each introduced in typically Gabrielesque manner to coincide with the lunar cycle. “I’m an awkward sod,” he told Uncut’s Michael Bonner in March. “I like doing things differently, if I can. I’m 73. At this point, it doesn’t matter what other people say. I listen, still, to people who I think are wise and smart and have good taste. Generally, though, I’ll end up doing what I think will be either fun or interesting.”

He has earned that right, and not always with the recognition his notoriously sporadic output has deserved. While never regarded with the same chameleonic awe as David Bowie, across nine solo studio albums so far, four soundtrack projects and myriad one-offs, produced a body of work as intriguing, compelling and as invariably confounding as anyone I can think of. I’m somewhat biased, of course. Having been first introduced to Gabriel via his seven-year tenure as lead singer and figurehead of proto-prog era Genesis, his solo albums (the first four simply titled Peter Gabriel to encourage the cover art to make each record stand out...although I suspect some wry record label trolling was also at play) have been nothing short of eclectic. Classic rock, soul, funk, gospel, Afro-beat, Indian themes, Aboriginal influences, electronica, barbershop jazz - you name it, they’ve all featured.

Surprisingly, there’s been more commercialism in that array than some might recognise, what with hits like Solsbury Hill, Games Without Frontiers, Shock The Monkey, and then the pop phenomenon that was the So album, with Sledgehammer, Don’t Give Up and In Your Eyes. But as the period between albums has stretched out - the first four made over five years, then gaps of four, six and ten respectively, before the two-decade elapse since 2002’s Up - Gabriel has also found plenty to with which to dilly and dally.

Peter Gabriel plays live - by yours truly in Smash Hits, 14 July 1987

At the O2 Arena last night - the seventh time I’ve seen Gabriel play live since 1987 - the 46-year expanse of Gabriel’s solo career was condensed into almost three hours, separated by an interval, and given fresh impetus. As with any well-established act, there are the expected staples: the now-customary finale of In Your Eyes followed by Biko (in 1980, one of the first mainstream rock songs to address apartheid), the feelgood Stax energy of So’s Sledgehammer (oddly sequenced at the end of the first set before the interval) and Big Time, the intimate optimism of Don’t Give Up (backing vocalist Ayanna Witter-Johnson stamping her own signature to mesmerising effect on Kate Bush’s duet role in the original). These are what many, if not most, of the punters have come to hear. 

This, though, raises questions about the back-to-front commercial wisdom of the 22-song set including a whopping 11 new pieces drawn from the forthcoming album i/o. It’s easy to assume that this is peak contrarian Gabriel - especially as the i/o Tour is not actually in support of the near-mythical new release, the date for which is still not confirmed. In the end, it was a masterstroke. This was, essentially, a preview of the new album on a grand, arena-sized scale. Gabriel has used tours in the past to preview works in progress, but here in North Greenwich, the new material was brought spectacularly to life. 

Even the six new songs released so far, were given bigger and bolder expression in the O2’s expanse. Lead-off single Panopticom, Four Kinds Of Horses and the i/o title track (named after the computing acronym for “input/output”) bounce expressively, their instantly singalongable choruses underpinned by stalwarts Levin, Rhodes and Katché’s combined rhythms. Along with The Court, Playing For Time and Road To Joy, the new songs bloomed into dimensions that seemed familiar and new in equal measure. Those we hadn’t heard before also seemed to fit effortlessly into the programme: Olive Tree, for example, seemed like it had come from a 1980s soundtrack album without sounding out of place in a trio of new songs that included the aforementioned Playing For Time (featuring the studio recording’s Tom Cawley on piano) and the warm reflection on domesticity, This Is Home. 

The one misfire of the entire evening was another new piece, And Still, inspired by the loss of  Gabriel’s mother. Not that it won’t have its place on the new album, but coming after the searing brilliance of Red Rain, it seemed downbeat and out of kilter with the general upbeat mood of the evening (much the result of the ensemble Gabriel has placed around him on this tour - which also includes guitarist Richard Evans, Witter-Johnson on vocals and cello, Marina Moore on vocals and violin, Josh Shpak on brass, along with the very funky keyboardist Don E).

“There’s always a trade-off,” Gabriel explained in one of his monthly Full Moon Club newsletters. “People generally want to hear what they know and the artist generally wants to play the new stuff. So, I think there’s a sort of barter thing where you have to suffer enough new numbers to get to hear the old ones. It’s always been a bit like that with me, but I think this is a strong batch of songs. They’re not all up-tempo, but I feel they’re certainly being played with a lot of heart.” 

Levin, Gabriel and Rhodes - not a comb between them
Picture: York Tillyer

In the early days of Genesis, Gabriel wore masks and costumes to ‘act out’ the invariably complex narratives of their lengthy fantastical songs. He would also tell ponderous, meandering stories between songs, largely to allow Mike Rutherford and Steve Hackett time to retune their twelve-string guitars. Some of this was a front, mere armour to shield his shyness, but also - in his own words - to “command an audience”. Five decades on, he’s still giving ponderous introductions, largely to explain what his songs are about. While mostly worthy, they are also sincere, and delivered with a wry sense of self-depreciation. And while the costumes and greasepaint have long been abandoned for stage clothing redolent of his world music interests, the singer who once bunked out of Charterhouse to see Otis Redding play the RamJam Club in Brixton is still prone to dad-dancing routines to accompany his livelier songs, like Solsbury Hill and In Your Eyes. Rather than being embarrassing, it’s endearing. By the evening’s end, and a somnolent, cavernous drum beat heralds the traditional ending of Biko, the crowd knows the score, clenched fists punching the air in solidarity to the “Heh! Heh! Heh! The man is dead, the man is dead” township refrain.

When the new album i/o eventually arrives, and lyric sheets and press releases can be pored over, the disparate, encyclopedic themes that Gabriel has always pursued will be explored in more depth than via, for most people, their first listen live. It’s part of my fascination with the multiple dimensions he brings to bear with his work, especially with a penchant for eccentric wordplay. When he officially left Genesis in 1975, he released a statement to Sounds newspaper which concluded:

“The following guesswork has little in common with truth: Gabriel left Genesis.
1) To work in theatre.
2) To make more money as solo artist.
3) To do a ‘Bowie’.

4) To do a ‘Ferry’.

5) To do a ‘Furry Boa round my neck and hang myself with it’.
6) To go see an institution.
7) To go senile in the sticks.
I do not express myself adequately in interviews and I felt I owed it to the people who have put a lot of love and energy supporting the band to give an accurate picture of my reasons.”

Such witticism (which found its way into songs like Games Without Frontiers and Sledgehammer) is there on the new songs, but used to cover pet topics such as utopianism (Panopticom), dystopia (The Court) and environmentalism. But, if their unfamiliarity to new ears might be unsettling, audience engagement is undimmed. “Now we’re going to do something new” is usually the cue for a bar stampede, which suggests that devoting half the set list to songs from i/o  would seem instinctively risky at best. But it’s here that you realise that Gabriel - even if never the first name on people’s lips when you invite them to name a rock legend - has earned that respect over 56 years as both a frontman and originator of, in his words “awkward”, yet utterly inventive pop music.

Absence does make the heart grow fonder, but there have been times when it has felt like Gabriel’s almost fan-trolling ponderousness in the studio might have tested that allegiance. “It’s been a while since I’ve been touring, but I am thoroughly enjoying it. We’ve had lovely audiences and I think it is a really extraordinary band, so I am delighted with that,” he wrote in his latest Full Moon Club update. 

For all the human rights causes, obscure artistic rabbit holes and other tangents that will have understandably drawn irate cries of “Just get on and make a new record, will you?!” from his fanbase, his emergence, on this tour and with the prospect to come of i/o, reawakened my belief that Gabriel is one of the most compelling artists in the business.

Art of a diver

Just beyond the eastern extreme of California’s Yosemite National Park, not far from the border with Nevada, sits Mono Lake, a salty body of water formed three-quarters of a million years ago. I came across it considerably more recently than that - 1992 to be exact - but at the time had no appreciation of the cameo it had made in my musical adolescence when I stopped there for what Americans politely term a “comfort break”.

For context, I was midway through a month-long tour of the American West, albeit in December when the tourist hordes are elsewhere. Having driven from Los Angeles up the Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco, and then north-east to snowed-in Lake Tahoe, I was heading south towards Death Valley along the scenic Highway 395, with California’s spinal Sierra Nevada mountains to my right. Just south-east of Yosemite, I came across Mono Lake and its seemingly abandoned visitor centre. Making use of its facilities, I then took in a view of the lake’s eerie stillness, framed by unique tufa formations. It would be another 25 years - and several visits further to that part of California - before I’d come to realise where I’d seen that tufa before. On a display wall at London’s V&A museum, as part of the Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains exhibition, was a blow-up of the inner sleeve of the band’s ninth studio album, Wish You Were Here, depicting a perpendicular diver performing a handstand in, yes, Mono Lake. 

The image was the idea of Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, the photographer and co-founder with Storm Thorgerson of the Hipgnosis design studio which, from the end of the 60s to the beginning of the 80s produced some of the most distinctive album covers ever committed to 12 inches-square of cardboard. Over 15 years, they produced more than 250 sleeves for artists as varied as Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney, Humble Pie, 10cc, Leo Sayer, Genesis, ELO, Black Sabbath, Olivia Newton-John and XTC, as well as Pink Floyd, with whom they became most closely associated.

It’s the perfect subject, then, for Us And Them: The Authorised Story Of Hipgnosis, a new book by journalist Mark Blake, whose previous work includes arguably the definitive Floyd account, Pigs Might Fly. “I’d always been quite interested in the idea of doing a book about Hipgnosis,” Mark declares. “I’d interviewed a lot of their associates for Pigs Might Fly - particularly the people who were around at the beginning of their work, their contemporaries, their friends from Cambridge and London in the early days.” A book about the creative duo was a natural next step, especially as Mark had come to know Powell and, in the later years of his life, Thorgerson, in particular, working on the very V&A exhibition I’d been to see. 

Hipgnosis and Pink Floyd’s histories are intertwined: Thorgerson and Powell had been cohorts of the band’s founder members, Syd Barrett and Roger Waters, in Cambridge before they all migrated to London to attend universities. There they met Nick Mason and Rick Wright, eventually becoming fixtures of the capital’s underground music scene as ‘The Pink Floyd Sound’. 

A year after Pink Floyd - as they became - released their debut album, The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn in 1967, Thorgerson and Powell established their working relationship with the band. “Storm was attending the Royal College Of Art, studying film, and Po got a job designing sets for the BBC,” says Mark. “Then Po got sacked and fell into low levels of criminal activity - bank fraud, stealing cars and so on. He got into an awful lot of trouble. It was then that they decided to talk Pink Floyd into letting them design the sleeve for their second album, A Saucerful Of Secrets.” Released in 1968, and made amidst the deteriorating mental health of Barrett (whose departure midway through recording led to David Gilmour joining the group), the album was only the second time that label EMI had allowed an artist to use designers from outside their own in-house art desk. Thorgerson and Powell took it as an opportunity to exploit the changing nature of record covers.

A Saucerful Of Secrets led to the pair designing for Pink Floyd’s labelmates at EMI and, later, its Harvest subsidiary, at first making use of the RCA’s photography faculty (even though Thorgerson wasn’t studying the subject and Po wasn’t even at the college), before being rumbled and thrown out. Instead, they turned the bathroom of Powell’s then-girlfriend into a dark room. This was to change towards the end of 1969 when the pair upgraded: “They moved into a studio in Denmark Street where they began doing stuff for bands like Argent, Quatermass, Toe Fat - all these late-60s, early prog rock,” says Mark. They also took on photographic work came for magazines and book covers. 

“Much of their success can be traced to that of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” says Mark, referring to the grandaddy of progressive rock and its ambitious pop art sleeve designed in 1967 by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth. That landmark inspired a decade of graphic design in rock which saw Hipgnosis, as well as their equally conceptual contemporary Roger Dean, taking cover art into new realms of creativity and expression. Prog bands like Pink Floyd, Yes and Genesis became fertile muses for such designers, turning cover art into an integral component of the narrative their records pursued, invariably conveying dioramic third dimensions through fantastical, somewhat lyrical and always unique imagery. 

For Thorgerson and Powell, getting their concepts across the line with some bands often owed more to the force of personality than creativity alone. “There was one slightly oddball character in Storm, and the slightly more measured character in the shape of Po,” Nick Mason tells Mark in the book. “And it stayed that way for the next fifty years.”

Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell

As their reputation grew, from 1968 and into the new decade, Hipgnosis became particularly prevalent working for artists sat on various degrees of the progressive spectrum, producing sleeves for myriad acts like Humble Pie, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Rory Gallagher, T-Rex, Wishbone Ash (for their album Argus, with its seminal cover) and even Syd Barrett, for his haphazard but still loved post-Floyd solo albums. At the same time, the relationship with Pink Floyd continued to bear fruit, with covers for the albums More, Ummagumma, Atom Heart Mother, Meddle and Obscured By Clouds.

However, the album that still defines the Hipgnosis legacy - and possibly the entire genre of LP art - came in March 1973: The Dark Side Of The Moon. Thorgerson and Powell’s brief from Pink Floyd was to produce something uncomplicated, a contrarian response to opinions amongst the suits at EMI that their previous sleeves for the band had been belligerently obscure and even unmarketable. What they came up with - with a little help from a school book - was the now singular black cover with its beam of light dissipating through a prism into a spectral rainbow.

“I don’t think there was so much foresight and forward thinking in it,” says Mark Blake. “A lot of the time it’s ‘We’ve got to get a cover out - there’s a deadline looming!’. The band wanted something simple so Storm and Po found the prism design in a physics textbook and ripped it off, getting their illustrator George Hardie to create a beautiful design.” To make up for the spartan outer cover, Hipgnosis included some visual extras. “You got the poster of The Great Pyramid and a load of stickers,” says Mark. ”That was Storm trying to shoehorn some bigger ideas in.”

Nowhere on the front or back was there any mention of Pink Floyd or the album’s name. Though not the intention, it reflected an undercurrent of growing distraction within the band (Roger Waters has, with customary misery, described Dark Side as “the beginning of the end”), and the lyrical themes of greed, fame, mortality and even the mental decline of their founder Barrett. Wrapped in a package not dissimilar to a box of Black Magic chocolates, The Dark Side Of The Moon became the standout release of 1973, a year which saw records like Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, Led Zeppelin’s Houses Of The Holy (with a cover also designed by Hipgnosis), Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells and Bruce Springsteen’s Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ amongst its pantheon.

Mark acknowledges Dark Side’s enduring success but doesn’t attribute it entirely to the legendary artwork: “I don’t think that it is just down to having the boldness of not having the band’s name anywhere on the cover. I know it wasn’t the first time Storm and Po had done that with Pink Floyd or, in fact, another band.” Music, he says, has clearly been the album’s defining character, but over time the cover has contributed to the record’s legend, albeit contentiously for Hipgnosis: “I think they got paid about 500 quid all-in for that. Years later, Storm tried to get more money out of Pink Floyd because he believed that the cover had contributed more to the sales.”

To date The Dark Side Of The Moon has sold more than 45 million copies worldwide - and continues to do so, even reaching new audiences. My 18-year-old step-daughter asked for a vinyl copy for Christmas two years ago, and even this last December the LP was selling steadily when I visited Fopp! in Covent Garden. While it contains some of the Floyd’s most revered music - Breathe, Money, Time, Us And Them, The Great Gig In The Sky et al - that cover art has found itself peppered throughout the zeitgeist of the last 50 years. “I think both Storm and Po had a complicated relationship with Dark Side,” says Mark. “It’s not their favourite work, but it is their most famous work. It’s a very simple design but doesn’t have the narrative quality that Wish You Were Here had a couple of years later, which I think was certainly one of Storm’s favourite Floyd covers.” 

That record, released in 1975 as a follow up to Dark Side, came with a significantly larger production budget for Hipgnosis, which is how Powell ended up in California for three weeks, an entourage in tow, taking the Mono Lake shot. At the same time, he captured the faceless bowler-hatted man for the back cover (shot in the Mojave Desert), and the front cover image of businessmen shaking hands on a Hollywood backlot, with one of the two stuntmen used for the picture actually on fire - a stunt that almost went very badly wrong.

The story of Hipgnosis isn’t, however, exclusively the Pink Floyd Story. Their work for other artists was equally as distinct, and sometimes just as complicated, though Mark feels they never came up with anything as singularly impactful as The Dark Side Of The Moon. “They became the hip guys to go to after Dark Side and Houses Of The Holy, and also, weirdly, Wishbone Ash’s Argus. That was the album Jimmy Page saw in a record shop: when I interviewed him for the book, he told me ‘I saw this album with a Viking on the cover. I never listened to it but I liked the cover.’ So he rang up Storm and said, ‘Come and do our next album’ [for Led Zeppelin]. After that they got the call from Paul McCartney, who asked them to do Wings’ Band On The Run.” That cover, Mark says, was entirely McCartney’s idea, and famously featured a Clive Arrowsmith picture of Paul and Linda McCartney, Denny Laine, Michael Parkinson, Kenny Lynch, James Coburn, Clement Freud, Christopher Lee and John Conteh posing against a wall, illuminated by a prison searchlight. Still, it had a domino effect, bringing many more bands to Thorgerson and Powell’s door.

Genesis was another band that enjoyed a run of distinctive Hipgnosis-designed covers, commencing with 1974’s The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway - Peter Gabriel’s final work as lead singer and a concept album about a Gulliver-like Puerto Rican street tough descending into the New York underworld. Its literal cover - including a new band logo - was peak Hipgnosis. “Storm was incredibly principled about certain things,” Mark explains. “He would go to the ends of the Earth and spend his own money on getting a cover right. There were certain ideas he wanted to do for bands that they rejected because they wouldn’t have been able to afford it. Storm would do it anyway, just because he wanted to. But by the same token, if Pink Floyd turned an idea down, he’d have no hesitation in trying to fob it off on another band.”

10cc and Genesis were, in particular, beneficiaries of Thorgerson’s ‘generosity’: “The cover of 10cc’s Bloody Tourists is actually a picture of Powell with a map across his face in the West Indies. They pitched that to Genesis for …And Then There Were Three, with the idea that they’d just lost Steve Hackett [who’d quit the band in 1977] and they’re now looking for a new direction.” Genesis, Mark says, weren’t having it, so Hipgnosis took the concept to 10cc who did.

Peter Gabriel recounted a similar experience to Mark for his first three solo albums, which had Hipgnosis covers. Every time he met Thorgerson, he’d be told: “I’ve got a great idea for you, Peter,” to which Gabriel would say: “You’ve fucking tried that on Led Zeppelin, haven't you?”. Mark reveals: “Storm would reply: ‘Yes, but it's perfect for you!’ So, there’s this sort of reject pile that Gabriel would always be confronted by. With Storm it was a weird mix of being incredibly principled and that art is everything, to ‘just have this’.” The covers Gabriel eventually agreed to were markedly different to those Hipgnosis produced for his old band and their contemporaries. While still surreal, they featured distorted images of the singer himself, but to his American record company’s frustration, Gabriel was naming his albums simply ‘Peter Gabriel’, with their covers the only means of distinguishing them. Eventually, the American label would remarket them respectively as ‘Car’, ‘Scratch’ and ‘Melt’, based on the Hipgnosis imagery, just to help the hard of thinking.

If Sgt. Pepper changed the nature of album covers, the early 1980s brought two shifts in the medium itself with industrial developments that, indirectly, altered Thorgerson and Powell’s trajectories. In 1982 Philips and Sony heralded the digital music age by introducing the Compact Disc. The 12-inch canvas that Hipgnosis had made their own became increasingly redundant. Until Gen Z’ers discovered their parents and grandparents’ vinyl collections - and a new romance began with cover art, appearing on bedroom walls and irony-nodding T-shirts - the designs that stood tall in my teenage years became minimised to fit 12cm ‘jewel cases’. Later still, with the advent of streaming, cover art would be minimised further to fit the postage stamp-sized screen real estate of online services. 

Mark Blake

To Mark Blake, the CD’s arrival marked an important pivot away from the ‘long-player’: “That’s another thing that was appealing about doing this book,” he says. “The Hipgnosis story follows the arc of the LP as a medium, which really began with Sgt. Pepper, which was a game-changer in that sense. Suddenly the LP was king. Bands made albums and didn't have to do singles. But, as I’ve been told, the arrival of the CD was one of the reasons that made Hipgnosis decide to wind up the company and go into making music videos.” 

The arrival of MTV in 1983 was the next industrial change, providing Hipgnosis with a new outlet: “All the money that might have once gone into sending them to the Sahara Desert to photograph footballs in the sand for a cover was now being spent on videos,” says Mark. “So that’s why they wound up the company and decided make music videos, which they did for a few years quite successfully…until it wasn’t.” 

While one of their first forays was the clip for Paul Young’s Wherever I Lay My Hat, the video age brought Hipgnosis back into contact with some of their older clients, who were finding new fans through the medium. “They did stuff for Robert Plant and Jimmy Page’s bands,” says Mark. “Owner Of A Lonely Heart [the hit single that revived the fortunes of Yes] was another big one for Hipgnosis. They got in on the ground floor with these older bands trying to relaunch themselves and having to make videos. And obviously, the bands went to the very guys who’d made their album covers, because they figured that they’d feel comfortable with them.”

Although Hipgnosis, as an entity, was wound up in 1983, there is a coda to their greatest legacy in designing covers for LPs. Vinyl sales grew for the 15th consecutive year in the UK in 2022, reaching close to 5.5 million - the highest growth since 1990. What began as baby boomers looking to reconnect with their long-discarded copies of classic Beatles and Bowie records has been boosted by the record-selling phenomenon that is Taylor Swift, as teenagers, moving on from raiding their elders’ records, have adopted their own heroine in the Nashville star. Visit any record shop - from independents to the few remaining chains - and a miasma of album covers will greet you. 

So, is Mark Blake’s celebration of arguably the greatest purveyors of album art perfectly timed? Not necessarily, he says: ”The 50th anniversary Dark Side Of The Moon was the main reason for writing the book. The thing about [the resurgence of] vinyl is interesting, though. I’ve got a 17-year-old son, and when he was first looking through my old records, he said to me, ’Some of these covers would look great if you had them framed on the wall,’ which I think is quite interesting. He listened to Dark Side a couple of years ago, because he’d heard a lot about it - and probably because of the cover.” The vinyl upswing does help, says Mark: “It shows there’s an interest in it as a format, but I don’t think there would have been interest in [a book] ten years ago. We’re moving on to a time where people maybe are reassessing some of this stuff a bit more now, especially after the Pink Floyd exhibition at the V&A. It just feels a bit more timely now.”

Us And Them: The Authorised Story Of Hipgnosis by Mark Blake is published on 2 February by Nine Eight Books

Light side of the moon - Peter Gabriel is back!

Picture by Nadav Kander

To those that believe in such things, the moon is, apparently, a symbol of femininity, a notion loosely related to the fact that the average length of a menstrual cycle matches that of the lunar phases. Thus, many cultures associate the moon with fertility. It’s fascinated Peter Gabriel for many years, even creating ‘The Full Moon Club’ on his website more than 20 years ago as a platform for monthly updates about the singer’s activities. Not that, in the 20 years since, there’s been much to update. 

That’s because Gabriel is a notorious dilettante. By his own admission, he is easily distracted by causes, projects and diversions that take his fancy. That has meant new music over the last two decades has been thin on the ground. Since his last studio album, 2002’s Up, there have been sporadic contributions to soundtracks, compilations, tours on his own and with Sting, but nothing as substantial as a brand new Peter Gabriel album.

To say that the gestation of a Gabriel record takes a while is an understatement. Hope was raised of new material in October 2021 when pictures appeared on Gabriel’s Instagram channel of work going on at the singer’s Real World Studios complex near Bath together with long-term cohorts Tony Levin on bass, David Rhodes on guitar, Manu Katché on drums. It would be another 13 months before Gabriel would announce plans to release a whole new album - i/o - this year, along with a tour.

Fittingly, then, on the day of a full moon, Gabriel has today dropped a new single, Panopticom. Reassuringly, this isn’t another random one-off release (his last, 2016’s I’m Amazing, which was partly dedicated to Muhammed Ali, appeared as merely a promotional tool for a tour, and had been been plucked from storage, having been written several years before). Instead, it is the first release, proper, from the new album, and significantly features Levin, Rhodes and Katché, as well as electronic noodlings from Brian Eno, reconnecting with Gabriel almost 50 years after Roxy Music ‘lent’ him to Genesis to provide “Enossification” to The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway album.

On first listen, Panopticom combines Gabriel’s customary layered approach with a sonic abstraction, building slowly on an electronic bed with an understated vocal that opens out into a rousing second half. Equally customary is that the single is based on some deep conceptual thinking, “an idea I have been working on to initiate the creation of an infinitely expandable accessible data globe: The Panopticom,” Gabriel says in a press release. “We are beginning to connect a like-minded group of people who might be able to bring this to life, to allow the world to see itself better and understand more of what’s really going on.”

Gabriel says the single’s lyrics are part inspired by the work of organisations like Bellingcat and Forensic Architecture, as well as the human rights group WITNESS that Gabriel himself co-founded. 

“Some of what I’m writing about this time is the idea that we seem incredibly capable of destroying the planet that gave us birth and that unless we find ways to reconnect ourselves to nature and to the natural world we are going to lose a lot,” he explains further in the press release. “A simple way of thinking about where we fit in to all of this is looking up at the sky...and the moon has always drawn me to it.”

Each new release from i/o be accompanied by a piece of art. For Panopticom it’s ‘Red Gravity’ by David Spriggs, an artist Gabriel noted for his recurring themes of surveillance. “David does this amazing stuff using many layers of transparencies so you get these strange creations with a real intensity to them,” says Gabriel. “Part of what he does is imagine what art might look like a few years in the future and then try and create accordingly and I think he’s done that very successfully in this particular piece.”

Concepts like these have been a constant for much of Gabriel’s 55-year career, even with his poppier songs, like Shock The Monkey or In Your Eyes. It is what has made him one of the most fascinating - if infuriatingly slow - creative forces in music. Nothing - even the hat-tip to Stax that Sledgehammer was - have sounded like anything else out there, and to that extent his solo work is timeless. However, the paucity of new material over the years has been largely the fault of Gabriel himself and his constant distractions. 

The one-offs and the Scratch My Back/New Blood projects, which saw Gabriel re-record his own songs as well as those of his favourite musicians with an orchestra, have provided moments of interest, but haven’t compensated for the lack of truly original new music, of the depth and richness of his de facto solo albums. Those, too, have been few and far between: his commercial breakthrough, So in 1986, was a fifth studio album in ten years (and the first not to be simply called ‘Peter Gabriel’). But since then there were only two additional non-soundtrack or live albums - Us in 1992 and then Up ten years later.

Pictures: Instagram/itspetergabriel/York Tillyer

Panopticom gives hope that i/o will fill the ever-widening gap since that last album, and my initial take is that it certainly gives reassurance that the work Gabriel has put in at Real World with Levin, Rhodes, Katché and others will deliver another gem which can genuinely be regarded as unlike anything else out there.

Listen to Panopticom via your preferred audio platform here

A step back in time

© Simon Poulter 2022

In 1978 Genesis had a hit with the love song Follow You, Follow Me, which marked a sea change in their concert clientelle. At a stroke, the band have noted, there were exponentially more women at their gigs. For the previous ten years, they’d been mostly patronised - again in their words - by men wearing army surplus greatcoats and carrying notebooks in which to record their thoughts about the noodly progressive rock they’d come to consume.

From that moment, Genesis would go on to become one of the biggest pop-rock bands in the world, still rooted in the progressive genre, but with shorter, MTV-friendly songs leading their repertoire. Steve Hackett, who until 1977 had been the band’s highly innovative lead guitarist (he invented the ‘tapping’ technique later made famous by Eddie van Halen and numerous other long-haired headbanging axemen), had left to pursue a solo career, just before this transition in the band’s fortunes. And, yet, for those still attached to the band’s arguably most novel era - with Peter Gabriel as its frontman, replete with his costumes, characters and penchant for lyrical theatricality - Hackett continues to keep the flame alive.

© Simon Poulter 2022

Which is why the crowd queuing outside the Eventim Apollo (the venue better known to old heads like me as Hammersmith Odeon), appeared to be 50 year-aged versions of those earnest young men in their army greatcoats. Paunches were in evidence, while some of those who still had hair had it tied in ponytails, despite expanding bald patches. This meant invariably finding yourself standing next to someone looking exactly like The Simpsons’ Comic Book Man. I do say this from a point of smugness at having a full head of hair.

Once inside, however, with the lights down, such cosmetics count for nothing. Hackett and his band - which includes longstanding keyboard stalwart Roger King, second guitarist Amanda Lehmann, bassist Jonas Reingold, flautist/saxophonist Rob Townsend and drummer Craig Blundell - launched into a first half of songs from Hackett’s early solo ventures, such as Ace Of Wands, The Devil’s Cathedral, Spectral Mornings and Every Day. All very good, but it was, I suspect, the second act of the evening that most punters had come to hear - the 1972 Genesis album Foxtrot performed in its entirety.

Being only 5 at the time it came out, I would have missed the original tour for this album, which included Gabriel’s notorious (and, to his bandmates’ surprise) appearance in Dublin wearing a scarlet dress and a fox’s head (a literal representation of the Foxtrot album cover), commencing the costuming that would become the hallmark of his time as Genesis frontman until his departure in 1975. So it would be fair to say that my interest last night at the Apollo/Odeon was to experience something of the magic of an album that, while not changing the band’s financial fortunes, is still held in the hearts of fans as being one of considerable virtuosity, with a still-young band of gifted musicians writing complex songs about complex subjects.

© Simon Poulter 2022

Opening with Watcher Of The Skies, a tribute to an Arthur C. Clarke novel with a bit of Holst’s The Planets thown in, Hackett introduces his vocalist Nad Sylvan, the gloriously eccentric Swedish singer who, vocally sits between Gabriel and his successor, Phil Collins, but despite his long blond Scandi hair and somewhat theatrical mannerisms, blends into the band canvas, rather trying to take centre stage, as Gabriel would have done in 1975. 

Foxtrot’s first side is worked through in sequence, including the prescient social commentary of Get ’Em Out By Friday (a somewhat dystopian Gabriel song about a 70s newtown in which the idea is floated to have residents genetically shortened so that they fit smaller homes in order to build more of them). There is, too, Can-Utility And The Coastliners, a rare early Hackett composition, losely based on the story of King Canute who, you might remember, ordered the sea to be turned back in response to lickspittle sycophancy, something rock bands will know a thing about. 

To replicate the flip from Side 1 to Side 2 of Foxtrot, there is a mini interval, after which Hackett is provided with a classical guitar and a stool. Performing alone, Hackett plays Horizons, a beautiful, baroque instrumental which, in Hammersmith, underlines Hackett’s status as an under-appreciated classical guitarist (he has produced several albums of classical playing, alongside his rock releases). Faithfully following the album’s track listing, it’s a precursor to one of the most adventurous pieces of music any band has ever pulled off: Supper’s Ready. 

No doubt part-inspired - or at least encouraged - by the 16-minute, eight-song closing medley on The Beatles’ Abbey Road, over the course of seven parts Supper’s Ready romps through a variety of time signatures and themes, starting with the ghostly apparition Gabriel claimed to have seen, through the Lewis Carrroll-esque whimsy of Willow Farm, to the epic conclusion of  As Sure As Eggs Is Eggs (Aching Men's Feet), with its biblical reference to “a new Jerusalem”. Perhaps, on the original record, it appeared more as a collection of songs, but hearing the enture 23-minute suite performed live for the first time in my lifetime, there is an added power to the song that not even the rendition on the imperious live album Seconds Out (during the mixing of which Hackett quit the band) captured.

Many, many years ago, for only my second live review for the NME I saw Sade at the Royal Albert Hall, and was struck by the somewhat clinical, sterile recreation of the Diamond Life album that had propelled her to stardum. Live performances work best when there is some reinvention, either to mitigate the inability to recreate complex arrangements created in the studio, or simply to indulge the artist’s whimsy, and introduce some riffing. Hackett has no need for either. With a piece as intricate as Supper’s Ready - and indeed the entire Foxtrot album - there was no need for embelishment.

© Simon Poulter 2022

This applied, too, to Firth Of Fifth, the grandiose epic on Selling England By The Pound that opens with an extended piano solo - played by Tony Banks on the original, and here faithfully and expertly recreated by King - before the song opens out, heading towards its somewhat legendary guitar solo. I once made a tit of myself when interviewing Hackett, in which I told him that, as a 13-year-old, I’d learned to play the solo, note-for-note, on my Spanish guitar. He was suitably unimpressed. It is still one of the greatest rock guitar solos of all time, though usually criminally overlooked by Jimmy Page’s on Stairway To Heaven, or David Gilmour’s on Comfortably Numb.

Solos are, of course, one of the nadirs of rock concerts. This Is Spinal Tap captured the indulgent absurdity of it, and there is a taste of this with an extended bass solo by Reingold earlier in the show. Blundell introduces the final song of the night with an elongated workout on the drums, but I’ll give him that for two reasons: 1) Craig is a thoroughly decent bloke who recorded a video of encouragement for a friend of mine after she was caught up in the 2015 Bataclan attack and took up drumming as a coping mechanism; and 2) Collins and his co-drummers (Chester Thompson and, briefly, Bill Bruford) would perform a drum duet as a prelude to Los Endos, the closing song of the Trick Of The Tail album whenever it was played live. And thus, Los Endos closes the evening with Hackett and Co in all its grandeur.

I’ve often maintained Trick Of The Tail and Wind & Wuthering, the albums that bore Hackett’s final studio contributions to Genesis, are two of the band’s best, bridging the lyrical and musical flights of fancy of the Gabriel era, and predating the pop orientation that Collins, Banks and Mike Rutherford as a trio went for in the 80s. There have been claims that Hackett’s contribution to the band, over the six albums in as many years, has been diminished. Part of this maybe due to the dominance of writing by Gabriel, Banks and Rutherford, and then the perceived commercial success that Collins’ higher profile led to, long after Hackett had left. But listening back to the albums he played on, his guitar work plays a much bigger role in the soundstage than is ever given credit for. 

In Hammersmith last night, we were given a highly enjoyable reminder. His solo material notwithstanding, I suspect the majority of last night’s punters were there for a trip down Memory Lane. And they would have been richly rewarded. Compared to the disappointing final experience of Genesis, earlier this year at London’s O2 Arena, this felt like the real deal. A wallow, yes, but a thoroughly enjoyable, comfort food-for-the-ears indulgence, provided authentically by the original purveyor. 

Fading lights - Genesis at the O2 Arena

Picture: Instagram/Genesis-band

Clearly, I’m a devotee of unfashionable causes. When news broke that my football club’s owner was being sanctioned for his association with Vladimir Putin, and the club itself was to be put through the ringer as a consequence, there was little sympathy from across football’s tribal communities. Likewise, I knew that I wouldn’t enjoy all that much admiration (or is it empathy?) for going to see Genesis on Friday night, on what would turn out to be their penultimate live performance, 54 years after forming.

I’ve long accepted that Genesis are a Marmite band. A guilty pleasure, even. Amid the devotees from their origins as one of ’70s progressive rock’s pre-eminent acts, and those drawn to their catchy, mid-’80s MTV dominance, are those who just never got them (or saw them as just another outlet for Phil Collins’ ubiquity). Then there’s another group - those, like me, who’ve seen good in all their guises. Over the course of three nights at London’s O2 Arena, 60,000 fans of, mostly, a similar venerability, were of the same view. 

These were the final performances of a tour that had been truncated by the coronavirus (the first scheduled dates were delayed by lockdowns and then the London shows got postponed again by a band member testing positive for Covid), which started to feel like a stay of execution. The tour itself had been named ‘The Last Domino?’ - an intentionally ambiguous in-joke but not without its inevitability, given that an increasingly immobile Collins, robbed of his truly unique ability to drum by a congenital back problem and other health issues, had indicated that this would have to be it. Compared with other still-touring bands of a certain vintage (the Rolling Stones come immediately to mind, and Paul McCartney), the core surviving members of Genesis - Collins, keyboardist Tony Banks and guitarist/bassist Mike Rutherford  - were all 71 as they took to the stage on Friday (the still youthful-looking Banks turned 72 yesterday), so there’s nothing materially requiring them to bring the band to a halt. But from the moment Collins walked on stage, slowly and assisted by a stick, to take the seat he would occupy for the next two hours, it was clear that this Genesis would be different. 

Picture: Instagram/Genesis-band

With his stage school training, Collins was always an impishly lively frontman, ever since he came forward from the drum stool in 1976 to replace the outgoing Peter Gabriel. Live reviews frequently referred to his end-of-pier schtick, a change of tone from Gabriel’s eccentric but hesitantly-delivered fantastical stories which he used to tell between songs as the band retuned their notoriously fussy 12-string guitars. For the live version of their minor 1973 hit I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe), Collins developed a remarkable tambourine tarantella, colourfully extending the percussive agility that easily made him a peer of other thunderous drummers of his time, like Bonham, Moon and Rush’s Neil Peart. But no more. Knowing this, some expectation management would be required. 

This was to be a farewell performance, not just a wallow in nostalgia. Not that there was an obvious air of mourning in the air. Opening with Behind The Lines, the song I first saw them open with 41 years ago at Wembley Arena, the hair on the back of my neck raised a little. From that first moment of hearing and ‘seeing’ that song performed live, it has always struck me as the way to open any gig. “Brrrrang!” chimes the opening chord, followed by a fanfare-like keyboard riff. If I ever formed a band myself, I’d want to kick-off a gig like that. 

Long before the video hits, and throughout the years when they weren’t seen as ‘commercial’, Genesis were always a live band. Despite Gabriel, Banks and Rutherford (along with original guitarist Anthony Phillips) regarding themselves more as songwriters than rock stars when they started out, their shows never lacked impact, visually or musically. That has largely been down to the material, songs which - even in the band’s more pop-orientated era - have lent themselves to entertaining engagement live. I may not be a huge fan of the hits that came out of the ’80s, but the albums they were written for didn’t lack the more epic grandeur Genesis established as their stock in trade in the ’70s. 1986’s Invisible Touch album netted five hit singles, more from one album than the band had enjoyed in, then, 20 years of existance. It’s title track is still one of my least favourites, but others - performed on Friday like Throwing It All Away, Tonight, Tonight, Tonight and Land Of Confusion (whose Spitting Image-based video was tweaked to reflect the chaos of Covid), still stand up strongly live.

Picture: Instagram/Genesis-band

In 1977 Genesis released the live album Seconds Out, recorded on the tour for only Collins’ second album as lead singer. As a result, the double release comprised songs from the Gabriel era as well as the new stuff with Collins as singer. Tellingly, it contained only one song that had been released as a single - I Know What I Like, and yet it represents my favourite era of Genesis, with even complex, meandering, multi-part songs like Supper’s Ready found new life by Collins’ stagecraft. Their next release, ...And Then There Were Three, which followed guitarist Steve Hackett’s departure, included the single Follow You, Follow Me, which was the first Genesis track I ever heard on the radio. It’s a simple love song, set to a slowed down samba-like rhythm, and it reached No.4 in the charts. It’s popularity, especially in America, changed the band’s fortunes. The concert demographic started to change: whereas ’70s gigs were mostly attended by earnest young men with long hair, beards and army-surplus greatcoats, making notes on the songs they heard for discussion later over a half of mild, all of sudden there were women at Genesis concerts. 

The Duke album followed, and two more radio hits - Turn It On Again and Misunderstanding, competing with contemporary rock acts like Rainbow or Toto for FM radio airplay in the US. It marked a deliberate shift away from the fantasy stories to more immediacy in their songwriting. Collins inevitably took the blame, but Rutherford and Banks were still the main songwriters. Collins had always been the class clown to puncture the band’s public school loftiness, but he was gradually able to bring more of his own personality into the music. Good Lord, they even recorded a track featuring the Earth Wind & Fire horn section!

Which brings me back to the O2. Sadly, Collins has lost some of his vocal spectrum. It happens with age, but here, there were notable moments where his range was kept low, while - for the first time in Genesis history - two dedicated backing singers filled in some of the gaps in which Collins was struggling. But rather than feeling in any way let down, the band collectively played on. Collins himself, in the concert programme, admitted to his deficiencies. It wasn’t anything the crowd was going to complain about, either. This was an audience who had come to pay their respects to a band that had been a part of their lives for a very long time. They were rapturous when Genesis dipped into their deepest history, with the aforementioned I Know What I Like and the epic instrumental part of Firth Of Fifth from 1973 and even an excerpt from a 1970 track, Stagnation. 

Picture: Instagram/Genesis-band

Midway through the set, Rutherford, Banks, long-standing touring guitarist Daryl Stuermer and Collins’ uncannily talented 20-year-old son Nic on drums, repositioned around the seated singer to perform somewhat ‘unplugged’ versions of Follow You, Follow Me, That’s All and - to my delight - The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. This was the title track of an album that, bizarrely, pre-dated punk, being a concept work built around the fantasy disappearance of a Puerto Rican street tough, Rael, into an imagined New York underworld (lyrically, it was Gabriel’s swansong). Here, though, stripped-down, it worked incredibly, suiting Collins Snr’s vocal limitations but sounding like it was always meant to be stripped back.

There were further treats from the past to close the show: after the almost obligatory performance of I Can’t Dance (which epitomised the band’s MTV dominance with its ZZ Top-aping video) - representing the band’s late-stage pre-eminence, there was an excerpt of Dancing With The Moonlit Knight, the opening track of 1973’s satirical Selling England By The Pound album, with its pastorality and references to “Green Shield Stamps”. In 41 years of seeing Genesis live, I’d never heard this track - an obscure entry in their canon at best - performed live. It was delightful. After the stomping pop, an example of the lyrical and musical individuality that, arguably, only this band could have ever produced, steeped in English tradition. 

For those who shunned the knowing commerciality that became Genesis’s hallmark, Moonlit Knight provided a reminder of how this band came into the world, around the time that The Beatles were inventing prog with the narrative concept of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, onto which David Bowie combined pop, rock and other artistic styles. Those early albums, Trespass, Nursery Cryme and Foxtrot may only have scratched the surface in places like Belgium and Italy, where the Gabriel-led Genesis enjoyed fanatical following, and now are politely “of their time”, but they contain many gems (even an early taste of Collins’ vocal beauty, the love song More Fool Me, along with Hackett’s truly innovative guitar virtuosity). There was, then, one more jewel from that first phase on Friday night: The Carpet Crawlers, one of the few real highlights from the sprawling Lamb Lies Down On Broadway record, its low-key vocal recreated perfectly by Collins, its musical subtleties providing a tender moment to end on.

With that, it was over. Literally (save for one final show the following night). As the full stage band dwindled to just Banks, Collins and Rutherford, who took a poignant final bow, it was time to reflect. All good things come to an end, and with rock bands you tend to want them to stop when they can and while they can. Banks and Rutherford could, probably continue (as they did in 1996 when Collins first decided to put his solo career first, and they brought in Stiltskin’s Ray Wilson in for one album and an ill-advised tour). But it seems unlikely. I would, sadly, even say it was unwise. Collins’ original departure was meant to give the other two an opportunity to prove that they are more than the sum of parts, but that denies the point that much of Genesis’s appeal for the greater part of their existence has been the knowledge that, since 1978, these three men were the band’s beating heart. Gabriel’s six albums defined the band in one way, while the eight with Collins brought with them hit singles. But it would be wrong to divide the band solely by their lead singers. The thread running through all 15 studio records is a style of songwriting that can be compared to no one else, not even the other stalwarts of the prog era, like King Crimson, Supertramp, 10cc, Yes or Pink Floyd. 

Of course, Genesis have never been to everyone’s taste, but for anyone prone to dismissing them for whatever prejudice or perceived prejudice they hold, they have always maintained a tradition of songwriting and song delivery established by A Day In The Life, Is There Life On Mars? or even Good Vibrations. Drama, narrative and, if you can excuse the record label pun, a unique charisma.If you had gone to see them on Friday night having never heard of The Return Of The Giant Hogweed, Squonk or Cinema Show, you would have heard a band of consummate musicians and songwriters, who for the better part of 54 years have made every note, every drumbeat, every chord, every riff and every vocal line count. 

At the start of this post I wrote about Genesis being a guilty pleasure. The trouble with that statement is that it places them in a similar category to, say, a Jason Donovan or a Rick Astley. But, then, to partition based on personal taste is to commit a facet of musical partition that I get very weary of. Taste might divide people, but talent shouldn’t. Genesis may have never been the most fashionable band, but the notion that fashion alone is the only diktat of popularity cuts no ice with me. Guilty pleasure, they may be, Marmite, even, but this band has been an unashamed part of my soundtrack since I was 11 or 12. My first forays with a guitar were to learn the solos and arpeggios of the early work, the infectious riffs of their later efforts. And in unsettling, troubling times like these, comfort is most welcome. On Friday night, in an O2 Arena still missing vast panels from its storm-wrecked roof, I found comfort, for the last time from a band that has been a part of my life for four-fifths of it. 

Marmite, they may be, but you know, I’m quite partial to it.

Picture: Instagram/Genesis-band