ALBUMS: Peter Gabriel (1977); Peter Gabriel (1980).
MVC Rating: 1st self-titled: 4.5/$$$
2nd self-titled: 4.0/$$$
Hope everybody has had enough time with ‘The Gaugin Years’ The History of Music and Dance in Tahiti. (Scroll down if you haven’t). That was the start of my G-music section and up now is Peter Gabriel, a political, intelligent, supporter of world music. We’ll see more of him in this blog soon as his longtime band, Genesis, comes up on my alphabetical course.
I have the first and third Gabriel albums. Oddly, he didn’t name his first four albums. They are called Peter Gabriel. To ID them people add a descriptor like ‘melt’ for the third one because it has a face appearing to melt on the cover.
I fell out of Gabriel’s thing about when “Shock the Monkey’ and then ‘Sledgehammer’ — MTV’s all time favorite video – propelled Gabriel from cult status to star. One thing I didn’t like, and others feel free to chime in, is that he seemed to employ an echo effect on his voice, especially in the “So’ era. Am I correctly hearing that? It is almost as if he didn’t have confidence in his natural sound. But the songwriting on Solsbury Hill, about a spiritual experience the Gabriel had, is about as good as it gets.
Climbing up on Solsbury Hill
I could see the city light
Wind was blowing, time stood still
Eagle flew out of the night
He was something to observe
Came in close, I heard a voice
Standing, stretching every nerve
Had to listen, had no choice
I did not believe the information
Just had to trust imagination
My heart going boom, boom, boom
“Son”, he said, “grab your things, I’ve come to take you home”
Biko’ on the second album is also a favorite of mine. It’s a powerful song with African rhythms lamenting the death at the hands of police of Steve Biko, an anti-apartheid protester.
September ’77
Port Elizabeth weather fine
It was business as usual
In police room 619
Oh Biko, Biko, because Biko
Oh Biko, Biko, because Biko
Yihla Moja, Yihla Moja
The man is dead
The man is dead