Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Peter Gabriel In His Own Words by Peter Gabriel "In Your Eyes" lyrics. In your eyes The light the heat In your eyes I am complete In your eyes I see the doorway to a thousand churches In your eyes The resolution of all the fruitless searches In your eyes I see the light and the heat In your eyes Oh, I want to be that complete I want to touch the light The heat I see in your eyes. Love, I don't like to see so much pain So much wasted and this moment keeps slipping away I get so tired of working so hard for our survival I look to the time with you to keep me awake and alive. And all my instincts, they return And the grand facade, so soon will burn Without a noise, without my pride I reach out from the inside. In your eyes The light the heat In your eyes I am complete In your eyes I see the doorway to a thousand churches In your eyes The resolution of all the fruitless searches In your eyes I see the light and the heat In your eyes Oh, I want to be that complete I want to touch the light, The heat I see in your eyes In your eyes in your eyes In your eyes in your eyes In your eyes in your eyes. How Peter Gabriel ditched the masks and made the album that changed his life. “It was important to him that he step out and be recognised as an individual talent,” legendary producer Bob Ezrin says of working on Peter Gabriel’s debut solo album. “Peter is a larger-than-life personality. Even though he presents in a fairly gentle, humble way, there’s so much fire, energy and creativity. There are many different personalities in there that he has to be able to let out. The only way for him to do that without constraint was to leave Genesis and do it on his own.” Gabriel had announced to his former Genesis bandmates/schoolfriends during the band’s epic The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway tour of 1975 that his Genesis years were done. Taking time out to be with his wife and new child, after the tour was finished and he’d cut the cord, he felt both liberated and guilty. He’d felt “cooped up inside the success we had wanted”, he wrote in an open letter to fans, “and it affected attitudes and spirit”. He added: “There is no animosity.” As drummer Phil Collins took over as Genesis’s lead vocalist, and the band triumphed with A Trick Of The Tail – an album that many fans now consider to be the best of the band’s early period – Gabriel pondered his next move. “I didn’t know whether I had messed up other people’s lives as well as, potentially, my own,” he recalls in the band’s biography Chapter & Verse . “Then when the band had more success without me, I felt as if people were re-evaluating the old work and thinking: ‘Maybe Peter was just the guy who wore the masks.’” Ezrin had first laid eyes on Gabriel’s masks years earlier, when Genesis had opened for Lou Reed in Toronto. “Usually you ignore the opening act, but I was spellbound,” he recalls. “I met Lou after the show to talk about producing Berlin , but when I got home I said to my wife: ‘I’m really looking forward to working with Lou. But boy, I wanna meet that kid with the flower on his head!’” For his part, Gabriel deliberately began writing songs that sounded a whole world away from his former band’s baroque prog rock epics. “When I started writing seriously again, I tried to come up with songs that would be as different as possible from the Genesis sound,” Gabriel said. “It was a scary thing to put an album together with other musicians… I was concerned about how I was going to express what I wanted. I had no idea how to communicate with real session musicians, who seemed like strange, foreign people.” Ezrin, who had made his name working with Alice Cooper, Lou Reed and Kiss, and went on to produce Pink Floyd’s The Wall , had been approached by Gabriel’s management to see if he’d be interested in working with him. He was. Ezrin reckons that while recording in Toronto, he and the musicians brought Gabriel out of his shell. “From my point of view the sessions were easy,” he recalls. “From Peter’s, I think not so much. He wasn’t used to being with someone so North American and… aggressive as me. I came from a tradition of having to get things done quickly, on time and on budget, making decisions, sticking to them. Peter was at a stage where he wanted to be more experimental. He’s said that he maybe would’ve been happier if he’d been allowed more time and latitude to try a few other things. “But we had a fabulous rapport. There was no fighting whatsoever. He was a joy to work with, so smart and witty. It was just that sometimes he was a little overwhelmed by the speed and intensity of the sessions. A British interviewer came out to Toronto to meet him; then the headline declared: 'A Mumble-Free Gabriel!' "With us he developed a new confidence and swagger. Prior to that he was a bit shy. He had to learn to shout to get through to us. There were just so many characters in their own right involved.” Ezrin praises the contributions of guitarists Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, bassist Tony Levin, synth player Larry Fast and other key players. “We put a fantastic band together. They were like the Dirty Dozen – each of them was a psychopathic expert in their particular field of destruction. It felt like letting the crack criminals out of prison and putting them together in a gang for the Big Job. “Peter said: ‘Well, could I at least have one Brit?’ So he brought in [King Crimson guitarist Robert] Fripp, which was great. Fripp was a totally buttoned-down English gentleman, with these American wild men, yet they all got on very well. Peter stayed with many of them for years afterwards." The album, titled simply Peter Gabriel (aka Car ), released in February 1977, sold well enough and established Gabriel as more than just ‘the guy who wore the masks’. From it, the Top 10 hit Solsbury Hill obliquely referenced his split from Genesis (‘ Thought my life was in a rut… which connection should I cut ’); Modern Love packed a rockriff punch; and grandiose epics like Here Comes The Flood and Slowburn proved his ambitions remained lofty. Ezrin recalls that arranging the barber-shop quartet for Excuse Me was “thrilling”, and cites Humdrum as the most stirring moment. “He opened his mouth and it was like the voice of God. I burst into tears. It was among the most beautiful things I’d ever heard. That’s a great album. It’s timeless.” Anne Sexton, Peter Gabriel, and the Dark Lure of ‘Mercy Street’ Conventional wisdom tells us that suicide serves one primary purpose. It’s the complete end of everything for the tortured soul. Suffering stops, catastrophes cancel, debts die. For the unconventional, the artists who choose this way out, suicide also casts a glow over all the work they leave in their wake. Ernest Hemingway takes a shotgun to the head in 1961, and all the macho posturing in between every line of his short stories and novels takes on new meaning. Kurt Cobain does the same, in 1994, and his visual and aural image of grunge and despair is realized. For the conventional and mundane among us, suicide only amplifies the suffering of survivors who are suddenly alone in a world of strangers. For the artist, suicide becomes the primary theme of all their work. The blueprint for the tragic post WWII female poet was forged in stone by Sylvia Plath, who took her own life on 11 February 1963. In many photos she came off as equal parts innocent and alluring, the hint of a strawberry blonde coquettish flirt hard to disguise under all the processed conformity of the ’50s. She was a Boston born and raised daughter of relative privilege whose father was a Boston University entomologist. He died in 1940, shortly after Sylvia’s 8 th birthday, so readers (then and now) of her vicious poem “Daddy” (1960) might wonder about the source from which she drew her angry inspiration. She spent time at McClean’s Hospital, the legendary location for mixed-up children of the emotional twilight zone. She excelled in her time at Smith College. There was a burgeoning and successful writing career, chronic depression, marriage to poet Ted Hughes, and death halfway through her 30 th year, at her chosen time and on her chosen terms. Anne Sexton took up the mantle of tragedy and ran with it. Three years after Plath’s 1963 death, Sexton’s collection Live or Die won the Pulitzer Prize. Her two-act play Mercy Street was produced in 1969. Her first posthumous collection, 45 Mercy Street , published two years after her suicide, continued the themes of searching, longing, wandering into the darkness and surrendering to it because the alternative — dealing and managing — proved impossible. Like Plath, Sexton was Boston-area born and raised. By all apparent proof she was equally defiant and dangerous, comparably talented. Plath was the visual lightness, and Sexton was the moody dark-haired beauty who sometimes modeled, took classes with Robert Lowell at Boston University, and managed to stay tethered to some sort of corporeal identity longer than probably expected. Consider these lines from 45 Mercy Street, as the speaker seems to realize she’s not going to reach the promise of the address: “Pull the shades down-/ I don’t care/ Bolt the door, mercy,/ erase the number…” “I am rowing, I am rowing/ Though the oarlocks stick and are rusty…” In his lyrics for “Mercy Street”, Peter Gabriel seems to understand that he cannot be so cryptic. He needs to match words with tone (droning or not), and he needs to combine influences. Though named after part of one Sexton poem title, “Mercy Street” also draws energy and imagery from The Awful Rowing Toward God , where the inevitable one-way trip towards the center offers an ending from which there is no escape. “Let’s take the boat out,” he sings. “Wait until darkness comes… Words support like bone.” Secrets are confessed to a priest. There’s a warm after- effect to kissing Mary’s lips. There’s a clever play with words in the chorus. The listener thinks that Mercy Street is where you’re inside out , but instead the line is a command, a verb, an implication that Mercy Street (if you ever get there) will allow you to be your true self: “Dreaming of Mercy Street/ Wear your inside out/ Dreaming of mercy/ In your daddy’s arms again.” This is where Sylvia Plath will drift away and stay to herself, quiet between the covers of her novel The Bell Jar or absorbed by Gwyneth Paltrow’s portrayal in the 2003 film Sylvia. Like Virginia Woolf (as seen in Nicole Kidman’s portrayal in the 2002 film The Hours ), suicide was the romantic conclusion, the logical end result to a life of personal struggle, of dancing with demons long enough to light the spark that would guarantee literary immortality. For all those women, their work cannot be understood without first confronting the suicides. No matter how many volumes of armchair psychoanalysis and film adaptations have been written about their work, they suffer from a sense of judgement and superiority. We know how suicide biographies end, and determining the clinical source of the sadness only disrespects the work. Gabriel’s 1986 album So was his fifth solo release since leaving the band Genesis. It was his first non-eponymously titled album, and arguably his most accessible collection of songs. The love song “In Your Eyes” would later be immortalized in the 1989 film Say Anything, and the dance tunes “Big Time” and “Sledgehammer” were perfectly evoked in striking, innovative music videos . “ Red Rain” was a politicized plea about global disaster and pending apocalypse, and “Don’t Give Up” (sung with Kate Bush) mixed his depressing verses with her plaintive, hopeful, soaring chorus. Add the experimental songs “This Is the Picture” (Excellent Birds), with Laurie Anderson, and “We Do What We’re Told” (Milgram’s 37) , about the infamous 1963 psychological conditioning experiments conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram. This was an album that mattered, creating college radio songs with infectious dance beats that more often than not resonated with a moody strangeness. The most remarkable thing about So is that it managed to hit all targets of mid-’80s era audience demographics and never compromise the artist’s singular vision. Before So, with such solo tracks as 1982’s “Shock the Monkey”, (ostensibly about shock therapy but apparently really a song about jealousy), and 1980’s “Family Snapshot” (definitively about political assassination), Gabriel had never shied away from dark, deep, difficult themes more suitable for pale brooding liberal arts or theater majors. In Mercy Street , side two track two, Gabriel managed to build something haunting and beautiful from an idea so dark and lonely. Directed by Matt Mahurin and screened only a few times on MTV, this black and white video is worlds away from the splashy fun of “Big Time” and “Sledgehammer”. A man is rowing something out towards a mid-point on a lake. Is it human? Is it cargo? A woman is preparing for her end, carrying out the rituals of her Catholic faith. There’s no apparent connection between these two themes. By video’s end, the man remains on the boat but the identity of the other presence remains unknown. For some, the video, a tribute to Sexton, was “…homage, elegy, pastiche and biography.” Everything is hidden. “The song itself is unpredictable, based on a drone that allows for various materials to be brought in and out of the mix… Mahurin’s imagery and Gabriel’s music share an affinity of tone and affect…” Unlike many of the other big MTV hits at the time, (including Gabriel’s), “Mercy Street” made the viewer work for an end result that remains elusive. None of this is easy because nothing about the subject is convenient or comfortable. Why, then, is it hard to forget? The simple answer is that sometimes the greatest art is in response to somebody else’s pain. Was Gabriel reaching out to this woman from beyond in order to assure her that she could have been okay had she stayed with us? Sometimes the results are disastrous (think Don McLean’s sappy “Starry, Starry Night”, about Vincent Van Gogh, with the line “You took your life like lovers often do” followed later by “This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you”). It’s difficult not to be entranced and seduced by Sexton and her mastery of and comfort with the camera. She was made for black and white documentary. Look at her perfectly chiseled face, dark hair flowing as she gestures and performs. There was nothing shrinking about this poet when she was on, nothing submissive, making the end result of her final choice that much more tragic. Poetry in all its forms can be a tricky, difficult beast, obtuse and accessible and ponderous at the same time. The romance of the tortured poet who chooses their own time and place to slip this mortal coil is a guaranteed ticket to literary immortality. The male writer suicide (among many being Hemingway, Mishima, John Berryman) is often more quickly forgiven than the female. The arguments for song lyrics as a legitimate poetic form are too tired to re-hash. Sexton took her life on 4 October1974, a little more than a month before her 47 th birthday. Gabriel continued after 1986’s So to sporadically write and perform challenging music and film scores that tapped into the dark recesses of mortality, temptation, fear and love. There were no more major hits. He had his time at the top of music video stardom, and then it was over. Somewhere, somehow, Gabriel and Sexton with her father are still searching for Mercy Street, riding in the boat during twilight, awaiting what happens next. Peter Gabriel: In His Own Words by Peter Gabriel. This was the exact moment Peter Gabriel showed us what he was capable of, says Chris Roberts. Research for this piece – a few clicks – tells me this is "generally regarded as Gabriel’s finest record”. I had no idea. My impression was that it sold well on the back of the hits 'Games Without Frontiers' and 'Biko', but that its chilly jaggedness was too much for the consensus and that it was only fully appreciated by freaks like us. I’d assumed So was his best-loved album, because by then Hollywood were using his material in movies and the dreadful, plodding 'Sledgehammer' had that ubiquitous, admittedly pioneering, video. Over the course of the 80s Gabriel got very successful and revered and politically correct, and lost what made him unique. He got so big and benign and respected that he couldn’t risk confessing any more, wouldn’t document the pirouettes of his hungry psyche. What made him unique is all over 1980’s Peter Gabriel 3 to the point of making it sticky, clammy. The third successive solo album to be called, officially, Peter Gabriel, it attracted the nickname Melt, because of its Hipgnosis sleeve. It’s some crazy shit. Arty prog-pop. Funk in negative. Depressed, romantic, twitchy, paranoid. You look in its eyes and you fear for its safety, and maybe your own. Here be monsters, in icy, literate, tales of stalkers, assassins, persecuted immigrants, ordinary people who fear they’ll do some damage one fine day, outsiders all. It reveals fresh treasures and kinks even 40 years on. At this time, remember, Gabriel was still trying to lay the ghost of Genesis. He was more identified with the band’s earlier, baroque work than he was with his own. He was the man who’d pondered, “A flower??” in the 26-minute 'Supper’s Ready' while wearing a fox head and a red ballgown. He’d punned and fretted his way through four sides of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway . He was theatre rock. But then he’d killed Ziggy. The first two solo albums – despite moments like “Solsbury Hill” and “Modern Love” – had begun to define him in a separate space, but not yet clarified what was going on in that space. Besides, far from feuding and falling out with the remaining members of Genesis, he was on good terms with them. Phil Collins appears on drums here, as he does on so many exquisite albums of the era, putting down markers despite the world of music journalism’s lazy, petty, perpetual loathing of him. PG3 is where Gabriel ascends, where he hits the perfect point on the curve between artistic ambition and accessibility, between dark and light, between floridness and reticence. Songs, themes, sonics and presence come together to create a cohesive yet many-limbed piece which pitches up somewhere between Lodger and Scary Monsters . Challenged by the NME at the time about Bowie comparisons, he replied defensively, “I get the feeling he’s more calculating. There’s not too much coincidence emanating. With me there is still quite a large functioning of randomness, accident and mistakes.” Going on to praise Bowie’s willingness to keep moving, he added, “You must let go of what you’ve got, cause if you try and clutch on to something which you think is yours, it withers and dies.” It would be facile to pin this album as an anti-Genesis statement though: much of it is every bit as self-important. It’s just leaner, sharper, quicker to make its points. It’s speed (with all the nervous glances over the shoulder), not dope, not comfortable or relaxing. While this will not turn into a detailed discussion of drum sounds, it has to be mentioned that the outstanding, ominous opener 'Intruder' is where the “gated drums” technique which so dominated and ultimately defiled the subsequent decade was invented. Gabriel and (the then very fashionable) co-producer Steve Lillywhite banned cymbals, asked Collins and Jerry Marotta to adopt a less-is-more approach, and found the results to be sinister, dramatic and arresting. (Freeing up the higher frequencies thus allowed room for exploration that few artists had realised was possible. They used the spaces for creaks, screeches, whistles, sirens and found sounds that are just as important to the record’s feel as the conventional keyboards, guitars, etc. This subsequently became common practice for a while, then it wasn’t, and now – in a period where music has a chronic lack of drama - it would be good if it was again.) 'Intruder' is an extraordinary piece of creepy-sexy art-rock. The protagonist is an up-to-no-good stalker, breaking and entering, part-Hitchcock, part-care-in-the-community. The detail of this sad-scary character’s lusts and motivations is intense. “I’m certain you know I am there. I like the touch and the smell of all the pretty dresses you wear.” To ensure that this weirdo cannot be confused with the avuncular do-gooder we now perceive Peter Gabriel as, "Intruder come and go and leave his mark.” Ugh. A bold, unsettling, sleazy and poetic gambit. Menace. No glib catharsis. 'No Self-Control' – a single, bizarrely – is a confessional of a man teetering on the verge of a nervous collapse. “I don’t know how to stop. I’m so nervous in the night. there are always hidden silences.” It’s a compelling construct of synths and riffs, of hooks and descent, echoes and loops, beautifully structured and subtly aggressive. After the brief instrumental respite 'Start', in rages 'I Don’t Remember', another examination of mental frailty. “I’m all mixed up, I got nothing to say. ” Perhaps more conventionally rock-pop, it’s yet riddled with quirks and counterpoints. Gabriel’s scorched, frayed voice(s), as throughout, are raw yet tender, deft yet decisive. Our next misfit is the would-be hit man of 'Family Snapshot', a Lee Harvey Oswald manqué who plans to assassinate a celebrity (a president?) because it’ll make him famous, amid the "camera crews” and “peak- time viewing”. As social documentary/ satire it seems old-hat now, but this was 40 years ago, two decades before Big Brother . Like most of the album, it goes for big statements with delicious knack for understatement. 'And Through The Wire' is relatively straight-ahead rock, but after the repeated teaser of “I want you”, that’s one doozey of a chorus, and he sings the title line like he’s gargling emeralds. You’ll know 'Games Without Frontiers' (with a barely audible Kate Bush on backing vocals). As an anti- war lyric it’s facile; as a pop song it’s a peach. 'Not One Of Us' is a prescient piss-take of the NIMBY anti-immigration lobby. “A foreign body. and a foreign mind. never welcome in the land of the blind.” Then comes the track which grabs you last but, after many listens, grabs you hardest. 'Lead A Normal Life' is barely there, a whisper, a rivulet. It can be interpreted as an asylum inmate’s murmurings as he glimpses the trees. It haunts, in your peripheral vision. You keep returning to it, like a flicker of a memory, willing it to catch flame. Grand finale 'Biko' signals where Gabriel was next to travel, becoming pop music’s patron saint of all things worthy and earnest. That said, his story of the murder of the apartheid activist, even with its big singalong coda, is lyrically extremely restrained and pointed, eschewing see-how-clever-I-am imagery: “The man is dead, the man is dead”. And again, one must recall that the first people to champion good causes should not be blamed for those who later jump the bandwagon to further their own careers. This is not Geri Halliwell posing with Nelson Mandela. This is a guy singing about something few people in the Western world had then heard of. Musically alive and daring (we haven’t even mentioned the contributions of Robert Fripp, saxophonist Dick Morissey, John Giblin’s gallumping, gorgeous period bass or, er, Paul Weller’s guitar cameo), lyrically and vocally astute, this is an auteur’s album, with sound and thought and feeling in perfect step. It confirmed him as not just “the ex-Genesis frontman”. It ensured he wasn’t swept away by punk’s blinkered absolutism. It should have been the beginning of even better things, but wasn’t quite. In 1980, for one album only – a murky, mirror-gazing masterpiece - Peter Gabriel was the finest exponent of art-rock in the world. Savour it, with the seductive, sentient shudder it prompts. Peter Gabriel: 11 surprising talks. We asked Peter Gabriel what TEDTalks he thinks will still be making waves in 25 years, like his classic 1986 album, "So." Here are his picks, from printing a human kidney to the learning revolution. MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld talks about his Fab Lab — a low-cost lab that lets people build things they need using digital and analog tools. It's a simple idea with powerful results. Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help. (NOTE: This talk was given in 2011, and this field of science has developed quickly since then. Read "Criticisms & updates" below for more details.) Surgeon Anthony Atala demonstrates an early-stage experiment that could someday solve the organ-donor problem: a 3D printer that uses living cells to output a transplantable kidney. Using similar technology, Dr. Atala's young patient Luke Massella received an engineered bladder 10 years ago; we meet him onstage. Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks brings our attention to Charles Bonnet syndrome — when visually impaired people experience lucid hallucinations. He describes the experiences of his patients in heartwarming detail and walks us through the biology of this under-reported phenomenon. In this poignant, funny follow-up to his fabled 2006 talk, Sir Ken Robinson makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning — creating conditions where kids' natural talents can flourish. Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. An astonishing story. At age 14, in poverty and famine, a Malawian boy built a windmill to power his family's home. Now at 22, William Kamkwamba, who speaks at TED, here, for the second time, shares in his own words the moving tale of invention that changed his life. In war we often see only the frontline stories of soldiers and combat. AT TEDGlobal 2010, Zainab Salbi tells powerful "backline" stories of women who keep everyday life going during conflicts, and calls for women to have a place at the negotiating table once fighting is over. Hans Rosling reframes 10 years of UN data with his spectacular visuals, lighting up an astonishing — and under-reported — piece of front-page good news: We're winning the war against child death. Along the way, he debunks one flawed approach to stats that blots out such vital stories. Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity. As a democratic revolution led by tech-empowered young people sweeps the Arab world, Wadah Khanfar, the head of Al Jazeera, shares a profoundly optimistic view of what's happening in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and beyond — at this powerful moment when people realized they could step out of their houses and ask for change.