PETER GABRIEL
Rated PG PGLP
Record Store Day disc featuring some of Gabriel’s greatest cine tunes, and rarities.
You can easily imagine the twinkle in Peter Gabriel’s eye when he first proposed the title for this special Record Store Day release. A collection of songs recorded for various movies over the last 30 years, Rated PG is a selfevident fans-only affair, but as with pretty much everything he does, there are melodies here that would pick even the most recalcitrant winkle.
Glorious music aside, the most intriguing thing about Rated PG is how it will impel you to check out some fairly obscure films. It’s questionable if anyone, its star Denzel Washington included, regards 1995’s Virtuosity as a classic, but This Is Party Man is a beautiful thing, Gabriel’s songwriting collab with Tori Amos and composer George Acogny hitting that mellifluous, faintly exotic sweet spot that typifies many of his greatest moments as a solo artist. Similarly, Nocturnal’s shuffling blur of jabbing fiddles, woodblocks and wistful acoustics harks back to the windswept shimmer of Gabriel’s debut, sequenced electronic beats providing the
cutting-edge flipside.
Aside from In Your Eyes, here in a previously unreleased version from Cameron Crowe’s 1989 film Say Anything, the best known songs are That’ll Do and
Down To Earth (from the soundtracks of
Babe 2 and Wall-E respectively): the former is as sweet and gently affecting as anything Gabriel has written; the latter is almost impossible to hear without mental images of that annoyingly cute robot bumbling around in an apocalyptic wasteland, but it’s a six-minute surge of warmth and wisdom nonetheless. The one truly startling moment is Taboo, a new-edit collaboration with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan that fans of celluloid nastiness will know from Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. There’s an evocative power in the Pakistani singer’s voice, as Gabriel’s tense, undulating barrage of rhythm serially erupts around him. In a sense, it’s the only track here that feels inherently visual in conception and design, but even its creator’s most straightforward songs are a triumph for the imagination.