BY Chris Rubin [carubin@aol.com]
Time magazine may have bestowed the title of ``Renaissance Man'' on the head of another art rocker, but it would have fit equally well atop Peter Gabriel. He left Genesis in the mid-'70s, just as they were heading to arena-level success, to take time off and, as he explained, grow cabbages. He reinvented himself in the more than two decade since as a multimedia artist and innovator, champion of human rights and proponent of world musics.
Gabriel founded WOMAD and the Real World label, and has been active in Amnesty International and Witness, a program dedicated to documenting and fighting human rights abuses around the globe. He has had both critical and popular success with his subsequent releases, from 1978's Peter Gabriel through 1992's US and 1994's Secret World Live, including the soundtracks to Birdy and The Last Temptation of Christ.
On this winter day at the office of his New York publicist, Gabriel, who is in New York to talk about Eve, his new CD ROM, is almost unrecognizable, with a shaved head topped only by centimeters of gray stubble. Of course, in the past, he's not only shaved his head but also painted his body silver and worn a rubber suit with an inflatable, exploding penis, all for the sake of his art.
When will the new CD finally be out?
I'm aiming at February next year. There's no real reason why I shouldn't make that...but I'm ...
Notorious for not making deadlines...
Notoriously slow. Deadlines are things that we pass through on the way to finishing.
With a subsequent tour at some point?
Yes.
How do you compare working on a CD ROM to just making music? And is the CD ROM format as interesting and as durable?
It may be different. To me, it's a platform, and if you get interesting minds together, and if there's stuff to be communicated, the specific medium is less important. But I really think it's about content and not the carrier. So that if you get something that touches people, that means something to people, the chances are they will go back. And even on the games level, in the scene that's retro games at the moment, like Pong, these are things that had some appeal to people and it didn't matter how simple the technology was. And I think the same may apply here.
You aren't exactly prolific. But over the next year or so, an unusually large amount of music from you will be coming out. In addition to Eve and your next solo project, you're also involved in the first of the upcoming Genesis box sets. Is it true that you've re-recorded some of the vocals on a live version of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway?
Yes. Well I was jumping around enthusiastically in costumes for that concert. So they found that on these live tapes the vocal tracks were very weak in places. So we re-did some of it, and there's a whole song which we've had to go re-record.
Which one?
I'm not sure I'm supposed to say. Probably not. I'm not usually that guarded with information.
Can you tell me any rarities, things from the past that are on there?
Yes, there are some old things from the first demos we ever did at school.
Are limitations placed on the artist a good or bad thing?
In some ways often I think if an artist is told, 'You can do anything you want with an unlimited budget,' that's a terrible fate, because they don't have to think creatively. If you're told that you can only use these two things, you've got ten minutes and $2, suddenly you've got to start using mental resources much more. We need to be conscious of limitations, that those are creative tools, and boredom and fatigue are creative tools, and they need to have their recognition and their place in the creative process.
What kinds of techniques do you use to enhance creativity?
I used to have an isolation tank, and then I moved to a smaller house and there wasn't really room to set it up, so it's never been reassembled, which actually I would like to do sometime.
Did you find it useful?
I think it was one of the tools in the creative process. It's fascinating when you first do it because you hear these strange liquid noises. After a while it dawns on you these are coming from inside your head and your stomach, and there's a lot of noise there that maybe you picked up on in your mother's womb, but not since. And that's fascinating. It's got parallels with meditation, which I also do, but more privacy, for removal from the outside world.
Are dreams important to you?
These cultures that believe that by steering your dreams you can really influence the way you interact with the world -- I think there must be truth in that. In many ways, I'm attracted to the Buddhist idea of the material world being an illusion, and that only in the sense that if you start thinking -- I talked about it a little bit in "Mercy Street" -- buildings and cars just being ideas sort of made manifest -- that ideas do have very strong shaping influence. And that by rewriting or re-steering some elements within those ideas and dreams, I think you can really change the way you function within the world by changing how you put stuff together and feed off it in your internal workings, whether it's dreams or internal stuff.
Have you ever used drugs in an effort to spur or alter your creativity?
I have very minimal experiences with drugs. The only ones I was really interested in were LSD and E to some extent, but I never tried either of those. I used to find some of my dreams quite disturbing, so it was a fear element, you know, that of surrendering control. About 15 years ago, some of the guys in the studio had left this big hash cake in the kitchen, and they'd all gone. I was trying to write some lyrics, and I thought okay, I'll give it a go. I was very ignorant. I tried some cake and nothing happened, so I tried some more. I sat down at my desk and I remember maybe 15 or 20 minutes later just moving my chin down a little bit. And all of a sudden there were these two sort of surges of mercury up my spine and crashing in the front of my head. I went into panic, thinking right, I'm going to die, so I've got to find a way back home to say goodbye to my wife and kids. At one point I had the enlightened moment where I realized 'life is nothing but full video recorders running slightly out of sync.' And at this precise moment of enlightenment, I fall into a ditch.
US is shockingly, confessionally direct. You've been so guarded and metaphoric, even obscure in the past. Has there been a big change in your writing? Was it due to therapy?
Yes, definitely, in part to therapy, and trying to handle things more directly. You know I read sometimes some writers who say, 'Oh, I don't want to be a middle aged confessional songwriter.' I think to myself, well, you try not to be. Because when you avoid the stuff, even in your choice of subjects, I think the world, the universe, has a habit of conspiring to put in front of you stuff that needs to be put in front of you.
Do you think much about death?
I always think it would be interesting to see your loved ones rot in the garden, you know, in the sense that the world, nature, would absorb the useful elements. You see that in some cultures, and it's perhaps a useful way of facing it -- because I generally believe that the body is a carrier, that there's something else in there. It's a useful reminder of the mortal coil.