“My heroes”: Peter Gabriel discusses the best live show he ever witnessed
Progressive rock bands tend to take their inspiration from nearly anything they can get their hands on. No matter how often they attempt to rewrite Bach or Beethoven, it’s not out of the question to throw in hints of jazz into an arrangement or plough through an entire country-adjacent section of a song before returning to the main theme of what they’re working on. However, for a group as cerebral as Genesis could be in the 1970s, Peter Gabriel had a healthy amount of soul in him when listening to Otis Redding for the first time.
Then again, no one would have guessed that the sounds of soulful music had anything to do with the man who thought it was fun to dress up as a flower onstage in his spare time. Earth Wind and Fire may have dressed up their sound, but they weren’t going to go so far as to greet their audience wearing a fox’s head or trying to look like the personification of a sexually transmitted disease.
If you listen to what Gabriel was singing, though, there were a few vocal inflexions that gave him away. Even in a piece as complicated as ‘Supper’s Ready’, there are still moments where he sounds like an old-school crooner amid the chaos and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is one of the best showcases for him throwing every sound that he can think of at the wall and seeing what sticks.
But where it all began came before Genesis was even a group. When working with his first band, Garden Wall, he remembered seeing Redding in all his glory at a concert, telling Soin, “I don’t think there was a white face to be seen there, but mine and it was the best gig of my life as a spectator. Otis Redding was singing with Wayne Jackson on trumpet, and that very night, I found my heroes. I stood in the middle of the club, as close to the front as I could get without drawing attention to myself, and decided that I wanted to be a musician for life.”
Whereas most Genesis songs were more concerned with bringing literary characters to life, Gabriel could put a lot more of his influences into his solo career once he decided to depart after The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. ‘Solsbury Hill’ was a far way away from Redding, but with later tracks like ‘Shock the Monkey’, you can hear him slowly inching closer to soulful music.
He just needed someone to help him the rest of the way, and when he teamed up with Daniel Lanois to create the album So, he turned ‘Sledgehammer’ into his very own soul track. He didn’t have the same gripping stage presence as Redding, but having the horns over top of him was the next best thing he could have asked for.
And despite his feeble attempts at becoming a soulful guy, even he could admit it was a little bit silly. From the claymation video to his wild dance moves onstage, he at least understood the irony of a younger prog-rock kid suddenly trying to get the rest of the world to move through the power of his “funk”.
Still, that doesn’t take away from ‘Sledgehammer’ being a classic of the 1980s, and it shouldn’t take away from Redding, either. He helped bring R&B across the water, and when Gabriel got that shock to his system, he knew that he had found his calling for the rest of his life.
