Home > Contemporary Musicians > Gabriel, Peter

Singer, songwriter

Peter Gabriel has had a long career in music. As one of the founding members of the British band Genesis, he helped it gain a reputation for artistic rock music and performances. When he left the group in 1975, it stood on the brink of popular success—a success it would go on to fully attain. But Gabriel, too, has done well. The cult following of Genesis's early days continued to support the solo efforts of its former leader; then Gabriel broadened his appeal with hits like the haunting "Games without Frontiers" and the New Wave-flavored "Shock the Monkey." He attained huge popularity, however, and four Grammy nominations, with his 1986 album, So, and its smash chart hit, "Sledgehammer."

Gabriel, born May 13, 1950, grew up on a farm in Woking, England, and had a childhood with "piano lessons, dancing lessons, riding lessons, every sort of lesson," he told Steve Pond of Rolling Stone. He was also sent as a boy to England's Charterhouse public school—the equivalent of a very prestigious private school in the United States. There he met Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford, and Anthony Phillips, with whom he would later put together Genesis. At first, however, the four youths were merely friends who shared a love of rhythm-and-blues music, particularly the work of Otis Redding. Charterhouse was a very strict school, and both radios and record players were contraband items, so the friends had to meet secretly to indulge their musical tastes.

Yet by the time Gabriel and his companions began to compose and play their own music as Genesis, the product was quite different from the songs they once risked punishment to hear. Critics considered Genesis's early output eclectic and intellectual—progressive rock. The band used keyboards and synthesizers as prominent parts of their recordings. Under Gabriel's leadership—he wrote most of the songs and sang the lead—Genesis was perhaps too eccentric for the general pop audience and didn't have chart hits. They did, however, achieve a loyal cult following that idolized Gabriel. "I used to get quite a few letters from people I visited with my psychic body," he revealed to Pond, "or told to do all sorts of things with a song." Gabriel also helped make Genesis concerts into spectacular shows, featuring impressive lighting effects and with its lead singer in costume—occasionally wearing dresses.

Genesis began to gain an audience in America with their 1973 album, Selling England by the Pound; they followed this with the critically acclaimed The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, a double-sided concept album that chronicles the strange adventures of a man named Rael in New York City. But it was during the production of Lamb that Gabriel came into conflict with the rest of the band. He and his wife, Jill Moore, whom he had also met while a student at Charterhouse, had their first child; the birth was attended by many severe complications. The infant, Anna, had caught an infection in the womb, was born with fluid in her lungs, and was not expected to live—she came through the danger, however, with no lasting ill effects. Consequently, Gabriel spent much of his time with his wife and daughter, and the other members of Genesis resented the time not spent completing Lamb. By 1975, Gabriel had left the group. Disillusioned by the music business, he spent approximately two years "puttering in his garden," in Pond's words, until he began recording again in 1977.

Gabriel's first three solo albums were all entitled Peter Gabriel. The first two were a struggle, but the third exhibited a new interest in the rhythms of African music and the use of drum machines. Atlantic Records, which had released Gabriel's first two albums, felt that the sound of the third was too unconventional to find an audience and refused to have anything to do with it. So Gabriel went to Mercury Records, which did want the album. "Games without Frontiers," a single from the third Peter Gabriel disc, became a hit, and, as Gabriel succinctly gloated to Pond, "Atlantic's regretted it." His next album, Security, released by Geffen, was also a success.

So, Gabriel's 1986 effort, "is shot through with hurt and hope," declared Time's Jay Cocks. The singer-songwriter confided to Pond that many of the songs on the album, such as "In Your Eyes," "That Voice Again," and "Don't Give Up," were written during a period of separation from his wife; So is thus more emotionally open than his previous work. "I wanted some of this album to be more direct," he explained. "Over the past few years .. . I tended to hide from some things, both personal and in my music. And so, if you like, it was part of a coming-out process." As Pond reported, fans have responded well to this new, more intimate Gabriel, but the overwhelming success of So is perhaps more attributable to the innovative video that accompanied the hit "Sledgehammer." "It started with a video," Pond asserted. "It started with singing vegetables and dancing chickens, with model trains circling Peter Gabriel's skull as he sang about lust in a series of luridly silly metaphors."

Gabriel is also deeply committed to the political issue of human rights and has been involved in benefits for Amnesty International and anti-apartheid causes. This aspect of the musician is reflected in So by the song "Biko," a tribute to Steven Biko, a black South African activist who died under mysterious circumstances while in police custody. Cocks credited Gabriel with finding "a resonance in Biko's death that goes beyond outrage or simple protest" and added that there is "no resisting either [the song's] heat or its true moral force. Biko is .. . full of ghosts that will haunt any political present."

—Elizabeth Thomas