I hear that voice again

There was hubbub recently, mostly amongst those who care about such things, when a 38-minute film of Genesis playing Le Bataclan in Paris in 1973 surfaced online. Now, it should be stated for the defence that this clip wasn’t of any great cultural significance: this wasn’t a ten-year-old Hendrix writing All Along The Watchtower on a toy guitar (Dylan wrote it, in any case), or hitherto unseen footage of The Beatles in some Hamburg bierkeller. No, this was Genesis, long before their MTV tenure, with then-lead singer Peter Gabriel giving it the full Brian Pern. For those less familiar with this era of the band, and indeed Gabriel (before he left in 1975, promising to “Do a Ferry, or a Bowie, or a Furry Boa and hang myself with it”) the restored, 4K-quality footage featured the band in proto-prog mode, performing grandiose stage epics such as The Musical Box,​ Supper's Ready and pre-punk stomper The Knife, with Gabriel dressed in a variety of outfits (such as a fox’s head and his wife’s red dress) to act out the songs, as was his want in those days, while Messrs. Banks, Collins, Hackett and Rutherford earnestly played around him. 

It’s easy to see, now, how lampoonable it all was (kudos to Simon Day for Pern, and to Gabriel himself for accepting the pisstake in very good humour), but like most of these time capsules that get unearthed from time to time, it served as a reminder of how, in the early 70s, rock music was still relatively new, and anything went. Gabriel’s final turn with Genesis was to take the concept album The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway out on tour in 1975, with the singer’s costumes and stage presence taking even more prominence, often to the mild resentment of the other band members. Two years later (and after the near tragedy of his first wife, Jill, almost dying in childbirth), Gabriel launched a solo career with the first of four albums, simply titled Peter Gabriel (a typically obtuse Gabrielism, which frustrated his American record company, Geffen). With the fantasy stories and extended keyboard noodling of the Genesis albums now behind him, Peter Gabriel (rebranded ‘Car’ by his US peeps) was a melange of themes and styles, from the Springsteen-esque rocker Modern Love to the cod-barbershop plaintive Excuse Me, the now perennial favourite Solsbury Hill (an autobiographic reflection on his ‘release’ from the rock band hamster wheel) and the melodramatic Here Comes The Flood, a song Gabriel also recorded as a haunting, stripped down affair, along with a version in German.

With each successive solo album - 1978’s Peter Gabriel (‘Scratch’), 1980’s Peter Gabriel (‘Melt’) and 1982’s Peter Gabriel (‘Security’) - the somewhat dilettante Gabriel took notable twists and turns of artistic style, delivering a more conventional rock album with his second release, experimenting with cymbal-free drums on the third (in the process “inventing” Phil Collins, who played on the album, with producers Steve Lillywhite and Hugh Padgham developing that famous ‘gated reverb’ drum sound), as well as collaborated with Kate Bush and Paul Weller, before throwing away the rock rule book with his fourth, with its extensive use of the Fairlight sampling keyboard, obscure rhythms and a decidedly un-Western musical fabric.

By the time So, Gabriel’s fifth solo album appeared, he’d established a reputation for artistically interesting, if not particularly commercially impactful, records. Between ‘PG4’ and So he’d also recorded the soundtrack to Alan Parker’s Birdy, which effectively and hauntingly remade existing songs to considerable effect (the jungle drums of Rhythm Of The Heat was a common presence underneath early-80s documentaries). While collaborating on Birdy with producer Daniel Lanois, he commenced work on his next solo album-proper. The final track recorded become the first song to be heard from the album, and it blew everyone away, in every dimension. Sledgehammer was an unashamed tribute to the soul music that Gabriel was obsessed with as a 60s schoolboy (he still considers Otis Redding at Brixton’s RamJam club the best gig he’s ever seen), and with its Stax-style brass, ever-so slightly saucy lyrics, and Nick Park’s pre-Wallace & Gromit plasticine video, it turned Gabriel into a bona fide pop star. Ironically, his former band’s Invisible Touch was released at the same time, with Gabriel and Genesis vying for chart positions throughout the world.

Released on 19 May, 1986, So was, still, quintessential Gabriel. Sledgehammer plus the gospel-inspired Don’t Give Up duet with Kate Bush, the US hit In Your Eyes and the satirical Big Time, all may have introduced Gabriel to singles buyers too young to have remembered Solsbury Hill, let alone The Return Of The Giant Hogweed, but the album was no sell-out. The brooding opener Red Rain launched the audience into Gabriel’s environmental concerns, while Don’t Give Up - for all of its goo-goo romanticism (especially that swoonsome video featuring Gabriel and Bush) and its 1930s dustbowl symbolism - was actually a direct swipe at Thatcherism. We Do What We’re Told (Milgrim’s 37) was a dark essay on the obedience experiments carried out by psychologist Stanley Milgram; the offbeat Mercy Street was inspired by the poetry of Anne Sexton; while the hypnotic This Is The Picture matched Gabriel in another duet, this time with avant-garde multimediaist Laurie Anderson. 

Picture: 20th Century Fox

Fuelled by the success of its singles, especially Sledgehammer and, in the US, In Your Eyes (used brilliantly in Cameron Crowe’s directorial debut, Say Anything…, in a scene in which John Cusack appears, Romeo-like, before his love interest, blasting out the song from his boombox), So went to No.1 in a number of countries and remained on the US chart for almost two years solidly. Sledgehammer itself became a No.1 single on the Billboard Hot 100, ironically, knocking Genesis and Invisible Touch off the top. “There is always wisdom from hindsight,” Gabriel recently reflected. “And because So was my most successful record, I think that a lot of people, particularly in America, think that it was designed to be that. From the other end of it, you never really know which records are going to do well. You know that some things are going to be so obscure and difficult for a mainstream audience that they’re no-hopers but generally, with what I do, it’s hard to predict which albums are going to do well.”

Gabriel says that, while he sort of knew instinctively which of So’s tracks might do well on radio, he was more excited by how the musicians produced what remains, 35 years later, a truly unique-sounding hit record, for that time or any other. Much of that credit goes to Lanois, then one of the hottest producers on the block, having worked with Brian Eno and on U2’s The Unforgettable Fire. “One of the things I learned with [Lanois] is a total respect for the magic of the moment. When you have some spine-tingling event musically, you’ve got to capture it,” says Gabriel, recalling his musical soulmate, Eno’s work with Talking Heads in which raw energy took effort to extract. “I wanted his emotions to come to the forefront [with So],” Lanois himself has said. “To wear no mask and no veil. To have no mirrored contact lenses, no trickery. Just take everything off and let the songs be heard. A nice sequel into the next chapter for Peter Gabriel. I think these songs are more revealing, they are more naked, they are taking risks, and listeners feel that when a man takes a risk.”

It has become something of a cliche to pick up on Gabriel’s long-standing embrace of world music, even the fact that he somewhat invented the term. His Real World label continues to be one of the strongest outlets for the form, and - after a near-bankrupting experience that required a Genesis reunion to bail it out - Gabriel’s WOMAD festival has become an annual fixture for promoting musical diversity. With a roster of musicians from every continent and ethnicity, Gabriel’s Real World label continues to be a positive outlet for music that challenges the notion that it should be both Western and sung in English, a concept Gabriel has championed since Biko on his third album and, more significantly, In Your Eyes, which features Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour. 

“In Your Eyes was the first thing that I’d recorded, I think, with Youssou and it was very important for that reason,” says Gabriel. “It was around the time I was going to Africa and really getting inspired by a lot of the music I was hearing there, particularly rhythmically and vocally. I’ve described Youssou’s voice as ‘liquid gold’ and I think when he comes in singing on that track it’s just a fantastic moment. We’ve since gone on to do a lot of other things, but that was one of the most exciting.” As an aside, In Your Eyes played a tiny part in music technology’s evolution: on So’s original vinyl release, the sonic limitations of the format meant that, due to Tony Levin’s bass, the track had to be listed earlier on the album (something to do with the width of grooves, so I’m told). For So’s CD release, the uplifting song closes it out.

35 years on, So retains a freshness that most of its mid-80s contemporaries would struggle to provide. Many compilations from that time and re-runs of Top Of The Pops expose how production techniques were still transitioning from analogue to digital, with associated aural limitations. With So, Gabriel produced something that spanned so many influences while still sounding unlike anything else. It’s worth mentioning here the record Gabriel released ‘immediately’ afterwards (in 1989, which is quite “immediate” for Gabriel): Passion, his stunning soundtrack for Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, was another career high point, but for very different reasons, drawing inspirations, musicians and instrumentation from a multitude of cultures, including the Middle East. On balance it remains, perhaps, my favourite Gabriel album - not for its hit songs (there aren’t any) but for the incredible landscapes it paints, inspired by the Holy Land. I played it endlessly a few years ago while driving in that very part of the world, and it was incredibly evocative, even in the very place it was inspired by. 

Steven Wilson

No surprise, then, that Steven Wilson - a musician very much in the Gabriel tradition of never standing still, musically or thematically - is a committed fan of So, comparing it to Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love, which had come out the previous September: “With this album Gabriel managed to make his sound more accessible, giving him a much broader mainstream appeal.” That is normally quite a tricky feat, especially for an artist hitherto known for his broad experimentation with conventional rock as well as non-Western traditions. But, says Steven, it was without compromise. “This was achieved without sacrificing any of his personality and ambition, or his will to experiment and push the envelope. So has pop immediacy but also artistic depth that bears repeated listening. It’s an extremely difficult trick to pull off.”

So's shift in form for Gabriel was even captured in the record’s graphic design, overseen by Peter Saville, who’d been responsible for artwork at Factory Records, New Order and Joy Division to his credits. To begin with, he wasn’t a fan: “I didn’t actively dislike him,” Saville revealed to the Real World Notes blog of Gabriel’s record label. “He was just not somebody I knew that much about.” Saville, who was brought on board when the album had the working title ‘Good’, was won over to working with the singer after a first meeting at his house near Bath. As Saville and his creative partner Brett Wickens drove back up to London, they listened to a cassette copy of the album for the first time. 

“The first track was Red Rain,” reveals Saville. “If you’re in a sensitive mood and you’ve just seen a car crash [as they had witnessed while approaching the M4] and you hear Red Rain for the first time… it’s quite like, ‘Woooaaah!’. There was a real passion in Peter’s voice and it was very listenable. I didn’t mind it. As we approached the motorway Sledgehammer came on. We stopped the fucking car on the slip road! You know when you’re hearing something important. It was like hearing Blue Monday for the first time. Brett and I just looked at each other and then looked at the cassette player and almost simultaneously we said, ‘That’s a number one single!’ It was fucking brilliant. By the time Don’t Give Up came on I cried a little bit. I hadn’t got far away enough from Bath and that just completely did me in, actually.”

Gabriel’s first four solo albums had all featured covers that had partly obscured his face, rendering the singer somewhat oblique. Even having released singles like Shock The Monkey and Games Without Frontiers in the video age, it would have been hard, in 1986, for mainstream pop fans to identify him. So changed all that, and its black and white cover image played a massive role in that. “Gail Coulson [Gabriel’s manager] had briefed me privately that Peter had to come out of himself for this record,” Saville recalled. “She knew that he had made an emotional album and that he’d written songs and made music which crossed over to other people who were not Peter Gabriel fans. We had to give a face to that. Of course Peter’s natural inclination was towards shyness and not showing himself. But that wasn’t going to do the job because this was 1986, you know.” With two weeks to deliver So’s cover, Saville brought in photographer Trevor Key, who’d produced the art for New Order’s Low Life, another band “disinterested in presenting their own identity” he says. The other graphic standout was the album’s name, presented simply over the singer’s name. It remains to this day one of the most basic but impactful album covers of all time. More importantly, it propelled Gabriel into another strata of fame.

A question remains, however, as to So’s place in the Gabriel canon: without doubt, it transformed him from legacy prog rock star into a genuine pop act, perhaps in a more artistically acceptable manner than his former bandmates in Genesis had done as they consciously moved into the pop-rock realm as a three-piece. But, the original albums that followed So took their time: Us came out in 1992, Up a full ten years after that. The former leant heavily on the break-up of Gabriel’s first marriage, and while it didn’t take the heart-on-sleeve approach his mucker Phil Collins had famously taken with his ‘divorce album’, Face Value, beneath the deep and introspective lines of Digging In The Dirt lay an album forced into the open through the cauterising of emotional wounds rather than So’s at times carefree approach. Up, Gabriel’s last album of original songs, had an even longer gestation, having been conceived originally in 1985. It remains a good addition to the library, with all the sonic layers and ambitious conceptual excursions Gabriel has always been known for, but it, and its predecessor, lacked the immediacy that So had through its hit singles.

It’s been a long time, then, since we heard anything really new from Peter Gabriel. His last new album-proper was ten years ago - the orchestral retreads of New Blood in 2011, preceded by the covers album Scratch My Back in 2010. There has long been talk of an album in the works, but as with everything Gabriel does, he picks and chooses what he devotes his energies to, with music taking a back seat (he owns the record company, so no pressure there). He’s not invisible, he’s not a recluse, and he’s certainly not a one-hit wonder. But with 35 years separating today’s anniversary and So first being released, it’s tempting to look at it through the prism of pop stardom. 

Gabriel has never sat easily with fame. His somewhat diffident personality fits well with his status as an arch auteur, owning a fine body of work but happy to tinker at the edges while being distracted by his myriad worthy causes, such as his long-standing commitment to human rights and The Elders group he co-founded with Nelson Mandela and Richard Branson. At 71, it’s unlikely that Gabriel will grace the charts with another Sledgehammer, but it would be nice if he produced another album with the accessibility of So that Steven Wilson talks of - but without selling out on the musical principles he’s held dear since those very early days with Genesis. 

Desert songs - The Joshua Tree turns 30

30 years ago I'd not yet set foot in America, let alone visited California or the Mojave Desert where a certain type of tree grows in the apparently waterless terrain. But even though it would be another five years before I would feel Western sunshine on my face for the first time, one album had already put me there: U2's The Joshua Tree.

Released 30 years ago today it took the Dublin band over the threshold of superstardom. Hit singles like Pride (In The Name Of Love), Sunday Bloody Sunday and New Year's Day, plus the critically acclaimed albums Boy, October and War, had already established their credibility, placing them on the fringes of daytime mainstream without brushing them out of the evening radio shows where the not-yet-huge could consider themselves cool.

Two things happened before The Joshua Tree became U2's turning point: firstly it's predecessor, the Brian Eno/Daniel Lanois-produced Under A Blood Red Sky, had netted them hits in Pride and the melancholy The Unforgettable Fire. And then the following year, on 13 July, 1985, the-then still-young band became one of the standout turns at Live Aid. This was due in part to U2 challenging Queen for the liveliest set of all the acts at either Wembley or in Philadelphia. Having torn through Sunday Bloody Sunday and then an extended version of Bad, Bono hammed things up by beckoning British teenager Melanie Hills to join him on stage (a Springsteen-esque gag he'd pulled before), shortly followed by her sister Elaine. At the singer's behest, bouncers attempt to pluck the girls from the crowd, but with Harvey Goldsmith's strict 20-minute limit on each bands' sets ticking away, Bono himself dived into the crowd to assist. A third girl, the 15-year-old Kal Khalique - there principally to see Wham - was also pulled from the throng. She's the one Bono ended up slow-dancing with. It was all gloriously hammy, and not entirely spontaneous ("I don't like the distance between performer and audience. So I'm looking for a symbol of the day, something I can hold onto", Bono would later say) but it carved an eternal mark in the collective memory of Live Aid, not least of which, because it occurred during a set that U2 had scheduled (via clever negotiation) just as the vast US audience was joining Bob Geldof's "global jukebox". It was a masterstroke.

Fast forward, then, to 6 March, 1987. I was in the control room of Studio 5 at Tyne-Tees Television in Newcastle, invited there by the show's producers on the day Jools Holland returned from suspension for saying a naughty word during a live teatime promo. Paula Yates (I think it was) spoke to camera to introduce a world exclusive - the first ever playout of the first single from a new U2 album. The screen faded to black and a quiet but distinct Adam Clayton bassline started to pulse. From the darkened screens in an utterly hushed, pindrop-silent room, Bono emerged, his hair slicked back into a pony tail, wearing a leather waistcoat with a guitar strung across his back. "See the stone set in your eyes," he semi-breathed, "See the thorn twist in your side. I wait...for you.".

We were hearing With Or Without You for the first time. It's a moment I clearly won't ever forget. Like so many bands, I'd not disliked U2 previously but I'd never been all that fervent about them, either. Tonally, too, With Or Without You didn't sound all that different from The Unforgettable Fire, their last single, but there was a notable flavour of Americana (then not really a term) about it. The following Monday The Joshua Tree was released, and it all started to come together.

They say you should never judge a book by its cover, but Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn's cover photography for U2's fifth studio album set the tone. There, in a black and white strip taking up a third of the cover space were Larry Mullen Jr, Clayton, The Edge and Bono, squeezed into the left-hand half of a frame, with grey desert occupying the other half. There was more of this sparse, monochrome photography on the inner sleeve and back cover, all shot in the vast Joshua Tree National Park near Palm Springs in California, and all with the band looking less like the punk-inspired New Wave rockers from Dublin that they once were, and more like members of a native American nation. "When I see the people we were back then," The Edge has written in a forthcoming personal photo diary of the Corbijn shoot, "I see a bunch of pilgrims on a journey towards some kind of creative home. I think that really does capture the spirit of the band at that time."

Corbijn's cover art was perfectly in keeping with the music within. Produced by Eno and Lanois (who'd most recently been responsible for Peter Gabriel's breakthrough So), it managed to encompass the signature U2 sound - Edge's instantly recognisable delayed guitar, Clayton's thudding bass, Mullen's crisp drums, and Bono's breathy vocal style - in a simpler, more stripped down sound, one which somehow evoked the desert landscape on the album sleeve. The desert theme became instantly obvious with the opening track, Where The Streets Have No Name, a compelling, scaling song that, according to Eno, had been tortuous to record ("...a ridiculous saga" he tells the latest edition of Mojo, "I estimate that 40 per cent of the time was spent on that one song. It became a kind of weird obsession."

As the album opened up further, it was clear that the Irish quartet were deliberately exploring the badlands of the Americas. Just as Bruce Springsteen had successfully evoked New Jersey and the industrial north-east, The Joshua Tree was doing the same for the barren south-west, with Red Hill Mining Town and even One Tree Hill (a tribute to a U2 roadie who'd died in a motorbike accident the previous year), drawing on the searing heat and dust of the West. Bullet The Blue Sky, while set in South America, sort of followed the album's unspoken theme of America's influence (it had been inspired during U2's involvement in the Amnesty International 'Conspiracy Of Hope' tour of Central and South America).

30 years on, The Joshua Tree is, perhaps, more legend than milestone. But for the 19-year-old me, it opened up a fascination with American music that I hadn't yet fully appreciated. I could recognise references to the blues (later to flourish on The Joshua Tree tour, with their BB King collaboration, When Love Comes To Town) and the various Lanois-influenced clips of Americana that dot the album. What is certain is that it launched U2 into the upper echelons of global achievement, with Time magazine featuring them on a cover with the splash "Rock's Hottest Ticket". Crucially, The Joshua Tree - with its American themes - established them in the country of its inspiration, becoming their first ever No.1 album in the US just three weeks after its release.

Some will argue that Achtung Baby, the Berlin-recorded studio follow-up, was a better album, written deliberately to confound the belief that U2 had, via The Joshua Tree and it's live release Rattle And Hum, become an Irish version of The Eagles. But, perhaps, with Americana as a genre taking more subtle strides to appropriate the American heartland, U2's first commercial colossus can be appraised afresh. A piece by Tim Sommer in The Observer last Sunday made a somewhat valid point that U2's unashamed appropriation of a blend of authentic genres was "the most basic thievery", but no more than a Led Zeppelin had done beforehand. However, Sommer wrote, "the sheer weight of U2’s personality and charismatic energy" allowed them to get away with it. "In their hands, it doesn’t feel like plagiarism, but like a redistribution of deserving and lesser-known art to the masses." Surely, though, isn't this what everyone has always done? From rock and roll to Chicago house music, someone's always taken from someone else and turned it into something different.

This spring and summer we'll get a chance to make our own minds up with U2 retreading The Joshua Tree in a 30th anniversary tour of, first, the US and then Europe, playing the album - as is the vogue - in its entirety. On 2 June the band will issue an anniversary edition of the record itself, including in the obligatory super deluxe package a live recording from the 1987 tour's Madison Square Gardens show, B-sides from the album's singles and new remixes from Daniel Lanois, Steve Lillywhite and others, along with an 84-page hardback book of unseen personal photography shot by The Edge during the Corbijn cover art photo sessions out in the desert.

Obviously it's a package aimed squarely at people like me and my vintage, but as someone who believes that U2 peaked in the contrasting period of The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, and began to lose their appeal with the bombast, gimmicks and pontification that followed (not to mention the violation of that free iTunes album...) I will happily take the journey back three decades, get some desert sand on my feet again, and remind myself of what it was like to dream about America long before I got the chance to experience it for real.