Peter Gabriel

Based on Wikipedia: Peter Gabriel

The Art of the Escape

In 1975, Peter Gabriel walked away from one of the most successful progressive rock bands in the world. Genesis was selling out arenas, their concept albums were achieving critical acclaim, and Gabriel had become famous for his theatrical performances—wearing fox heads, bat wings, and flower masks on stage. He gave it all up to spend time with his family and, as he put it, to enter his "learning period."

Three years later, he released a song about that very decision. It was called "Solsbury Hill," and it became one of the most enduring anthems about personal transformation in rock history.

But Gabriel's story isn't really about leaving a band. It's about a man who kept finding new ways to reinvent himself—as a musician, a technological pioneer, and a human rights activist who would eventually sit at tables with Nelson Mandela.

The Frustrated Drummer

Peter Brian Gabriel was born on February 13, 1950, in Chobham, a village in Surrey, England. His family background was a curious mix: his mother came from a musical family, while his father was an electrical engineer who owned a dairy farm. Gabriel grew up at Deep Pool Farm, a Victorian manor, which sounds like the setting for a gothic novel rather than the childhood home of a future rock star.

His first musical love was drums. At age ten, he bought a floor tom-tom. When he started his first band at Charterhouse School—an exclusive private boarding school—he sat behind the kit, not in front of a microphone. Mike Rutherford, who would become his bandmate in Genesis, later remarked that Peter was "and still is, I think—a frustrated drummer."

Before he discovered soul music, Gabriel found his voice through an unlikely source: church hymns.

"Hymns played quite a large part," he later explained. "They were the closest I came to soul music before I discovered soul music. There are certain hymns that you can scream your lungs out on, and I used to love that. It was great when you used to get the old shivers down the back."

That image—a young boy in a church pew, bellowing hymns until he got shivers—tells you something essential about Gabriel. He was always chasing that feeling of transcendence, whether through religion, rhythm, or eventually through his own art.

The Birth of Genesis

The story of how Genesis formed reads like something out of a British school drama. At Charterhouse, Gabriel befriended Tony Banks, who played piano. Neither boy was particularly interested in school activities, but they bonded over music and began writing songs together. Gabriel formed a band called Garden Wall, and at their final concert, he wore a kaftan and beads and showered the audience with flower petals picked from neighboring gardens.

He was seventeen years old. The theatrical instinct was already there.

In 1967, Gabriel and Banks connected with two other Charterhouse students, Anthony Phillips and Mike Rutherford, who had been in their own band. They recorded a demo tape together and sent it to Jonathan King, a Charterhouse alumnus who had become a successful musician. King loved what he heard, particularly Gabriel's vocals, and signed the group immediately.

King's first suggestion for a band name? Gabriel's Angels.

The other members vetoed that idea quickly. They settled on King's second suggestion: Genesis.

The Making of a Frontman

Early Genesis was not the band that would later fill stadiums. Their debut album, released in 1968, was a commercial failure. King had pushed them toward straightforward pop, and their first single was essentially a pastiche of the Bee Gees. The band nearly fell apart, with members going their separate ways.

But they regrouped in 1969, deciding to make Genesis a full-time commitment. And Gabriel began to evolve into something more than just a singer.

During their second album, Trespass, Gabriel expanded his role dramatically. He picked up the flute, accordion, tambourine, and bass drum. The reason was practical: he couldn't stand doing nothing during instrumental sections. He would have preferred to play keyboards, but Banks—as Gabriel put it—"was extraordinarily possessive about the keyboards."

Still, the album sold poorly. At one point, Gabriel applied to study at the London School of Film Technique because the band "seemed to be dying."

Then came a moment that changed everything.

On June 19, 1971, during an encore performance, Gabriel took a running jump into the audience, expecting them to catch him. This was before crowd-surfing became a rock concert staple. The audience moved out of the way. Gabriel crashed to the floor and broke his ankle.

He spent the next several shows performing from a wheelchair.

The Theater of Genesis

Genesis shows became famous for something that had nothing to do with broken bones. Gabriel began telling stories between songs—long, improvised narratives that started as a way to cover the silence while the band tuned their instruments. These stories evolved night after night, becoming increasingly elaborate.

Then, in September 1972, during a gig in Dublin, Gabriel disappeared from the stage during an instrumental section. When he reappeared, he was wearing his wife's red dress and a fox head, mimicking the cover of their new album Foxtrot.

The rest of the band had no idea this was coming. They initially thought a fan had invaded the stage.

The incident made front-page news in Melody Maker, one of Britain's leading music magazines. Genesis doubled their performance fee overnight.

Gabriel had discovered something powerful: the combination of music and visual spectacle could capture attention in ways that sound alone could not. By 1973, a typical Genesis show featured Gabriel in fluorescent makeup, capes, and bat wings for one song; a helmet, chest plate, and shield for another; a crown of thorns and flower mask for their epic "Supper's Ready"; and an old man mask for "The Musical Box."

This was progressive rock as theater, years before arena rock became synonymous with elaborate staging.

The Departure

Gabriel's final album with Genesis was The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, a double concept album about a Puerto Rican youth named Rael wandering through a surreal spiritual journey in New York City. Gabriel insisted on writing all the lyrics himself—a break from the band's collaborative tradition that created immediate tension.

Then his wife had a difficult pregnancy. Their first daughter's birth was complicated, and Gabriel needed time away. The other band members, laser-focused on their music, were not sympathetic. Gabriel later described it as "a really unsympathetic handling of my dealing with a family crisis." Mike Rutherford eventually admitted that they had been "overly fixated on their music and were very unhelpful."

During a tour stop in Cleveland, Ohio, Gabriel told the band he was leaving.

"We could all see it coming," Rutherford recalled.

The music press had increasingly focused on Gabriel's costumes and theatrics rather than the band's musicianship, which irritated everyone else in Genesis. Gabriel was becoming the story, and the band was becoming his backing group.

On August 15, 1975, Gabriel released a statement to the press titled "Out, Angels Out." He explained his departure, his disillusionment with the music business, and his desire to spend time with his family.

Fans were stunned. Critics wondered if Genesis could survive without him.

The answer was yes—drummer Phil Collins reluctantly took over lead vocals after the band auditioned four hundred singers and found none suitable. Collins would eventually transform Genesis into an even more commercially successful pop act, though one with a very different character.

Starting Over

Gabriel called his time away from music his "learning period." He took piano lessons. He studied music theory. He worked on demos with a friend named Martin Hall, eventually writing around twenty songs.

In 1977, he released his solo debut. He called it simply Peter Gabriel.

In fact, he called his next three albums Peter Gabriel as well—same title, same typeface, only a different photograph on the cover. Fans distinguish them by their artwork: the first is often called "Car," the second "Scratch," the third "Melt," the fourth "Security."

"The idea is to do it like a magazine, which will only come out once a year," Gabriel explained. "So it's the same title, the same lettering in the same place; only the photo is different."

The lead single from his debut was "Solsbury Hill." Named after a real hill in Somerset where Gabriel had what he described as a spiritual experience, the song became an instant classic—an autobiographical account of choosing the unknown over the comfortable.

"It's about being prepared to lose what you have for what you might get," Gabriel said. "It's about letting go."

The Sound of the Eighties

By his third album, Gabriel was experimenting in ways that would shape the sound of an entire decade.

He had developed an interest in African music and drum machines. He also made an unusual demand during recording: no cymbals. He wanted to create more sonic space for keyboards and synthesizers, and cymbals—with their sustained wash of high frequencies—would fill up exactly the space he wanted to keep open.

This constraint led to an accident that became historic.

While recording drums for a track called "Intruder," Gabriel and his engineer stumbled upon a technique called gated reverb. The science is complicated, but the effect is distinctive: drums that explode with massive reverb, then cut off abruptly instead of fading naturally. It creates a punchy, dramatic sound that feels both huge and tight.

Phil Collins, who was playing drums on the session, brought this technique to his own debut solo single, "In the Air Tonight." That song became a massive hit, and the gated reverb drum sound became one of the defining sonic signatures of 1980s pop and rock music.

So when you hear that distinctive drum sound in countless eighties songs—that explosive, tightly-controlled boom—you're hearing something that emerged from Peter Gabriel's experimental recording sessions and his strange insistence on banning cymbals.

The Breakthrough

Gabriel's third album reached number one in the United Kingdom. But it was his fifth album that transformed him from a critically acclaimed artist into a global superstar.

So, released in 1986, became Gabriel's commercial breakthrough. It went triple platinum in the UK and five times platinum in the United States. Its biggest single, "Sledgehammer," won nine MTV Video Music Awards in 1987—a record at the time.

According to a 2011 report from Time magazine, "Sledgehammer" became the most played music video of all time on MTV.

The video was remarkable for its stop-motion animation, which surrounded Gabriel's face with dancing fruits, animated figures, and surreal imagery. It was playful and strange—a world away from the straightforward performance videos that dominated early MTV—and it showcased Gabriel's understanding that visuals could be as important as sound.

He had learned that lesson two decades earlier, in a fox head and his wife's red dress.

Beyond Music

But Gabriel was never content to be just a musician. In 1980, he released "Biko," a song about Steve Biko, the South African anti-apartheid activist who was beaten to death by police in 1977. It was one of the first major pop songs to directly address apartheid, and it established Gabriel as an artist willing to take political stands.

In 1982, he co-founded the World of Music, Arts and Dance festival—better known as WOMAD—which brought traditional music from around the globe to Western audiences. He launched Real World Records as a label dedicated to releasing and promoting world music.

He co-founded OD2, one of the first online music download services, making him an unlikely pioneer of digital music distribution years before iTunes.

In 1988, he participated in Amnesty International's Human Rights Now! tour. In 1992, he co-founded Witness, a human rights organization that provides video cameras and training to people documenting abuses around the world. The idea was simple but powerful: if atrocities are recorded, they become harder to deny or ignore.

Then, in 2007, working alongside Nelson Mandela and Richard Branson, Gabriel helped develop The Elders—an organization of distinguished public figures working for peace and human rights. The group has included former presidents, Nobel laureates, and humanitarian leaders from around the world.

For all of this, Gabriel received the Man of Peace award from Nobel Peace Prize laureates in 2006. Time magazine named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world in 2008.

Recognition

The music industry has given Gabriel nearly every major honor. Three Brit Awards. Six Grammy Awards. Thirteen MTV Video Music Awards. The Polar Music Prize—sometimes called the "Nobel Prize of Music." Lifetime achievement awards from Q magazine and the Ivor Novello Awards.

He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice: once in 2010 as a member of Genesis, and again in 2014 as a solo artist. Being inducted twice is rare—it acknowledges that Gabriel had two distinct, hall-of-fame-worthy careers.

AllMusic, the comprehensive music database, summed up his legacy by calling him "one of rock's most ambitious, innovative musicians, as well as one of its most political."

The Through Line

What connects the schoolboy who bought a floor tom-tom at age ten to the elder statesman working with Nelson Mandela? What connects the young singer screaming church hymns to get shivers down his spine to the producer releasing traditional music from Madagascar and Pakistan on his record label?

Perhaps it's that Gabriel was never satisfied with staying in one place. He left Genesis at the peak of their success because he needed to grow in new directions. He banned cymbals from his recordings because he wanted to discover new sounds. He founded a human rights organization because he believed that music and art were not enough—that direct action was required.

When Gabriel jumped into that audience in 1971, expecting to be caught and instead breaking his ankle, he was already demonstrating something essential about himself. He was willing to take the leap, even when the landing was uncertain.

Sometimes the audience moves out of the way. Sometimes you end up performing from a wheelchair. But you keep performing.

And sometimes—as with "Solsbury Hill" and "Sledgehammer" and WOMAD and The Elders—the leap takes you somewhere extraordinary.