Lately more a technology guru than a singer, he now has a new CD – Scratch My Back is a covers album with a difference.
It’s been a while since Peter Gabriel has looked much like a conventional rock star, or acted like one, and, as he nears his 60th birthday, he passes unremarked in the smart Kensington hotel where this interview takes place. With his dark baggy garb, white goatee and twinkly beam, Gabriel looks today rather like a plain-clothes Santa, an impression enhanced by his solicitous manner. How am I? Would I like a cup of tea or coffee? Something to eat? As well as illustrating Gabriel’s instinctive kindliness, this amiable fussing is reflective of his way when presented with an agenda.
He is, famously, always running late, a master of the mumbled apology. It takes 15 minutes for him to get down to talking about Scratch My Back, his album of cover versions of songs by artists ranging from Paul Simon to Bon Iver — a clue, perhaps, as to why this is only the third collection of new material he’s released since 1992. Not that Gabriel has been taking it easy in the interim. On the contrary, he has developed into a tireless master of off-piste activities. For years in the 1990s, he was involved, with Laurie Anderson and others, in developing an “experiential theme park” — a sort of Disneyland for arty types that sadly never found a sponsor. More recently, he has been involved in exploring the creativity and cognition of bonobo apes, from helping them to make music with percussion and keyboard instruments to using a pictorial search engine to navigate the internet. Gabriel says he “was fascinated by the idea that these animals we’ve brought to the brink of extinction might be capable of mastering our language in sign and symbol form. All musicians are stunned when I show them the footage, because you can see them searching intelligently for notes in a musical way”.
On a less wacky tip, his campaigning interest in human rights led, in 2007, to the setting up and funding of an international think-tank, The Elders, a group of senior statesmen, fronted by Nelson Mandela, whose aim is to “promote peaceful solutions to long-standing conflicts”. Plenty of work still to be done there, then. There have been several high-tech internet ventures, notably an early legal downloading service, OD2, which preceded iTunes and was eventually acquired by Nokia in 2006 for a reported $60m. He still oversees the running of the Womad festival, which he started in 1982, as well as the Real World residential studio complex near his country home in Box, Wiltshire.
Yet while international arts and humanitarian organisations revere Gabriel’s experimental initiatives — he was made a Nobel Man of Peace in 2006, and awarded Sweden’s prestigious Polar prize in 2009 — some of the fans have been getting restless. Neither OVO, a collection of songs Gabriel wrote for the inaugural Millennium Dome show, nor his 2002 album, Up, ignited the album chart. And the news that Scratch My Back comprises 12 non-originals did not go down well with some bloggers. “It’s hard to get excited about an album of cover songs when we’ve been waiting so long for new stuff,” one posted.
Gabriel takes this on the chin: “I cleared the decks for this, put the tech companies and benefit projects on hold. In the old days, I used to work 60-80 hours a week, but now, with two young children, I live more of a family life, 9 to 5.” He insists he has a plan that overrules the normal objections to covers projects. “I’ve always been a songwriter first and foremost, and with X Factor’s stress on performance, I felt the craft of songwriting has got rather overlooked. So I thought, if we could put a twist on the covers thing, make it a genuine exchange and a dialogue with other musicians, rather than a homage to just one song, then we could create something different.” Read the rest of this entry »
