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