Peter Gabriel: Taylor Swift’s comments about my music were very kind

“The world is moving in the direction of shorter, faster,” Gabriel told Mojo magazine recently, “and when the tide goes one way it’s my attitude to go in the opposite direction.”

Does he ever. He liked both sets of mixes from two engineers, so is releasing both, meaning that after 21 years of waiting there isn’t even one definitive version of the album. Include the Dolby Atmos surround-sound mix, for those with the right equipment, and there’s three.

Peter Gabriel is releasing his first studio album of new material for 21 years

NADAV KANDER

What’s more, he played his big arena tour in support of the album while the striptease was only half done. Did he and his eight musicians restrict themselves to playing only the songs that were already out there? Did they hell. Yes, they served up Sledgehammer, Solsbury Hill, Big Time, Don’t Give Up and a handful of other old favourites. They also played pretty much the entire new album.

It’s the kind of thing acts do before they have a big beloved back catalogue to plunder. This, though, is Gabriel’s eighth full solo album, only three of which have come in the decades since he achieved global stardom with So in 1986. At the show I saw in Paris in May, the big hits went down best, but the audience was remarkably responsive to the new stuff.

Maybe they had learnt to expect the unexpected. After all, this is the man who left Genesis when he was only 25. Who gave each of his first four studio albums the same name: Peter Gabriel. Who, today, won’t grant an interview in person, but will respond to questions by email. It’s not a deal we would normally agree to. Yet having interviewed Gabriel once in person, when he was promoting his orchestral re-recordings of old songs, New Blood, in 2011, I knew that he was likely to be honest and thoughtful in any context.

I wondered what drives that need to be different, to surprise, to provoke? Releasing a single each full moon, each decorated with designs from artists such as Cornelia Parker or Ai Weiwei, isn’t quite the same as sticking on a fox’s head and wearing a red dress, as Gabriel did — without warning his Genesis bandmates the first time he did it — on tour in 1972. But did it come from the same desire to stand out? Is he stubborn, cussed or simply having a laugh?

Phil Collins, Steve Hackett, Mike Rutherford, Tony Banks and Peter Gabriel in 1975

ANDRE CSILLAG/SHUTTERSTOCK/REX

“All of the above,” Gabriel replies. Somehow, though he’s typing rather than talking, I can imagine this deadpan retort echoing drolly around an arena like one of the lengthy intros to songs he does on tour. “I’m not too worried about going off-piste. All of us know those crossroads where there is a choice between the road of courage and the road of fear. Although it may not be the smartest, I know I have always had a more interesting journey when I managed to be bold.”

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The delights of i/o are in the details rather than a sound startlingly different to that he plied on his previous album, Up There are funky songs about sex and “raising the finger to death” (Road to Joy, co-produced by Brian Eno), there is an exquisite orchestral ballad reminding us of how finite and precious life is (Playing for Time). In fact, more than a few songs touch on mortality, nature, ageing and acceptance, as well as politics and technology. It all suggests a man who doesn’t spend many evenings watching I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!. The music is tasteful but packed with electric, acoustic and electronic instrumentation, plus choral and orchestral arrangements. Call it refreshingly intelligent, call it overstudied, but you can’t call it lazy. Is this part of what holds Gabriel up? Does it get harder to say new things as he gets older?

“I can and do enjoy generating things fast,” he replies. “But my internal critic can be harder to satisfy these days, especially with words, so I shy away from finishing things. Luckily, I never have a shortage of ideas — and when a door opens, I can rarely resist exploring what lies on the other side.

“I visited Howard Hodgkin in his studio a while back. It was a well-lit, all-white former garage full of white sheets over each of the many paintings. He would pull a sheet back and say, ‘I started this 25 years ago.’ My ideas archive is a bit like that. I am clearly slow in feeding the external machine with music, but I have learnt to have a life outside of work, to enjoy the process and have the luxury of putting stuff out when I want. It’s the process, not the product.”

Gabriel married his second wife, Meabh Flynn, just before the release of Up in 2002. They have two sons: Isaac, 22, and Luc, 15. Gabriel also has two daughters from his first marriage, to Jill Moore — Melanie, who sings on this album, and Anna, a photographer and film-maker.

He’s had more than perfectionism keeping him away from recording a new album. This son of an inventor has long mixed music with being a boffin, businessman and activist. Not every scheme triumphs — the high-tech park he tried to set up in Barcelona with Eno and Laurie Anderson in the Nineties never happened. In 2007, though, he set up The Elders, a group that convenes retired statesmen to bring a fresh look at the world’s problems. “Getting that going with Richard Branson and Nelson Mandela was a brilliant adventure,” Gabriel says. “It is a real buzz listening to and watching these great leaders working to apply their experience and understanding to all manner of current problems.”

He moves slowly, but he walks it like he talks it. The first song on i/o, Panopticom, about an “infinitely expandable accessible data globe”, follows up from his work setting up the human rights group Witness. He wants to make the Pantopticom a reality too. After playing some music with bonobo monkeys at Georgia State University, he set up a non-profit organisation devoted to facilitating “communication between cognitive species”, the Interspecies Internet. He has also been involved in a project called Reverberation that his daughter Anna has helped to develop, looking at how sound and music affect the brain and health.

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He also brought his interest in tech to his family’s greatest challenge, when Flynn developed an aggressive form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a blood cancer, in 2016. After chemotherapy failed, they successfully explored stem-cell research pioneered by two doctors in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has since explored ways of making the approach more accessible and affordable.

So the man who has a record label and recording studio (near Bath) called Real World has had a lot of real-world issues in his life. Does that leave music feeling like a blessed relief or an indulgence? Has he reached the point where Shakespeare’s line from Richard II — “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me” — comes to feel like an urgent reminder to get cracking?

“I still adore music, but I also love having a real life outside of music,” he says. “Science, AI, the Interspecies Internet, health, human rights and now the Panopticom project are all non-musical passions.

“Time is the big boss and the only meaningful luxury. I am not convinced it can ever be wasted: if you are alive, you are learning. I do love learning about stuff and researching things. After all this touring I am having a sabbatical and taking over things at home. There is another album’s worth of stuff in the can that needs to be finished and then I will work on a brain project that I am now researching a bit.” This brain project is the story of a device that can read minds: being Gabriel, it is rooted in cutting-edge scientific research rather than mere whimsy. “Some of these current songs will fit into the brain project,” he adds, “as I want to have some familiar songs in it when it is finally assembled.” Quite what form the project will take remains a work in progress, I’m told.

He has sold more than 20 million albums, but the gaps between those albums have kept Gabriel’s profile lower than many other acts of similar heft. Nonetheless, when he recorded a pair of cover albums in 2010 and 2013 — Scratch My Back, which was him singing other acts’ songs, and then And I’ll Scratch Yours, which had others singing Gabriel songs — the line-up included Elbow, Lou Reed, Bon Iver, Regina Spektor, Paul Simon and Arcade Fire. Were he doing it now, he would surely invite Taylor Swift too. After all, it was Swift who gave an interview in which she summed up his entire MO by calling him “remarkable at giving people what they want but didn’t think they wanted”. She described him as “an artist who has such incredible taste and such an incredible finger on the pulse of what would excite people, musically. What he was doing in the Eighties was so ahead of its time.”

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“My daughter sent me some of the very kind things Taylor said about my music. I do have a lot of admiration for what she has done, and given that she now has more economic clout than many small countries, I also thought it was very important that she stood up for artists’ rights — and told her so.” They are also, he adds, linked by a combination of work and love. His chief engineer at Real World Studios, Oli Jacobs, has started working with Swift’s sometime producer, Jack Antonoff, and is going out with Swift’s engineer Laura Sisk. Expect that Gabriel-Swift duet sometime this century.

And actually, though he is almost 40 years Swift’s senior, you’d bet more bitcoin on Gabriel working with Swift than you would him going back to work with his old bandmates in Genesis. Yes, he reunited twice with them: for a show in 1982 and a re-recorded song (Carpet Crawlers) in 1999. Beyond that, he tends to keep such nostalgia under armed guard. Still, as Phil Collins noted from the stage on the night itself, Gabriel was in the audience for Genesis’s final show, at the O2 in London in March 2022.

“I had put so much of my life into getting Genesis going in the early years, it felt wrong not to be there when the guys decided to close the book. It was a strange night for them and for me, full of memories, sadness and warmth.”

I get that the Interspecies Internet fires him up more than reprising songs he sang not long out of school. Does he understand, though, even among those of us who will follow whatever new caper he pursues, that there is something about the music you love when young that nothing can quite top afterwards? And with the old firm no longer trading, he could make a handy bob staging a Peter Gabriel Sings Seventies Genesis One Last Time world tour. Well, he could if he had a personality transplant, anyway.

“I know that the music that means the most to you as a teenager tends to retain its hold on you throughout your life. I do occasionally have thoughts about doing a version of a couple of those songs that have a lot of me in them.” You heard it here first, old-time fans! Oh, until normal service hastily resumes. “But then,” he adds, “my attention gets caught by something new and exciting.”
Peter Gabriel’s album i/o is out on all formats on December 1