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Performing Arts
'I'm a sort of weekend rock star'
By Rob Blackhurst
Published: June 1 2007 19:07 | Last updated: June 1 2007 19:07
If the Arctic Monkeys are positioned at the raw end of the rock firmament, Peter Gabriel would occupy its farthest-flung corner. He's cerebral, public-school educated and impeccably polite. He writes literate songs loaded with complicated metaphors. And it would be far more accurate to describe him as studious than sybaritic. At 57, just as when he was the teenage singer in Genesis 40 years ago, he's far more likely to be caught discussing obscure folk records than driving a Rolls Royce into a swimming pool.
Though it has been more than a decade since he sold millions of albums – and even longer since his commercial peak with soundtrack-to-the-1980s mega-hits like "Don't Give Up" and "Sledgehammer" – Peter Gabriel still sells out arena shows across Europe and America. Later this month, along with Aerosmith and Crowded House, he headlines the Hyde Park Calling festival.
But he's probably more famous these days for taking the concept of the rock-star sabbatical to new heights. His schedule is as likely to take in seminars at Davos and collecting human-rights awards from Mikhail Gorbachev as it is to include studio-time for his next album.
It is not such a surprise, then, to find him giving a multi-media presentation on human rights at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship at the Said Business School in Oxford. He's here to talk about Witness, an organisation he helped to establish in 1992 to equip human-rights activists with video cameras to record abuses around the world. The Skoll Foundation – a philanthropic fund endowed with $250m of eBay stock by the company's founding president Jeff Skoll – has provided three years' funding for Witness. And Gabriel is this year's celebrity turn (last year the organisers bagged Al Gore).
At the front of the lecture theatre, with his stocky frame, loose-fitting clothes, stubbly head and a white goatee beard, Gabriel could pass for an eastern mystic. The sense of Zen is heightened when he speaks, softly in a classless accent, about the "Hub" – a human-rights version of YouTube that Witness is setting up to allow activists from around the world to post footage of human rights violations. He seems at home amid the venture capitalists, religious groups and young MBA graduates in a hurry.
One-to-one, his manner is serene to the point of inaudibility. I ask how he became involved with Witness. "I was amazed that people could still suffer in extraordinary ways and then have their whole experience denied, buried and forgotten," he murmurs. "And it seemed that was harder to do when there was video footage around. Then the Rodney King incident happened and people thought, 'OK, we get it.'" He reels off victories following exposure of Witness footage – from tacking flaws in the Californian juvenile justice system to publicising the murder of indigenous people in the Philippines who were filing ancestral land claims.
But, I wonder, is there really a need for Witness now that even the poor in developing countries often have mobile phones equipped with a built-in-camera? Gabriel's milky blue eyes flash: "That's a huge transformation! Our dream was to get cameras to the world. And telephone manufacturers have done that very effectively. With better resolution imagery, it's obviously a much more potent tool, so the Hub is really a means to take advantage of that. It's empowering Little Brother."
In this age of celebrity fatigue, where every other band wears a Make Poverty History wristband and has a PR strategy to spotlight their munificence, it is easy to be cynical about rock stars and good causes. But even the most hard-bitten cynic couldn't accuse Gabriel of dilettantism. During the 1980s, he wrote anti-apartheid elegies like "Biko", toured for Amnesty International with Sting and Bruce Springsteen – and championed artists then unknown in the west such as the Senegalese singer Youssou N'Dour.
Gabriel is painfully aware that the conscience of musicians with millions in the bank can make the nerves jangle: "For sure, everyone is very cynical about these semi-retired rock millionaires puffing themselves up with various charity projects. People are sick of worthy do-gooders and I fall into that category sometimes. But, actually, when you get to the other side, like anybody, you have a certain amount of opportunities to put back – and I would recommend that to anyone, regardless of how cynical they are or whatever they're doing."
Genesis fans, though, would sooner have Gabriel locked in the rehearsal room preparing for the group's summer reunion tour. Gabriel was one of four Charterhouse schoolboys who teamed up to create the band in the Easter holidays of 1967. Throughout the early 1970s, under Gabriel's creative direction, they released songs with titles such as "The Battle of Epping Forest" and "Dancing with the Moonlit Knight". Their brand of prog-rock is usually remembered as a strange brew of Arthurian legend, instrumental solos that seemed to last for several hours, and high-brow "concept albums" – all delivered by a singer with a penchant for dressing up in flower-themed head-gear.
Gabriel left the band in the mid-1970s to go solo. But whatever Genesis's subsequent successes as a Phil Collins-fronted stadium rock act, many true fans remain nostalgic for the Gabriel years. He was invited to join the band in the world's arenas this summer but declined. Collins said that he was being "over-cautious". I ask whether he feels a twinge of regret? "We started to have discussions," he says quickly. "There wasn't any ideological barrier. I think I'd pictured a short period and they're now doing 40 dates or something. And it took 10 years to leave Genesis in the eyes of the public. But I wouldn't rule it out, I just didn't really want to do it this time around."
It has been a long time since Gabriel spent months on the tour-bus. The blurb about Gabriel at the Social Entrepreneurship conference describes him as a "musician-film-maker". And among his extracurricular activities, establishing the Womad (World of Music, Arts and Dance) festival – a franchise that has been exported to 20 countries – has proved as influential as any of his records. The British festival – a peculiarly bourgeois, child-friendly gathering of African drumming, piercings, patchwork and henna – celebrates its 25th anniversary this year. It is, says Gabriel modestly, "one of the things that has opened up people's tastes a bit".
Over the past 20 years, Gabriel has turned himself into a one-man think-tank on the future of the music industry. In the late 1980s, he converted a mill in the Wiltshire countryside into a recording studio – starting the vogue for recording in bucolic settings.
But it's the transformation of the music industry through digital technology that has preoccupied him in recent years. He was one of the founders of On Demand Distribution (OD2) – a company that developed the technology behind Microsoft MSN digital downloads in Europe. He also started www.thefilter.com, a music filtering service that scrutinises your digital music collection, guesses your tastes and creates a play-list of artists and albums that you might like.
Gabriel has only released two albums of original material in the past 15 years but, he says, "There's some new things cooking that I'm excited by." For the US release of his next album, he has decided to bypass a record company in favour of a £2m deal with an investment boutique. He believes this is the way of the future. "I think the big players are going to re-evaluate. The old model is not working. The one I favour most is where the artist owns their database of fans. They buy in A&R [artist and repertoire scouting sections], manufacture, distribution when needed. If [the artist] doesn't like what they're doing, then [he or she] can go elsewhere rather than be contracted for five or 10 years".
Jarvis Cocker, musing on the creative death that can come when rock stars enter the pampered bubble of stardom, once said, "You can't write songs about your trout farm." I ask Gabriel whether all this frenetic activity is simply a quest for inspiration. "It certainly feeds me in various ways. Just doing the music business cycle of album/tour, album/tour – you've got less stuff to write about. You would be writing songs about unwrapping soap."
Yet even before he wrote songs, Gabriel has displayed an entrepreneurial restlessness. While still a schoolboy, he set up a cottage industry selling hats to boutiques in swinging London. One night he turned on the TV to see Marianne Faithful wearing one of his creations: "That was a big thrill for me. Keith Richards bought one, too."
But how did this riot of colour and creativity flow amid the pettifogging rules of a public school in the damp English countryside? According to Gabriel, the grey culture paid creative dividends. "Repression breeds creativity. You can say to an artist, 'You can do anything,' and that's like a death sentence. You start saying to an artist, 'You can't do this,' and, 'You definitely can't do that,'' they start getting creative."
As Gabriel packs his holdall to leave for the next seminar, I ask whether he misses the Grammies, the huge audiences, and American number ones.
Isn't it galling to be routinely referred to in media shorthand as a former rock star turned human-rights campaigner? He shrugs and gives a calm smile: "I've always looked upon myself as a sort of weekend rock star – that is what I've been most of the time. Because it's a great place to visit but it's a lousy place to live."
From Charterhouse to Real World
When he helped form Genesis in 1967 Peter Gabriel was a 15-year-old Charterhouse schoolboy, writes Paul Morley; after a naive orchestral pop debut coordinated by shabby pop svengali and former Charterhouse pupil Jonathan King, the group recorded a series of surreal and pastoral albums that established them for better or worse as legends of early 1970s progressive rock.
Progressive rock was where British rock, less rooted in blues and country than American rock, got carried away with technical innovation, combining the eccentricities of psychedelia with melody, conspicuous intellectual ambition and very English mystical subject matter. Traditional song techniques were abandoned and ideas lifted from jazz, classical, folk, art and literature were folded inside lengthy, self-consciously scholarly pieces of music: classical-style song suites, story-telling tone poems, and jazz-like improvisation abounded, leading to concept albums containing songs up to 30 minutes long. It was Gabriel, Genesis's chief utopian fantasist, who helped fashion the band as the precocious child of Alice, Sgt Pepper, Vaughan Williams, Tolkein, Monty Python, Marcel Marceau and King Crimson.
By 1975and the album Lamb Lies Down On Broadway – embraced by fans as positively Shakespearean and spurned by others as near psychopathic whimsy – Genesis had perfected the cryptic hammy prog-rock concept double album. Gabriel's loony headgear alone is probably responsible for provoking the reaction that was punk rock. In the mid-1970s, with Genesis on the verge of arena-rock success, Gabriel left the group. Genesis without Gabriel seemed unimaginable but they carried on, with drummer Phil Collins taking over the singing and his voice so closely resembling Gabriel's that casual listeners seemed not to notice. By the 1980s Genesis had evolved in Collins' chummy image from prog-rock wizards to easy-listening mavens.
Gabriel took a more experimental route, replacing the mime and the magic with the mercurial and the moody. His first solo album, released in the year of punk 1977, showed the theatrical minstrel distancing himself from the excesses of Genesis, becoming, as if on a quest either to compensate for earlier Genesis dreaminess, or to adapt it to the real world, an inscrutable techno pioneer and informed activist.
His first four solo albums, all called "Peter Gabriel", are known among fans as "Car", "Melt", "Scratch" and "Security" because of their covers. His fifth, in 1986, was called "So" – some say for "Sell out" - and by now Gabriel had established his persona as a predictably unpredictable, slightly creepy pop star with a striking political conscience, a surreal protest singer who mixed his prog roots with electronica, African polyrhythms, ambience and soul.
Gabriel's visual zeal merged perfectly with the dawn of the video age, and his 1987 claymation "Sledgehammer" video suggested MTV could show art as well as trash. By the 1990s music and performance were just part of what had become a kind of discreet, visionary Gabriel empire, including the hi-tech Real World recording studios and Real World record label. The influence of Gabriel, as entrepreneur, theorist, composer, futurist, advocate, digital druid, trendspotter and human rights activist, can be detected in the work of Radiohead, Björk, Arcade Fire, the Decemberists and Moby.
The Human Rights Video Hub is at www.witness.org. Peter Gabriel will be at Hyde Park Calling on June 23
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
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