Peter Gabriel turns 60. For fans and friends of his music this also means a career in rock music that now extends over more than four decades.
Gabriel was born in the county of Surrey, England, an area that can justly be called the cradle of his later band Genesis. His mother was the musical conscience in his youth while his father invented many remarkable things. This combination would have a big influence on Peter Gabriel's life.
Gabriel's creative character soon found itself head to head with the disciplinary atmosphere of Charterhouse School. His escape from the grey routine became - music. He began his career as a drummer before he met Tony Banks. They formed The Garden Wall who in 1966/67 joined forces with Anon in which Anthony Phillips and Mike Rutherford were playing - a great band was born, but at the time they were little more than a bunch of naive schoolboys playing at making music.
Gabriel
began to leave his mark on public appearances of Genesis, wearing peculiar
costumes and absolutely outlandish song intros. When he finally performed
wearing a red dress and a fox's head tensions arose in the band - but this put
them on the cover of the Melody Maker. Genesis became commercially
successful.
Gabriel refined his artistic approach with the lyrics for Supper's Ready before the created The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway which would become the storyline for a double album. Limitations within the band and changes in his private life prompted Gabriel to leave the band in 1975. It was only in 1977 that the bruised and crazed the top ten with Solsbury Hill. Gabriel experimented on all his solo album and kept trying out new ideas. In 1980 he banned all the cymbals from the drumkits for the recordings of III (Melt), and two years later he introduced a mixture of peculiar sound and extracts from world music on IV (Security). His interest in world music almost ruined him, which triggered the only Genesis reunion so far, on October 02, 1982 in Milton Keynes...
More than ten years went by before he could stand up commercially to his former band with So in 1986: Sledgehammer pushed Invisible Touch from the #1 position in the US single charts. His mainstream manifesto changed the opportunities the artist Peter Gabriel had. He set up RealWorld Studios, recorded Passion, one of his best albums artistically, and brought together the pop music of So and the world music structures of Passion; the result was Us. He has set new standards in the production of music videos, toured for Amnesty, developed highly metaphorical stages shows and done mainly one thing in the end: he got sidetracked. Gabriel began to distract himself with ever new projects. The successor to Us, Up, took more than ten years to come out. When it did, however, Gabriel toured for two years straights and released a flood of concert DVDs and CDs. He is still involved in human rights, turns his website into a multimedia event and keeps changing plans every week. He sings Imagine at the Olympic Games 2006 and does not release it, he moves the release date of the Up successor to the twelfth of never, wants to release Son Of Ovo but does not, produces new ideas, goes on a brief tour, surprises with a retro setlist, asks other people to cover him when he covers them and suddenly has a new album.
In 2010 Peter Gabriel is busier than ever and has more ideas than ever - and
has stronger opinions than ever. At the end of the we are very glad about
that.
Peter Gabriel created a mixture of the World Music in Passion with the Mainstream of So.
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Multi-Artist-Album from 2000, with Elisabeth Frazer, Richie Havens, Paul Buchanan, Neneh Cherry and larla Lionáird. Gabriel himself sings on four.
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