Peter Gabriel: Genuine Genius

Peter Gabriel: The Genesis of the Genius
Peter Gabriel has been making his mark on the music world for nearly 40 years. Born Peter Brian Gabriel on February 13, 1950 in Chobham, Surrey, England, Gabriel was still a teenager when he started gaining recognition as an artist and musician in Europe, and by the age of twenty-five he had taken the music world by storm.

After forming Genesis with school classmates Mike Rutherford, Tony Banks, Anthony Phillips, and Chris Stewart in 1967, Peter Gabriel embarked on a professional journey that would earn him acclaim as a musician on several fronts, respect as a political activist, and international regard as a humanitarian.

As Genesis quickly became one of the most respected bands in Europe, a young Peter Gabriel learned to test the boundaries of progressive rock and pop music, and to push the envelope of showmanship and stage production. Famous for his stage presence, incorporating flamboyant costumes and intricate storytelling into the band's live shows, Genesis created an enormous buzz, starting with their first album, From Genesis to Revelation, released in 1969.

Over the course of the next five years, Genesis would record and release four more studio albums, in addition to the impressive live disc Genesis Live. During this time, it was becoming increasingly clear to the public, and to the band, that Peter Gabriel and his dramatic, charismatic writing style and stage performance was becoming the main focus of the attention that the previously more collaborative Genesis was receiving. This caused tension in the band.

In 1974, Genesis released it's sixth studio album, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. An intricate concept album, and the brainchild of Peter Gabriel, Lamb provided Genesis with their biggest success to date, a critical darling, and the nail in the coffin of Gabriel's tenure with the band. The tension between Peter Gabriel and the other members of Genesis, coupled with directions that Gabriel wanted to take his music that diverged from the path the band was heading down led to his decision to split from Genesis. In 1975, at the completion of the tour promoting The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Peter Gabriel left the band.

Peter Gabriel: D.I.Y.
Peter Gabriel released his first solo album, Peter Gabriel, in 1977. The album included the track "Solsbury Hill," a song written about his departure from Genesis, which would become his first solo hit and establish him as a credible solo artist. Peter Gabriel reached number 38 on the charts in the U.S., and made it up to number 7 on the UK charts.

The titles of Peter Gabriel's next two solo albums, released in 1978 and 1980, raised some eyebrows. Against studio pressure, he insisted on naming his second and third albums Peter Gabriel. In order to differentiate between the discs, the three eponymous Peter Gabriel solo albums have become commonly referred to as Car, Scratch, and Melt in reference to the effects on the images of Gabriel on the album covers.

A song from his third Peter Gabriel album alerted the world that the musician had more on his mind than generating pop records. The track "Biko" was written about the death of black anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko, who died of massive head wounds while in police custody in South Africa in 1977. The song served as a glimpse into the mind of the musician who's own political and nonviolence activism would soon find some very public outlets, and also exposed his deep interest in World Music.

Peter Gabriel's solo success continued to build. His fourth solo album was originally entitled Peter Gabriel as well, but was released in the United States under the title Security, and that title has stuck, breaking the chain of Gabriel's eponymous albums. Security included the hit song "Shock the Monkey," his first single after the explosion of music videos. The video for "Shock the Monkey" was an enormous success on MTV and other video programs, and Peter Gabriel's emergence into the world of video would show him to be a trailblazing auteur, and video would later become the vehicle for one of his greatest humanitarian efforts.

Peter Gabriel's fifth studio album, So, was a monster hit in 1986, and launched him into the stratosphere of super-stardom. With four top ten singles, including the number one hits "Sledgehammer" and "In Your Eyes," So was one of the biggest selling albums of the 1980s. Following the success of So with the solidly selling and artistically superior Us in 1992 and, after a ten year hiatus between solo studio albums, the moody, introspective Up in 2002, Peter Gabriel has released seven solo studio albums.

Around studio albums, Peter Gabriel released three live albums, (Plays Live, Secret World Live, and Growing Up Live), and three compilations (Shaking the Tree, Revisited, and Hit). He has contributed to several movie soundtracks, and has scored the films Birdy, The Last Temptation of Christ and Rabbit Proof Fence. Passion, his score to Martin Scorsese's 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ is regarded by many critics as one of the greatest motion picture soundtracks of all time.

In 2000, Peter Gabriel released OVO, the soundtrack to a musical he wrote and staged for performance on New Year's Eve 1999, at the Millennium Dome in London.

Peter Gabriel: Signal to Noise
In his 1980 song "Biko," Peter Gabriel composed a striking depiction of the occasion of anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko's death while in police custody in South Africa. The song was a catalyst for many artists, including Little Stephen Van Zandt, who credits the song as an inspiration for his song "Sun City," which was recorded by the mega super group Artists United Against Apartheid in 1985 to draw attention to the plight of black South Africans under apartheid. Peter Gabriel participated in the project.

Peter Gabriel's activism has branched out into several distinct areas. A long-time advocate of nonviolence and exposing political persecution, he has been an active participant in Amnesty International.

In 1992, Peter Gabriel founded WITNESS, and organization that partners with human rights groups to provide video cameras to document human rights violations around the world. As they state in their mission, WITNESS "empowers human rights defenders to use video to shine a light on those most affected by human rights violations, and to transform personal stories of abuse into powerful tools of justice."

Passionate about the promotion of world music, Peter Gabriel has worked with a host of international artists, regularly incorporating them into his stage shows and studio albums in his quest to educate the Western world about talents they are rarely exposed to. After the release of his The Last Temptation of Christ soundtrack Passion, Gabriel released a disc entitled Passion Sources. It did not contain any original material by Gabriel, but, rather, was an album of music from the Middle East that inspired his work on the soundtrack.

In 1989, Peter Gabriel created the Real World Studios and Real World record label dedicated to the recording and distribution of world music artists that otherwise might not find exposure in the West. He has also been a driving force behind the WOMAD movement. An acronym for World of Music, Arts and Dance, WOMAD holds multiple festivals annually to promote world music throughout the Western hemisphere.

Peter Gabriel: Growing Up
As he has with events of the world, Peter Gabriel has infused his music with inspiration from his personal life. His first single as a solo artist "Solsbury Hill" was written about his break with Genesis. After splitting from his first wife, Jill, Gabriel began a long-term relationship with actress Rosanna Arquette. His enduring hit "In Your Eyes" was written about his relationship with Arquette, and several songs from his album Us were written about the couple's break up.

The last few years have been big ones for Peter Gabriel. In support of his most recent studio album, Up, he embarked on an extensive tour, and his two adult children, daughters Anna and Melanie traveled with him. Melanie Gabriel sang backing vocals on the tour, and Anna Gabriel filmed it for the documentary Growing Up on Tour: A Family Portrait. Currently married to second wife Maebh, Peter Gabriel had a new baby, a son named Isaac born in 2002.