Peter Gabriel

Global Citizen

Paul Hegarty

• Editorial: Reaktion Books
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789140231
• Categoría: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoría: Música

Peter Gabriel is one of contemporary music's great experimenters. From his work in the progressive group Genesis, through his pioneering solo albums, to his enthusiastic embrace of world music and new technologies, Gabriel has remained steadfast in his commitment to redefining music's boundaries and influence—geographical, virtual, and thematic. Peter Gabriel offers nuanced and trenchant insight into this enigmatic, questing musician and his works, into an artist whose constant traveling—through identities, influences, and media—defines him as one of modern culture's truly global citizens. At the heart of Paul Hegarty's analysis is the idea of locatedness: what it means to be in a specific place at a given time, and to reflect on that time and the changes which inevitably occur. Gabriel's work, Hegarty argues, can be understood as a series of reflections on the "where" of being—a facet of existence that spans everything from politics to psychology, philosophy, psychogeography, and inward reflection.

1

ALBION

The Domesday Book of 1086 lists a village, Cebeham, in what is now the county of Surrey, just south of London. This long-lived rural town, now named Chobham, has no epic tale to tell, and does not nestle in leafy or mountainous splendour. Instead, like much of the English countryside, it has a reasonably autonomous existence amid fields enclosed over the intervening centuries. It never grew vastly in scale or population, it is something of an Everyman village, and it was where Peter Gabriel was born and lived his early years. More specifically, he grew up on Deep Pool Farm, Coxhill, just outside of Chobham. This would be the first of the potentially significant non-urban locations in Gabriel’s early life. The second has a much higher profile, another location at the border of a large village or small town. This time, the place is Charterhouse School, the town Godalming, to which the school decamped in 1872. It was in this school that Genesis formed, with the original line-up of Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks, Anthony Phillips, Mike Rutherford and Chris Stewart all being pupils at the school. It was also there that alumnus Jonathan King ‘discovered’ them and began the process of piecing together the band’s first album, From Genesis to Revelation, released in 1969. The third of these formative places is another building, a house called Christmas Cottage, and like the other two places, also in Surrey. This cottage was owned by Richard Macphail’s parents and was lent for a period of several months to the band. Macphail acted as the band’s organizer and took advantage of his parents losing interest in their holiday home to house the band for rehearsing and recording. This was in late 1969 and would lead Genesis to kick-start their career after a disappointing and rather characterless first outing, and to stretch out their songs into what would become their first work as a progressive rock band, the 1970 album Trespass.

The story begins with these three potentially formative places, and it would be tempting to read much of Gabriel-era Genesis’s lyrical and musical leanings into these settings. While it is hard not to ascribe any influence to them, what is much more of interest is how the band incorporated the places into their music and songs. It would be perverse to attribute the entire ‘early’ period of the band (1967–75) to a set of determinations about well-heeled country gentlefolk, and yet this has been the dominant popular narrative, in ignorance of much of the biting and critical lyrical drive provided by Gabriel, which he honed over this period. In short, knowing of these places, these sites of his early life, tells us very little. It is much more interesting to look at how the English countryside and its varied societies are refracted through the light of Genesis’s actual songs, rather than overdetermining their content, purpose or concerns from a hasty class dogmatism. There is nothing mysterious about those middle-class origins – they were on show from the beginning – but at the same time Genesis would increasingly become part of a shared critical tradition, more visible in 1960s surreal British comedy. Even allowing for the possibility that the group’s shared origin, in the shape of one of class-ridden Britain’s most exclusive fee-paying schools, might limit the possibility of Genesis being able to express the suffering of the oppressed and exploited, we have to note that very few musicians active in the late 1960s or 1970s did that. Far from being shaped by the school, they moulded themselves against it, with Daryl Easlea noting that ‘Gabriel and Banks were united in their distaste for the school’ and reacted against its conservatism and tolerance for bullying.¹ What is not limited is the capacity of Genesis to tell us about huge swathes of English life, whether in terms of the past, or myth, or of the present of the countryside, or the growing suburbs, or the meaning of the city as an all-encompassing world, perhaps not seen so clearly from within.

British society was in flux in the 1960s, with the most obvious sign being The Beatles and the cultural change that they represented, taking shape in the ‘Swinging Sixties’. One part of the story is of Britain opening up, becoming more progressive in outlook and slowly losing its entrenched respect for hierarchy. Musically, certainly, there was an explosion of variety and innovation, with psychedelia, folk music, jazz and progressive rock all emerging as significant forms. The latter, which would reach its commercial zenith in the early and mid-1970s, was where Genesis were located, with many of the genre’s trademarks present in their music: long-form songs, songs based on narrative and musical development rather than repetition, complex instrumentation, and the use of non-rock instruments and styles.

Godalming, home of Charterhouse School, where the founding members of Genesis met.

For all the commercial and critical impact of the new musics, fashion and live music scenes, many, perhaps the vast majority, of its citizens lived out a different period of very little change, as conservatism and traditional class structures did not break down in any significant way.² Despite this, massive change was occurring. Anti-colonial struggles in the colonies led to the independence of many countries. Britain in the 1960s was only slowly emerging from a long period of austerity and lagging behind the economic progress of many of its competitors. Consumerism, rock ’n’ roll, immigration and debates about the worth and morality of having a nuclear missile deterrent were changing the cultural landscape. The enduring class divisions of Britain – with ‘old money’ aristocracy, middle classes and industrial working classes – were defined to the point of segregation. The class borderlines were represented in the fight between trades unions and employers, and between the Conservative and Labour parties, the two main political parties of the time, and people felt their identity to be heavily structured by class expectations. The system may have been slow to change, but criticism of it was something new, and did represent a dramatic change – and Genesis would come into being towards the end of a decade that had witnessed not just hints of social change, but also the irreverence of the ‘satire boom’ and best-selling books about class by Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, and despite their very clear class ‘origins’, the group participated fully in the new articulation of resistance to conservative morality, class roles, religion and tortuous levels of respect for authority.

With this shifting bedrock of conflict came another source of unease or utopianism, depending on one’s point of view, and this was the modernization of Britain, which was taking physical form in modernist mass housing. Britain witnessed massive rebuilding in the wake of the bombing of the Second World War and the subsequent period of ‘making do’. By the late 1950s, huge swathes of urban land were empty and/or derelict, while many lived in slum conditions. Historian David Kynaston takes this rebuilding to be at the heart of the wider changes then happening, and shows that every city would have its modernist housing, new roads, new precincts for shopping.³ The concerns about this rebuilding would inform Gabriel’s lyric-writing and narratives on Genesis’s albums Foxtrot (1972) and Selling England by the Pound (1973).

In parallel to this social and urban progress (as it was seen at the time) was a vindication of more traditional values and arts. The poet John Betjeman was a vocal supporter of historic buildings threatened with demolition, and Britain witnessed something of a ‘folk revival’ in the 1950s and ’60s. This phenomenon can clearly be heard in the second and third of Genesis’s albums, Trespass (1970) and Nursery Cryme (1971). It can be heard musically, but also lyrically, as many of the themes concern rural culture, mythical settings, agrarian societies and timeless themes of love, murder, quests and the valorization of stability over change. However, the folk revival was darker and more critical than this, and so were Genesis, particularly Gabriel, so the listener will hear also of transgression, metamorphosis, anarchist rebellion, and of the strangeness to be found in apparently known, predictable worlds and situations.

From album to album, Gabriel gradually developed a vocal and lyrical style that could convey all of the complexity of a culture that was built on its valorization of tradition yet racing forward in many directions. This style involved dramatic changes in tone, subject-matter, imagery, in order to reveal, analyse, criticize and play with the ideas of British, particularly English, culture, both of the time and throughout history. For that reason, we should regard Gabriel as part of a lineage of English artist-critics who have become part of the mainstream, or seem to have been part of it for ever, with William Blake as the paradigm of this type of critical expression. Gabriel, like the leading Pop artists in Britain in the 1950s and ’60s (Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton), used a type of surrealism to mould a complex picture of England’s dreaming (as John Lydon, a later musical visionary, would have it).

On the first two albums that Genesis made, there was very little sign of the analytical surrealism that would, in a short time, become their trademark. The lyrics were group-written, with Gabriel taking over this role bit by bit as the first half of the 1970s wore on. The music began to stretch out on Trespass, but it would be the next three albums, Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot and Selling England by the Pound, that really illustrated how Genesis, and particularly Gabriel, came to articulate a set of positions and commentaries on the Britain of the time as a kind of cracked mirror of old Albion, an Albion not so much gentle, fair and heroic but one riven by conflict, foolishness, oddness and creative ways out of encroaching conformity. The first two albums were tentative in this regard, but the leap from first to second was still highly significant, and already in Trespass, a dark vision of mythical England started to unfold, in line with various other new musics and revivals in a continuum identified by Rob Young in Electric Eden (2010) as extending from its first flourish in the 1960s right through to the present day.⁴ While Genesis had little to do with the claims for ‘authentic’ music present in folk revivals of the time, it is my view that their music from Trespass onward sprang from the same sources, the same period’s outlook on the ‘state of the nation’, and that Genesis ultimately advanced a much more rigorous and inventive take on myths of England and its countrysides and towns than many of the supposedly faithful renderings of ‘folk’ music that sprang up in the 1960s, in the second wave of folk revival.

None of this attitude, though, was present on From Genesis to Revelation. By the time it was released, the band had moved on from its folk-pop styling and predictable structures and was exploring longer-form songs and preparing the Christmas Cottage sojourn. The band essentially ‘disowned the album altogether and insisted that Trespass should be treated as the first Genesis album’, notes rock critic Bob Carruthers.⁵ Jonathan King first met the group when it was comprised of Banks, Gabriel, Rutherford, Phillips and Stewart (the drummer who was replaced by John Silver for all but the ‘Silent Sun’ track on the album). The album was very much a King construction, forming a concept album based on themes from the Bible, in no particularly meaningful sequence. Many of the tracks were linked by the ham-fisted placement of instrumental segments between them, and the songs were then washed in a bath of strings, arranged by Arthur Greenslade. The result was surprisingly bland given the amount of effort put in to try and replicate the commercial success of post-psychedelic pop and the burgeoning field of the conceptually connected album, and in the end ‘the group was aghast’, writes Easlea.⁶ There was very little that was distinctive about the album, only flashes emerging of what would become their style. The lyrics and singing, despite Gabriel’s smooth-voiced performance, were as badly construed as the strings (the misguided group choral singing persisted on two of the six tracks that make up Trespass).

The songs tried to combine an English whimsy (much better captured elsewhere by, for example, Giles, Giles & Fripp or the Moody Blues, let alone by the early Pink Floyd or The Kinks) in the choruses, with an inoffensive, mildly soulful versifying. King seemed to be attempting a fusion between American and English styles, based on what was selling well, and then larded it with the strings as easy listening markers of ‘classiness’, an early version of homogenized music doing whatever the opposite is of transcending place.

Trespass is something else entirely. The sessions in the cottage led to the adoption of twelve-string acoustic guitars, a vital part of Genesis’s reinvention of the pastoral sound. The drummer also changed, with John Mayhew providing the percussion this time. The combination of added power and acoustic instrumentation was perhaps driven by the band’s formative encounter with King Crimson’s debut album, In the Court of the Crimson King (1969), which Gabriel described as ‘doing the things we wanted to, but so much bigger and better’.⁷ The soundworld of Trespass was much more heavily composed than that of From Genesis to Revelation, and more purposeful in its combinations. Elegant passages of guitars, keyboards and flute enwrapped tales from a parallel mythical land, acting as texture and atmosphere as well as melodic and harmonic structure. The instrumentation Genesis opted for went beyond standard rock instrumentation, and they used the studio to develop already rich textures into evocatively rich sound combinations designed to take the listener out of time. This new Genesis, both more ethereal and earthy, began to incorporate ideas of place, history and reflections on England.

Trespass is an album characterized by movement: into and out of rules, across borders and fences. The conceit of crossing a line, the transgression of the trespass, informed the entire album, in lyrical content, the presentation of those lyrics and the changing musical sections. Musically and vocally, Genesis worked as a whole to create sequences of changing moods, in order to capture narrative drive and also to provide an involved perspective. So, for example, Gabriel’s voice changes dramatically in the course of individual songs, from straight singing to whispering and shouting, capturing, above all, yearning and suppressed violence – the keys to transgressive behaviour in mythical stories that are designed to transcend time – in a bid to realize his vision of the band as what he described as ‘sad romantics’.⁸ This instructive phrase gives us a very clear sense of how Gabriel and Genesis saw themselves, and how they tried to address connections to nature, the world, society, individuals. The Romantic movement had looked to a mythical Nature for inspiration, and also tried to rival the great artists of all times, of any historical period, who had reached beyond the mundane and proximate world to address the ‘big questions’ of life, death and the universe. Gabriel’s qualifying addition of ‘sad’ means that the yearning and melancholic troupe of ‘romantics’ of Genesis would not be looking to be heroic conquerors of the world, but would instead adopt the role of world-weary, gentle seekers after truth and meaning.

Although Genesis were yet to put their own stamp on the myths of countryside, of heroic figures, of events in distant lands, their songs already demonstrated a knowing mobilization of a generic mythical thinking or storytelling, as opposed to trying to capture an existing myth or recreate music from other times. There are plenty of references to established cultural myths in the course of Trespass, but the album occupies a space that is not quite inside any specific mythical realm, as instead it looks on to myths from the (trespassed) border, observing, learning, moulding and remoulding. In short, myth becomes content, the subject-matter, and not just a story to be consumed.

Genesis had already begun to expand their conception of what a song should do, as can be heard on ‘Genesis Plays Jackson’, the suite that appears on the ‘extras’ CD in the Genesis 1970–1975 box, recorded early in 1970. The BBC had approached Genesis to provide a soundtrack to a film about the British painter Michael Jackson, and Gabriel noted they took ‘the chance to test out a lot of the musical ideas we were exploring at the time’.⁹ While Gabriel was pleased at this aspect, he was less than happy with the vocals, which he described as ‘[a lot of it] undeveloped and out of tune, merely a sketch for ideas’.¹⁰ Gabriel was right to identify it as a sketch, but it represented a test for longer-form pieces and discrete musical ideas – elements would appear on Trespass, Nursery Cryme and even The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974) – leading Tony Banks to concur that the exercise was a valuable experiment.¹¹ Musically, the players created a set of pieces that alternate between aggressively electric sections full of attack, and other sections where acoustic instruments and electric take a more sedate path in combination. As well as the actual sequences that would crop up in later songs, the overall approach to instrumentation and extended form would feed into the later albums. For Gabriel himself, that was what was worth retaining, as opposed to any of his own vocal interventions, which were limited. In addition, the suite was the band’s first experience of matching sound and thematic ideas to visuals – something that would grow to be very important for them as a unit, but even more so for Gabriel, who would go on to develop a significant visual presence onstage and introduce the epic visuals for the concerts of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Later still, he would make complete soundtracks for Birdy (1985), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Rabbit-proof Fence (2002), and standalone tracks for many other films.

Along with many of their peers in progressive rock, Genesis were looking to broaden the range of what a rock group could do. At this stage, this was through the medium...