Peter Gabriel

On 2 October 1982, at the Milton Keynes Bowl, forty thousand people watched a coffin arrive on stage. Four men dressed as undertakers were carrying it. Inside was Peter Gabriel, who had left Genesis seven years earlier and was coming back for one night only.

His former bandmates knew nothing about the coffin. They found out right there, watching.

The concert was called Six of the Best and it was not a sentimental reunion: it was a rescue. That July, Gabriel had staged the first WOMAD festival and it had gone badly — bad weather, a rail strike, almost no press. It lost so much money that it left him on the edge of ruin. The manager, who was also the band's, proposed the only obvious way out: Genesis would play one night with him.

And that is how the man who walked away from Genesis at its peak ended up saved by Genesis. With Phil Collins on drums, which is to say with the man who had taken his place playing to dig him out of the hole.

Why he left

In the early Genesis, Gabriel was the show. A theatrical singer who dressed up, wore extravagant masks and performed surreal story-songs as if they were plays. It was pure, ambitious, difficult art, on records like Selling England by the Pound and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

And just as the band was taking off, he got out.

The official version — a public letter saying he wanted to be with his family — was true but incomplete. His daughter Anna had been born with serious complications, and he was there instead of with the band, which the others did not take well. There was a worse erosion too: the press wrote about his masks and not about the music, and that irritated the rest of the group as much as the business as a whole was suffocating him.

He left Genesis in Collins's hands, who would make it enormous, and went off to start again without a net.

Four albums with the same name

The first thing he released already painted the whole picture. "Solsbury Hill", from 1977, is one of the very few cheerful songs that exist about leaving: about hearing an inner voice telling you to let go of what is safe. He explained it without ornament — it is about being prepared to lose what you have for what you might get — and he wrote it about his own exit from Genesis.

And to make clear he was not going to play at being a normal star, his first four solo albums were all called exactly the same thing: Peter Gabriel. He thought of them as issues of a magazine: same masthead, different cover. People ended up naming them after the sleeves — Car, Scratch, Melt, Security — because there was no other way to tell them apart. It is an odd, anti-commercial and very characteristic gesture: four records in a row refusing to let the packaging give orders.

The third also made him one of the most political musicians of his generation. That is where "Biko" is, for Steve Biko, the South African anti-apartheid activist killed in police custody. It is one of the great protest songs of the eighties, and an Englishman wrote it when almost nobody in pop was going anywhere near the subject.

Being massive without becoming ordinary

In 1986 came So, his masterpiece and his enormous hit. "Sledgehammer", with that stop-motion video that won nine MTV awards in a single night — a record — and became one of the most played in the channel's history. "In Your Eyes". "Don't Give Up", a duet with Kate Bush.

Gabriel pulled off what almost nobody manages: reaching everyone without becoming simple. The man in the masks was selling millions and remained, song by song, as unconventional as he had been at the start.

What actually deserves the credit

But his greatest legacy is not on the charts.

In 1982 he founded WOMAD — World of Music, Arts and Dance — and in 1989 the Real World label, with a clear mission: to bring the music of Africa, Asia and Latin America to Western ears, and to treat those musicians as equals. As artists with names and bodies of work, not as exotic curiosities or seasoning for somebody else's record.

At a time when "world music" meant nothing to the general public, he set about proving that the whole planet was singing. A good part of what we now take for granted — that a musician from Mali or Pakistan can fill a theatre in Europe, that a Senegalese singer records with whoever he likes — happened partly because Peter Gabriel insisted it should. And it cost him, literally, bankruptcy: hence the coffin at Milton Keynes.

Nor did he stop there. He sang for Amnesty International, toured for human rights, and in 1992 co-founded Witness, an organisation built on an idea that sounded like science fiction at the time: putting cameras in the hands of ordinary people so they could document abuses where they happened. Decades before everyone carried a camera in their pocket, Gabriel had understood that an image in anyone's hands could be a weapon against impunity.

The two halves

Peter Gabriel is alive and still working at no particular speed — he came back in 2023 with i/o, twenty-one years after the previous album. Nobody who knows him was surprised by the delay.

And there is the contrast that closes the story of Genesis, that band which was really two. Collins gave the world its heartbeat and its tears, the songs we all sing. Gabriel gave it his strangeness, his conscience and the sound of the entire planet. They did not compete: they divided the soul of one group between them, and each kept the half the other could not carry.

On the night Genesis said goodbye for good, in March 2022, with Collins singing seated and his son on drums, Peter Gabriel was backstage, watching.

If you only know Gabriel from "Sledgehammer", you are missing the best of him. Go to "Solsbury Hill" and "Biko", and then find any record he put out on Real World, one you have never heard of. You will find a man who put on masks not to hide but in order to look, who left what was safe to go after what was true, and who used everything he had — the fame, the money, the ear — so that the world could hear itself.

Sources

Peter Brian Gabriel (Chobham, Surrey, England, 13 February 1950), singer, musician and songwriter; founder and vocalist of Genesis between 1967 and 1975, known for his theatricality, masks and costumes, on records such as "Selling England by the Pound" (1973) and "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" (1974). He left the band after the tour for the latter; his public letter cited a wish to spend time with his family, in a context that included the difficult birth of his daughter Anna, tension with the rest of the group over the attention the press gave his staging, and his disenchantment with the industry. Phil Collins took over as vocalist. In his solo career, his first four albums were all titled "Peter Gabriel", conceived as issues of a magazine, and audiences distinguish them by their sleeves ("Car", "Scratch", "Melt", "Security"). "Solsbury Hill" (1977), his first solo single, alludes to his departure from Genesis; Gabriel described it as being prepared to lose what you have for what you might get. His third album (1980) included "Games Without Frontiers" and "Biko", a song about the South African activist Steve Biko, who died in police custody in 1977. "So" (1986) was his biggest success, with "Sledgehammer" — whose video won nine MTV awards in 1987, a record — "In Your Eyes", "Big Time" and "Don't Give Up", a duet with Kate Bush. He founded the WOMAD festival in 1982 and Real World Records in 1989. The first WOMAD, in July 1982, made heavy losses because of bad weather, a rail strike and poor publicity, leaving Gabriel in a critical financial position; his manager Tony Smith, who also represented Genesis, proposed a benefit concert. On 2 October 1982, at the Milton Keynes Bowl, Genesis played with Gabriel under the name "Six of the Best" before some 40,000 people, with Phil Collins on drums and Steve Hackett joining for the encores; Gabriel arrived on stage inside a coffin carried by four pallbearers, which the band did not know about. The concert saved the finances and allowed WOMAD to continue. A human rights activist, he took part in Amnesty International campaigns (the "Human Rights Now!" tour, 1988) and in 1992 co-founded Witness, which promotes the use of video by citizens to document abuses. He released "i/o" in 2023. He attended the last Genesis concert backstage, on 26 March 2022 at the O2 Arena in London. Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Interpretations of the meaning of his work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, AllMusic, Encyclopedia.com and press coverage.