Peter Gabriel

About

“I felt I wanted to write music for the 1980, and that the place to begin was the rhythm track,” Peter Gabriel once said. “Rhythm being the spine of music, if you change the spine, the shape of the body changes as a matter of course.” Armed with a primitive drum machine, Gabriel took a sharp compositional detour for his third album, <i>Peter Gabriel 3: Melt</i>, letting his songwriting process lead with rhythm instead of chord change. The sparse, percussion-driven album, released in 1980, became the place where his artistic ambitions finally coalesced, resulting in a peculiar and ominous piece of shadow-lurking art-rock that nonetheless spawned a pop hit. Traditional sounds were eschewed across the album. Gabriel banned the use of cymbals and hi-hats for drummers Jerry Marotta and Phil Collin, which explains such austere, atmospheric tracks as “Intruder” and “No Self Control.” But the in-studio innovations didn’t end there: Gabriel and Collins—working with producer Steve Lillywhite and engineer Hugh Padgham—also experimented with the explosive, cavernous sound that would be known as “gated reverb,” which would soon come to define the decade. <i>Melt</i> was also one of the first to use the Fairlight CMI synthesizer, a sampling keyboard whose trademark sound would take flight across the decade on records by Art of Noise, Herbie Hancock, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Tears for Fear. Rhythmically inspired by the soundtrack to the 1965 South African film <i>Dingaka</i>, Gabriel composed protest anthem and perennial set-closer “Biko,” a soaring tribute to activist Steve Biko that would help bring global attention to South African apartheid, and would directly inspire Steven Van Zandt’s <i>Sun City</i> project. .

via Apple Music

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