My concert moment for eternity, that moment that you have saved forever, with all your senses, of which you not only know what you saw and heard, but also how it smelled and felt: We are in Cologne Gymnasium, it’s Friday, June 19, 1987. The hall light has gone out, everything is black, tense and total silence that suddenly erupts in ecstatic jubilation. Even before the artist steps onto the stage, his presence can be felt in an irritating, irrational way. There is an almost physical connection between Peter Gabriel and his audience: before the first note, before the first word, established just by being in the same room with Gabriel. Never again, at hundreds of concerts afterwards, neither with him nor with others, have I experienced anything similar. Maybe: allowed to experience.
36 years later it is daylight, the concert starts at 7 p.m. It will last two hours and two minutes, ending at a babysitter-friendly time, taking into account all the pitfalls of the typical Waldbühne outlet drama and local public transport. Peter Gabriel on the “i/o” tour. Family business without a family. Where Mama can have a nice trip to “Solsbury Hill”. And dad is the Sledgehammer.
Help! Is that actually Gabriel?
No. We’ll get to “Solsbury Hill” and “Sledgehammer”, but now one of the (only funny in Berlin) orange-clad stage bustles raises his voice, says something in broken German about what to expect today, and then it’s already dawning agree: Is that, well, could that, this man there, is that, well, HE? Yes. Gabriel doesn’t come on stage. He’s already there. It’s weird and insanely likeable.
He takes off his cap, now everyone recognizes him. Tony Levin comes on stage with a monster of bass. Gabriel fools around a bit, puts a keyboard on his knees and then he sings the song of the flood, in German. “Yes, now the tide is coming”, this oversong, originally on Robert Fripp’s “Exposure” album, translated by Horst Königstein. He’s been dead for a long time now. Laurence, my lighting genius friend who flew in from London, has tears in his eyes. The trip was worth it for this song alone, of course. Gabriel.
Back to Cologne again. Peter Gabriel, then 37, experienced the third and most successful phase of his career. It had been almost a decade since the Genesis years. From the shy Leptosome, who donned costumes and masks out of fear of the audience, who explained the obscure stories of the songs with even more bizarre tales (to give the musicians time to adjust their complicated workbenches) and his exit from the band that just now rocked the genre of progressive rock that had just been invented, had become a consensus artist. After four gloomy, sometimes rough albums (“I” to “IV”) and economic total loss in the fight for a better world, “So”, released in 1986, was the coffee table album of the year. Gabriel kept his balance live. The early work dominated, the new hits stood out a bit out of body – and yet cheered by the significantly expanded audience.
In 2023, Gabriel dares a spectacular experiment. New songs dominate the setlist. After all, if you’re a supernerd, you know half of them from Gabriel’s website, on which songs from the forthcoming album “i/o” were pre-released for every full moon. To be honest: that sucks. Only rappers do it that way, says Thomas, my oldest friend and the label boss of Inside Out. The guy Steve Howe of Yes trusts blindly. And he’s right: we want to know what we’re going to hear. Sing along, empathize. Having the security of the joint process. The discussants in the Genesis forum “it” had speculated that the master would probably dare five new songs. But ten? Half of the tracks in the entire show? What allow Gabriel?
Gabriel is and remains an enigmatic artist. And especially for those who want to love him the most – that’s us, the hardcore Genesis fans, the “Lamb lies down on Broadway” disciples, those who never really got over his exit. He distanced himself further and further from what we worship, the great pathos that is awakened from pain and gloom, the musical nervousness that erupts in powerful coda and the bizarre miniatures. Like his nemesis Phil Collins, he researched ever more deeply into American soul music and its instrumentation, linking it primarily with African, rhythm-driven ethnic music and cold New Wave. Yes / Yes. Artists develop, that’s the way it has to be (although not necessarily like his old band, which degenerated into a fairground polka troupe in the eighties). For those who stayed behind – or let’s just say: got stuck – it’s not easy.
The audience in Berlin is diverse. And that has nothing to do with gender identification. As Caesar would say: Auditores in tres partes divisus est – there must be so much great Latinum, we are not talking about Def Leppard here. So: A third Heritage fans – their favorite album is The Lamb lies down on Broadway. A third “So” nostalgic – they consider “Don’t give up” the best song of all time. And a third of people who just like to go to the Waldbühne on a lukewarm early summer evening and are willing to pay six euros for a beer. Gabriel demands a lot from all three groups. The old fans only get “Solsbury Hill” (which they despise) and “Biko” (which they already know very, very well). The “So” people have to struggle through the new songs until they are finally freed from the brass fanfare and encouraged to rock their shoulders. The third third pay six euros for a beer.
Gabriel only released two official studio albums after “So”, and the tours became less frequent. Up until the turn of the millennium, they were almost theatrical events, much more extravagant and somnambulistic than the operatic Genesis shows. Those were beautiful pictures: the band rowing across the stage like a boat, Gabriel in a huge balloon. Nevertheless, an agout of well-groomed boredom settled over the live performances. “Manufactum” as a concert, something like that. Later, Gabriel explored what it would be like to go back a step or two. But on the retro tour, with a focus on his first albums, he seemed visibly aged and well-fed, like a foreign body in his own work. That was the point where we all had to realize that there was no going back to Genesis either. Steve Hackett, the band’s Lord Keeper Seals, told me, “Think of Peter as Rael today – impossible!” And he was right. Gabriel was no longer a rebel, certainly not the Puerto Rican punk from the “Lamb”, but a saturated grandmaster, a favorite person, an uncle.
He’s lost weight, that’s good. And he’s in an excellent mood. Talks a lot, in his version of German (and the night before French in Paris), which almost has something of the “Traumtheater” boss Harry Owens in its pathos, it’s about visions, wishes and thoughts. Everything is super nice, one wishes for the cynical Gabriel back, the one from “Not one of Us” or “Intruder”, the eccentric from “I have the touch” or the high priest from “Lay your hands on me” – but all of that is history and we knew that too. Gabriel has found his role. He rests in himself and has full confidence in his band – at the core, of course, Tony Levin, David Rhodes and Manu Katché, complemented by Josh Shpak (wind instruments) and the bowing (!) and background singing (!) Marina Moor and Ayanna Witter-Johnson. Whereby the latter in her duet entry (“Don’t give up”) was a bit too much – the original precariat ballad lives above all from Kate Bush’s un-manneristic and very honestly modeled singing.
Anyway, “So” ….
Ten years ago Gabriel brought his album “So” tutti completti to the stage, following the fashion of the eternally great that was beginning at the time. The result of these summer evenings (even then he was already playing in the Waldbühne) was mixed. Certainly a pleasant dip in lukewarm nostalgia for many, but nothing more. Then there was a break, except for a few concerts that Gabriel played with Sting in North America in 2016.
The “i/o” tour now puts Gabriel in a broader focus again, just like perhaps the last time at the end of the eighties. And he – and his band – pass the test. On the one hand, this is due to the indestructible “So” material, but on the other hand, it is also due to Gabriel’s charisma, which can be felt up to the ranks of every arena, that the really tough risk of going on tour with an almost completely unknown album is not quite effortless, but sovereign carries. The songs are strong, especially “Panopticum” and “Four Kinds of Horses” for the traditionalists and “Love can heal” for their wives. I didn’t actually write the latter. word of honour.
In the end, as expected and hoped for, there is no other way to imagine the great anthem to Stephen Biko, the freedom fighter who was murdered in South African prison in 1977. It is always the last point in the set. Gabriel was already a political artist when Roger Waters was still writing albums about a cold, long before he turned his concerts into agitprop workshops with musical accompaniment… However: Gabriel also signed an appeal to the BBC to boycott the ESC in Israel in 2019 , which brought him close to the anti-Semitic BDS, as well as a remake of the song his band is now playing for the finale.
In 2023, however, “Biko” will be performed again in its originally clear, very authentic version, which tells the story of Stephen Biko’s death in deliberately simple words and is exaggerated by congenial music: in the best sense of the word, a song against oblivion.
One musician after the other, that’s also a tradition, leaves the stage. Only the rhythm remains, like a beating heart. And again the most impressive moment of the evening is the one when you can no longer see Peter Gabriel, but you can feel that he is there.