Peter Gabriel

Biography

Peter Gabriel, born February 13, 1950, in Cobham (Surrey), England, is an English musician. He first came to fame as a member of the progressive rock group Genesis, which he founded as a student at Charterhouse School with bandmates Tony Banks, Anthony Phillips and Mike Rutherford.

Gabriel's first solo success came with the single solsbury hill, an autobiographical piece expressing his thoughts on leaving genesis."Genesis quickly become one of the most talked-about bands in the UK, largely due to Gabriel's flamboyant stage presence, which involved numerous bizarre costume changes and comical, dreamlike stories told as the introduction to each song. During "The Knife", a popular live song from the Trespass album, Gabriel would perform a stunt that, two decades later, became extremely common: stage diving. On one occasion he broke a leg leaping into the crowd, but managed to climb back up onto the stage and finish the performance.

Gabriel has had a long and successful career after unexpectedly leaving the band in 1975, with his position as lead singer then filled by drummer Phil Collins.

His first solo success came with the single "Solsbury Hill", an autobiographical piece expressing his thoughts on leaving Genesis. Although early on he achieved critical success and some commercial success (e.g. "Games Without Frontiers" from his third album and "Shock the Monkey" from his fourth), Gabriel achieved his greatest popularity with songs from the 1986 So album.

He famously refused to title his first four solo albums, so they are usually differentiated by number in order of release, or sleeve design.

Gabriel's song "Sledgehammer" was accompanied by a visually stunning music video, which was a collaboration with director Stephen Johnson, Aardman Animation, and the Brothers Quay. The video won numerous awards at the 1987 MTV Music Video Awards, and set a new standard for art in the music video industry.

He has collaborated with singer Kate Bush several times, including an appearance on her television special. Their duet of Roy Harper's "Another Day" was discussed for release as a single, but this never came to pass. Another duet, "Don't Give Up" became a hit, however.

He also collaborated with Laurie Anderson on two versions of her composition "Excellent Birds" - one for her album, Mister Heartbreak, and a slightly different version called This is the Picture which appeared on cassette and CD versions of So. In 1987, when presenting Gabriel with an award for his music videos, Anderson related an occasion in which a recording session had gone late into the night and Gabriel's voice began to sound somewhat strange, almost dreamlike. It was discovered that he had fallen asleep in front of the microphone, but had continued to sing.

Peter Gabriel Promoting his new Greatest Hits Compilation 'Hit'. Gabriel has been interested in world music for many years, with the first musical evidence appearing on his third album. This influence has increased over time, and he is the driving force behind the WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance) movement. He created the Real World Studios and record label to facilitate the creation and distribution of such music by various artists, and he has worked to educate Western culture about the work of such musicians as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Youssou N'dour. He has also recently been interested in multimedia projects, creating the Xplora and Eve CD-ROMs. He has a long-standing interest in human rights, and launched the Witness program to supply video cameras to human rights activists to expose abuses.

Gabriel's song "We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)" from So refers to Milgram's experiment, and in particular the 37 out of 40 subjects who showed complete obedience in one particular experiment.

It has been reported that he suffers from bipolar disorder, but despite some claims, he never confirmed this information.

Peter Gabriel has two daughters from his first marriage, Melanie and Anna, and a son, Isaac, from his second marriage. Melanie sang on the Growing Up tour.

Peter Gabriel is one of the founders of On Demand Distribution (OD2), an online music enterprise, and additionally is co-founder (with Brian Eno) of a musicians union called Mudda, short for "magnificent union of digitally downloading artists".

Latest Album Review

2003 Hit (album/compilation)

From Amazon.co.uk

A judiciously-selected two-CD compendium of Peter Gabriel's finest moments, Hit offers a far more generous windfall than can be found on the only previous Peter Gabriel best-of selection, the 1990 Shaking the Tree. The devil, after all, is in the detail, particularly on the second disc (self-deprecatingly entitled "Miss"), which really traverses the whole gamut of Peter Gabriel's globally-visioned artistry. It includes recent soundtrack work (the haunting "Cloudless" from Long Walk Home: Music from the Rabbit-Proof Fence), material from 2002's sterling Up ("Signal To Noise", featuring a compelling vocal from the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and some ominous string arrangements, really does sound like a thinking man's Massive Attack) and goes right back to that fourth album when marrying the reticence of cold, synthesised new wave with insistent African percussion seemed like a good idea (it was).

The first disc--including the MTV smash "Sledgehammer", anti-apartheid war cry "Biko", "Big Time" (interesting how the styles of Gabriel and his former group Genesis seem to converge at this time) and "Games Without Frontiers"--really speaks for itself, although with hindsight it seems the single-buying public-at-large had a particular taste for a certain kind of Peter Gabriel record. Universally excellent throughout, the collection is rendered even more desirable by the inclusion of three previously unreleased tracks: a live rendition of "Downside Up", a shorter version of "Blood of Eden" and "Burn You Up, Burn You Down", latterly included on a video game and initially earmarked for the Up album but jettisoned at the last minute. --Kevin Maidment