Peter Gabriel
What really happened between him leaving Genesis and his first solo album…
It’s very rare that you get two successful acts when people split up or break off…
Between leaving Genesis and starting to record his debut solo album, Peter Gabriel grew a lot: cabbages, his family, and his confidence as a musician and songwriter. This is the inside story, from Somerset allotment to American studio, of what he did on his summer holiday.
When viewed retrospectively, the period between Peter Gabriel leaving Genesis and then releasing his first solo album seems like hardly any time at all. There were just 20 months between his final show with the group in France on May 22, 1975 and the release of his debut solo album in February 1977. At the time, however, it seemed an eternity.
Fuelled by his own grandiloquent statement of departure from Genesis in August 1975, which came nearly a year after he’d told the group he was going, and four months after he’d played that last show, it really did seem as if Gabriel was giving it all up and that would be the last we would see of him – at least the ‘him’ that people had come to know.
The length of time was amplified somewhat by the obsession the weekly UK rock press had then with generating stories and headlines – it highlighted the vestiges of the 60s mechanism of an artist releasing, at the very least, an album a year. On August 16, 1975, Melody Maker proclaimed, “Gabriel Out Of Genesis?” A fortnight later, the paper published Gabriel’s humour-laden missive, “Why I Quit Genesis”, in which he wittily assessed his future and his options.
Leaving a band so obviously on the verge of wider acceptance seemed simply unfathomable, not only to the group’s fans, but to the music world as a whole. “When I left Genesis,
I just wanted to be out of the music business,” Gabriel told Rolling Stone in 2011. “I felt like I was just in the machinery. We knew what we were going to be doing in 18 months or two years ahead. I just did not enjoy that.”
Gabriel’s departing announcement was little short of a prescient mission statement for his immediate future, and for the rest of his career. Over 700-odd words, he looked at his life to date and his career going forward. It was unusual, too, for an artist just on the edge of hitting the big time to cite one of the reasons for packing it up as the “hidden delights of vegetable growing”. This wasn’t a euphemism for a prodigious drug habit, but a reference to his beloved cabbage patch at his home in Bath.
“My future within music, if it exists,” Gabriel said, “will be in as many situations as possible. It’s good to see a growing number of artists breaking down the pigeonholes. This is the difference between the profitable, compartmentalised battery chicken and the free range. Why did the chicken cross the road anyway?”
This idea especially encapsulated what he was to do for the following 18 months, as his chicken seemed to not just be crossing the road but veritably dancing right down the white line. It was a period that fashioned some true Gabriel oddities: a collaboration with a football-loving poet from Wolverhampton; a record with British comedic institution Charlie Drake; a Beatles cover version; and a single of brawny, long-forgotten pop, produced by Tony Visconti. It also involved cabbages, therapy, a partial Genesis reunion and visits to see Bruce Springsteen and the Sex Pistols.
“It’s about being prepared to lose what you have for what you might get, or what you are for what you might
be. It’s about letting go.”
Peter Gabriel
Peter Gabriel’s retirement ended with the release of his self-titled debut album in February 1977: a record that combined muscular, straight-ahead Springsteen-esque rock with whimsy and flights of fancy. Not unlike a Genesis album, you may argue, but one made on his own terms.
This was a period of exploration, of collaboration, and a most refreshing take on how to reinvent yourself.
First and foremost, Peter Gabriel needed to spend time with his young family. He had returned home at the end of the tour for The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway in May 1975 and dissolved into the community. In his statement, written at home, he said, “The increase in money and power, if I had stayed, would have anchored me to the spotlights. It was important to me to give space to my family, which I wanted to hold together, and to liberate the daddy in me.”
Liberating the ‘daddy in me’ seemed an extremely unfashionable step at the time. Ahead of John Lennon watching the wheels with his baby Sean, at that time rock kids were often farmed out to wives and nannies, or taken on the road as an adjunct. It was well documented quite how difficult the birth of his first daughter had been for both wife Jill and baby Anna in
July 1974. It was one of the principal factors in his departure from the band – as he had been the first to have children in Genesis, the group’s relative lack of empathy hit him hard.
The family had relocated to
Woolley Mill in Swainswick, north of Bath, which was to herald a steady trickle of musicians moving there and the birth of a scene. Jill, Gabriel and Anna were tight-knit at the old, once water-driven corn mill, with Gabriel tending his much-loved vegetable patch. It was a restful period, marking the first time Gabriel had dropped from the writing-recording-touring circle that had come to dominate his life in the preceding four years. He could do as he pleased.
The impact of this disappearance on the weekly UK rock press, needing column inches to fill, was marked. It was hardly Brian Wilson’s retreat into his sandbox, but for some reason it absolutely fascinated the papers that a star, suddenly about to achieve what he had ostensibly craved, would turn his back on it at the age of 25 to pursue family life.
It wasn’t that Gabriel was a recluse: he would materialise in public sporadically. On June 7, 1975, he returned to his roots and appeared at a Stackridge concert at Friars, Aylesbury, where he leapt out of a birthday cake. There were no costumes, slide shows or synchronisation to worry about – just a bit of old-fashioned spectacle. Life was good, and the pressure of the music business seemed a long way away.
Long-term supporter Chris Welch interviewed Gabriel at the end of 1975 for Melody Maker. Gabriel had been exploring the possibilities of alternative lifestyles.
“I’ve also been trolling around seeing different people in various communities,” he said. “One of the possibilities I’ve got on ice at the moment is joining a commune. It’s not your drug-ridden sex orgies, but a group of people working together in a lot of areas, and one of the communes is called, by complete coincidence, Genesis… I can’t get away from them. Let me out! There’s another place in France I’m going to have a look at. I’m thinking of joining with my family.”
“Peter did various spiritual seekings,” school friend Richard Macphail recalls. “He looked at the Genesis commune and quite seriously contemplated the idea of joining them. I’m pretty sure Jill wouldn’t have followed him there – not that she wasn’t an advocate of all this.”
Gabriel also partook in the then fashionable Silva Mind Control course, a form of extrasensory perception where participants aim to reach an alpha state, a clarity of thought. “He did that with Betsy Gibson, Simon Cowe from Lindisfarne’s wife,” Macphail says. “She was into all that stuff as well.”
Two years later, Macphail, his then partner Janessa and the Gabriels would attend EST seminars, the controversial technique designed to challenge the very fabric of one’s personality.
“It was all part of that theme, that process,” Macphail reveals. “It leaves you open-hearted. It gave
Peter and I’s relationship a real grounding as we went through profound experiences together.”
Gabriel’s first new release of this period was his second daughter, Melanie, who was born on August 23, 1976. Although there was later to be considerable turbulence in his first marriage, there was no question how important the girls were to him and Jill.
The success of
Gabriel’s home life was underlined by an interview Anna gave to The Scotsman in
2005, when she revealed:
“We went to a little village school in the middle of the country and I knew he went to work and did music,” she said. “But that was all I knew really until Sledgehammer came out.”
In his leaving statement, Peter Gabriel stated that there was “no animosity between myself and the band or management”. (This was underlined by Gail Colson, Tony Stratton-Smith’s General Manager at Charisma, who would later become Gabriel’s manager: “We were quite confident that he would do something on his own,” she said, “once he and his family had had some time together.”)
Gabriel continued: “It is not impossible that some of them might work with me on other projects.”
And this was immediately true in this first period: Gabriel was to work not only with Mike Rutherford and Phil Collins, but, going back to the early days, Anthony Phillips too.
Gabriel’s first principal collaborator in his new life was someone not just outside his immediate social circle but someone on the very periphery of Genesis’ world. Martin Hall was a poet and lyricist from Willenhall in Staffordshire who had been described as a ‘Black Country Randy Newman’.
Hall had been introduced to
Gabriel by producer John Anthony at the sessions for the Colin Scot album in 1971. Hall had been active since the late 60s, co-writing Two’s Company, Three’s A Crowd, the Brad Ford & The Sundowners single that was released on Phillips. In 1974,
Stan Cullis Blues, Hall’s book of poetry, was published by Charisma Books, complete with illustrations by Genesis artist Paul Whitehead.
Gabriel first mentioned the potential collaboration in an interview in 1973: “I do have things I’m interested in outside of the band. There is a songwriter called Martin Hall and there is a possibility of my doing an LP with him. As it is, the band comes first.”
Indeed, the speculation of a collaboration was confirmed on the rear of the book, stating that Hall was “currently working on… an album with Genesis leader, Peter Gabriel”.
Looking at Stan Cullis Blues, it’s easy to see how Gabriel – fresh from battling at Epping Forest or getting them out by Friday – would have been motivated by Hall and vice versa, with the witty wordplay of poems like Some Of My Best Words Are Friends or the thought-provoking brevity of the eight words of Photomatic. Eight Good Buys, from Hall’s 1972-’73 collection The Songs Of The Bears Of Bilston (the second half of the Stan Cullis Blues book) references deceased celebrities and death row author Caryl Chessman, providing possible inspiration for one of Gabriel’s greatest lyrics, Broadway Melody Of 1974.
The two began writing, and three of their co-writes were to make it to vinyl. “I got to know Martin quite well,” Anthony Phillips told this writer in 2013. “Martin was a big Wolves fan [Wolverhampton Wanderers FC], and a good lyricist. Looking back, you have to question why Peter was working with someone who was essentially a duplication, because Martin’s strength was as a lyricist and Pete was already a brilliant lyricist.”
Phillips added in 2018, “Martin was a very thoughtful guy, a really nice guy. It was a meeting of minds in the lyrical department.”
“Whenever I went down to Woolley Mill Cottage where Peter was living at the time, Martin was around a lot,” Richard Macphail adds. “He was quite eccentric, very likeable. He was nice to be around.”
In May 1974, Gabriel recorded three demos at Anthony Phillips’ parents’ house in Send, near Woking, with Phil Collins, Phillips and
“There’s so much brilliance in this record, coming from a man in his middle 20s: the depth of wisdom and sensitivity, not to mention how musically brilliant he
was then, and is still.”
Bob Ezrin
Hall himself. “It was just before Pete started recording The Lamb…,” Phillips recalls. “I had fairly primitive recording equipment. I don’t think Pete had any; Martin certainly didn’t have any. They were simple demos – they didn’t get taken round anywhere.”
Three Gabriel-Hall songs were committed to tape. You Never Know was a cheeky, upbeat track, extending out the Gabriel we knew and loved from Willow Farm. Firebirds was a beautifully emotional piano-led number, complete with Phillips quoting from Stravinsky’s The Firebird Suite at the start. You
Get What You Want (When You Rip It Off) was the most interesting – a parody of the Stones, sarcastically eyeing the music industry, and with Gabriel sending himself up with the line, ‘There’s always the middle-class Rolling Stones, getting out the marrow in your backbones.’
When Gabriel left the day job, he set about recording one of these songs. As he harboured the idea of producing and writing for other people, both yearnings converged on his first post-Genesis recordings. It’s ironic, and somewhat telling, that when David Bowie got his first flush of success and could produce other artists, he chose Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. When Gabriel had the opportunity, he chose Charlie Drake.
Drake was a diminutive comedy star who had been popular in Britain for the best part of two decades. With his everyman demeanour, he had built upon his initial fame in the 50s with the TV show The Worker between
1965 and 1970. In common with other comedians of the day, he had enjoyed several hit singles.
In July 1975, less than two months after finally embodying The Lamb…’s protagonist Rael on stage, Gabriel went to Studio 2 in AIR Studios, high above London’s Oxford Circus, to record You Never Know with Drake.
The line-up of musicians was quite incredible: Robert Fripp – who, like Gabriel, was by then in the first phase of his self-imposed exile from the music business – on guitar, jazz pianist Keith Tippett, Phil Collins, Collins’ Brand X bandmate Percy
Jones on bass, and legendary folk vocalist Sandy Denny. Gabriel and
Hall co-produced with engineer
Steve Nye, later to be an esteemed producer and a member of the
Penguin Café Orchestra.
Percy Jones takes up the story:
“I had got a call from Phil about an upcoming session. We did quite a few together back in those days. I got to the studio and there’s Robert Fripp, Peter Gabriel and Keith Tippett, who was a neighbour of mine at the time.”
Joining this line-up was Martin Hall. “With that sort of line-up I anticipated some really interesting music coming up,” Jones continues. “Gabriel appeared to be the producer. Anyway, it turned out to be a very straight-ahead pop tune, not at all what I had expected. It left me a bit puzzled as to why they got a line-up like that to record that style of music. We recorded the tune, which didn’t take too long from what I remember… I was told it was a backing track for Charlie Drake.”
Richard Macphail arrived at the studio just as the session for the backing track was finishing. “AIR was amazing at rush hour because you could stand at the window and watch all these people way below disappearing down the holes into the Tube station. It was an extraordinary sight.”
The other extraordinary sight was seeing Drake arrive just as the musicians were leaving. “We bumped into Charlie on his way in to overdub his vocal,” Jones says. “I remember him as a very friendly guy dressed in what resembled a safari suit. He said hello to us in his characteristic squeaky voice as we passed.”
Macphail saw the overdub, complete with Sandy Denny’s voice-over. “Charlie went in and did the vocals. It was a typical Gabriel no-holdsbarred type of thing.”
Phil Collins seemed as puzzled as the wider world about it. He wrote on his website after Drake’s death in 2006: “How he ended up with this line-up I have no idea… The whole session was one of life’s interesting snapshots.”
“He was never pushy. Stubbornness was his only ‘fault’, and sometimes you need to be stubborn when you’re standing up for a point. He was always
a sweetie to work with.”
Anthony Phillips
Fripp was later to comment:
“This was arguably the strangest session of the entire era.”
Jones concurs: “It was probably the most unusual session I have ever been involved in.”
“I have no recollections of Martin Hall or Peter working on the Charlie Drake record or how it all come about,” Gail Colson laughs. “I just remember it being delivered and then trying to work out how to sell the bloody thing! Apart from Peter and Martin, I defy anybody to remember the Charlie Drake record.”
Her brother Glen, who was Charisma’s Press Director at the time, goes one better: “I never heard about it and never saw any letters and Strat never mentioned it. Sounds a bit far-fetched, like shit from China, as my old man used to say!”
However, whoever wrote it, there was a press release that said, “The single is produced by Peter Gabriel. Erstwhile lead singer with Genesis, and sometimes human sunflower. It is a send-up of pop stardom which also features Sandy Denny, Eno [?] and Robert Fripp. As Drake is chalk to Gabriel’s cheese, so is the idea of Charlie encountering a groupie – listen to the single and you’ll discover what happened.”
The single, credited to the production team of ‘Gabriel Ear Wax’ was backed with I’m Big Enough For Me, the theme to Drake’s recent children’s film series Professor Popper’s Problem.
It was released on November 21, 1975 and promptly did nothing. Drake’s dreams of being a pop superstar were cruelly dashed.
“I thought he was having a bit of fun,” Phillips says. “I didn’t think it was going to go anywhere, but everyone was starting to flex their muscles and do different things, and I thought, ‘Okay, life’s been tough recently, why not have a bit of fun?’ It did seem a bit strange, but then
Pete was always a bit left-field.”
Get The Guns, Gabriel’s second Martin Hall collaboration, was covered by Alan Ross for a superobscure Good Earth single produced by Tony Visconti in 1977. Nothing else came of the partnership with
Hall, aside from Excuse Me, another collaboration they were demoing at this time, which was used when Gabriel finally came to record his first album proper.
“Martin wrote very good lyrics but it could never work out,” Phillips says. “It was a meeting of minds with Pete, but ultimately it couldn’t survive because you need to
be complementary, and they were cancelling each other out in a way.”
After writing with Phillips and moving into music publishing, Martin Hall seems to have vanished. When researching, this writer almost began to wonder if Martin Hall was a pseudonym for Gabriel himself.
“I think probably a lot of people might think that!” Anthony Phillips says. “No, he very much did exist. I loved some of his poems, and some of his lyrics too. At least he’ll be happy that Wolves are back in the top division!”
“I think it was a bit of a bridge thing for Peter because I think he felt quite lacking in self-confidence when he left the band,” Richard Macphail adds. “He didn’t know how it was going to go – he’d somehow found comfort and friendship in working with Martin. And then Peter got his confidence back – he wrote Solsbury Hill and Here Comes The Flood.”
At the end of 1975, Gabriel recorded some demos on piano at old Charterhouse friend David Thomas’ house in Putney, again with Hall. It was as if he was going straight back to school. These demos were interesting and diverse, of which Howling At The Moon, Funny Man, No More Mickey and God Knows – all Hall co-writes – have never turned up on any subsequent Gabriel recording. An early version of the game-changing new song Here Comes The Flood was tried out.
After their Send liaison in
1974, Gabriel again turned to Ant Phillips, who had also been using David Thomas’ piano to rehearse on. “I was in London, I didn’t have a piano and I used to go to David’s and rehearse,” Phillips says. “Pete didn’t have a piano where he was so Pete taught me this stuff. It wasn’t incredibly difficult in terms of needing hours to practise.”
In the long, dry, drought-ridden summer of 1976, Gabriel took some ideas into Trident Studios in London’s St. Anne’s Court. The scene of the recording of Trespass and Nursery Cryme, it was a familiar and warm stamping ground for him. This can be seen as the start of Peter Gabriel’s solo career proper.
Although nothing has ever been released from the Trident recordings, it provided another confidence boost for Gabriel, working again with Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford as his rhythm section, with another of Collins’ Brand X buddies, John Goodsall, on guitar.
Anthony Phillips played Trident’s Bechstein piano: “I’d studied enough to play slightly more sophisticatedly than Peter, and I wouldn’t argue.”
He also may have been there for talismanic reasons – as the first significant member of Genesis to leave the group, Phillips had shown that there could be life afterwards. “I was open to a lot of things, and I think Pete quite liked that. If I’d just been the composer in Genesis
I’d have been a bit narrow.”
It was good to be back. “It was only then that I realised quite how good a rhythm section Mike and Phil were together,” Phillips says. “They were astonishing. Dear old John Goodsall completed us; he was quite eccentric. It was a funny band. Mike and Phil were very pally, but it was very professional as well. It was strange looking back that so many members of Genesis past and present were there.”
Recordings included the Hall co-write Get The Guns, alongside an unknown track and a track still to surface – Mr Tattoo. Three tracks played were to appear on subsequent albums: Slowburn, Here Comes The
Flood and, to be held back to 1978, Flotsam And Jetsam.
Did Phillips see a completely different man in Peter Gabriel after the six years since they had last been together in Trident? “Not really, no,” he says. “He was always slightly vague and a bit otherworldly, but basically always gentlemanly and patient. Maybe a little bit more confident, I guess. He was never pushy. Stubbornness was his only ‘fault’, and sometimes you need to be stubborn when you’re standing up for a point. He was always a sweetie to work with.
“I think I was given a free-ish hand, with guidance. I was careful not to overplay, and careful not to overflower. I remember the sessions being very easy. I wasn’t nervous, which you’d have thought I may have been, not having recorded in a big studio for five or six years. The last time I was there it was with John Anthony, and suddenly now these guys are not quite superstars, but pretty famous.
“Pete created a very relaxed atmosphere around him, which was great, but there was a feeling that he needed a bit of help as well,” Phillips continues. “He was definitely finding his way. We now know a lot of these tracks are great, but we didn’t know that at the time. It was terra incognita for him.”
Although matters were to take a different turn, the results of the sessions, which unsurprisingly sounded a bit like Genesis, showed that Gabriel was ready to begin his return to the album and stage. He’d been with safe pairs of hands. It was now time to go into the unknown.
The first time the public heard Gabriel sing on record since The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway was on his heartfelt version of Strawberry Fields Forever, which he contributed to the soundtrack of the ill-fated film All This And World War II, which married stock footage of the Second World War and old MGM film clips with a soundtrack of cover versions of The Beatles’ songs. Conceived by record company man Russ Regan for The Beatles themselves to supply their catalogue, musical director Lou Reizner decided it could prove more lucrative to have wellknown artists provide cover versions.
Gabriel’s contribution was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra at Olympic Studios in Barnes. It underlined Gabriel’s significance when you look at the company he was in: Elton John, Rod Stewart, the Bee Gees, Bryan Ferry, Frankie Valli and Tina Turner were just some of the stellar names involved. Although the film was withdrawn from cinemas after just two weeks and has never had an official DVD release, the soundtrack was a modest success, reaching No.23 on the UK albums chart on its release in November 1976. As such, it became the first official Peter Gabriel solo release.
By October 1976, Gabriel was on the other side of the Atlantic working with a team of session musicians, finally making his first solo album. After considering Todd Rundgren, Gabriel hooked up with young Canadian producer Bob Ezrin, who had made his name producing Alice Cooper and Lou Reed. Ezrin first saw Gabriel when Genesis supported Reed at Toronto’s Massey Hall in 1973. Tony Smith, Gabriel’s then manager, put in the call.
“When Tony asked if I would be interested in working with Peter as a solo artist, I didn’t hesitate for one second,” Ezrin told this writer in 2013. “He’s a brilliant man and I would love to work with him.”
It was imperative that they work fast and that Ezrin had a hand in picking Gabriel’s team. To that end, Ezrin chose virtually all the album’s players, trusted session hands used to working at speed with demanding artists.
“I had developed this crew of regulars that I would work with,”
Ezrin says. “I put them together for when I worked with solo artists who didn’t come with their own band. They were very versatile – some of them were New York session players I had encountered in different situations, but in whom I’d seen a spark. These were the outlaws of the studio musician set, the guys who often felt constrained by what they were trying to do, and liked to stretch out.”
These included drummer Allan Schwartzberg and Tony Levin, who would go on to become Gabriel’s long-serving bassist. Gabriel added Nektar keys player Larry Fast, and for old times sake and continuity, Robert Fripp, latterly sighted with Gabriel at the Charlie Drake session, on guitar. The team worked fast, recording at Nimbus Studios in Toronto.
“It was only then that I realised quite how good a rhythm section Mike and Phil were together. They were astonishing.”
Anthony Phillips
“Peter thrived on the characters,” Ezrin continued. “He negotiated with me, asking if he could have one Brit. I felt we were doing a sports deal, like a football club needing a striker. I agreed. He said, ‘Can it be Robert Fripp?’ Robert perfectly rounded out this group of misfits and musical outlaws. He was the proper Brit, in total contrast to the improper Americans – and we had Canadians too. It was a very ecumenical date.”
The album, simply titled Peter Gabriel, was released in the UK on February 25, 1977. It came encased in a Hipgnosis-designed sleeve: a heavily colourised image that featured Gabriel sat in Storm Thorgerson’s rain-soaked vehicle. It had an otherworldliness about it, looking distant, strange and mysterious. It gave the album its simple, colloquial name of Car.
Of the album’s nine tracks, two stood out clearly and established Gabriel at once as a credible artist. Solsbury Hill was released as a single ahead of the album and soon was sitting in the UK Top 40, becoming the first release associated with Genesis to reach the Top 10 singles chart. With it, Gabriel proved he had more than enough commercial nous to go it alone. As he said, “It’s about being prepared to lose what you have for what you might get, or what you are for what you might be. It’s about letting go.”
A thinly veiled reference to his departure from Genesis, it’s set over an infectious, acoustic guitar-driven folk groove, played by Steve Hunter.
Its optimism is heart-warming and its manifesto is clear: to succeed, you must take risks. Fortune favours the brave. His choice of the line ‘walked right out of the machinery’ echoes his 1975 interview where he said that Rael “feels as if he’s a waste of material, part of the machinery”.
Here Comes The Flood was the album’s triumph. “All I know is that Peter played me Here Comes The
Flood in my living room on our first meeting,” Bob Ezrin said. “I was in the middle of producing albums for KISS and Alice Cooper. In the midst of all that, I went to bed singing Here Comes The Flood instead of my own records!”
Inspired by the writings of Carlos Castaneda and recent reading about native Americans, Gabriel was fascinated with short-wave radio, and was amazed by the way signal strength would become stronger as daylight faded. All of this fed into the tale of barriers in individuals’ thought processes being broken down so anyone could see into others’ minds, and as Gabriel said, “those inclined to concealment would drown in it”.
“What an amazing song,” Ezrin said. “There’s so much brilliance in this record, coming from a man in his middle 20s: the depth of wisdom and sensitivity, not to mention how musically brilliant he was then, and is still.”
With a tagline of ‘expect the unexpected on the new Peter Gabriel
“He’s a brilliant man and I would love to
work with him.”
Bob Ezrin
album’, Car reached a respectable No.7 in the UK and No.38 in the US. Gabriel was pleased with this performance: “Success no longer holds the key to happiness for me,” he told Barbara Charone at Circus magazine. “I wanted it badly once but it’s an experience
I had. I’ve got complete control now. The rock business is a strange hybrid of hypocrisy. You get to the point where you’re not really being yourself. You’re selling something. You get the feeling that the rock star is some sort of teenage creation realised by people who are no longer teenagers.”
Most definitely not a teenager, Peter Gabriel’s retreat to his cabbages lasted less than six months. However, the 20 months, his ‘gap year’ in which it was set, and the empowerment it offered him, was to reverberate throughout his career to this very day: if you can walk away from what you had worked so hard for and start again, put your family first, you can do anything.
It was a period of the most incredible cleansing and confidence building. Stepping out from behind the flower and growing up in public. His prolonged absence from the pop eye seemed an eternity – today, in the 21st century, a year off is common; longer is positively expected to allow tour cycles to finish and marketing departments to work through any residual magic or life there may be left in a product.
“Generally, there’s only one golden egg in a band, as far as business goes,” Gabriel reflected in 1977. “It’s very rare when people split up or break off that you get two successful acts. The chances are remote. The longer I didn’t do anything, the bigger the question mark. I wouldn’t describe myself as a golden egg yet. But I’m in a strong position – certainly much stronger than I was a year ago.”
Within a handful of years, with the release of So, Gabriel did indeed become this golden egg. And once he did, with that gold he walked right out of the machinery again. This time, he wouldn’t have to borrow his friend’s piano – he would set up his own studio and label. He would become the factory owner, allowing him the freedom to take as much time between releases as possible. For sure, the 26-month gap in releases between The Lamb… and his first album now seems like barely a nanosecond compared to the 16 years it has been since the release of Up…