‘I Have the Touch’: Peter Gabriel’s strange study of Englishness
‘Englishness’ is an entirely abstract concept, tenuously attached to everything from a love of queuing to drunken football hooliganism. Still, there are indeed some attributes which seem to afflict the English more so than any other nationality, and that was a topic that Peter Gabriel was keen to get to the bottom of back in 1982.
Gabriel has certainly left his mark on the landscape of English music, having established himself among the brightest sparks of the prog age back in the early 1970s. As he progressed into his solo career towards the end of the decade, though, his sonic repertoire seemed to be constantly expanding, culminating in a wealth of genre-bending and, aside from anything else, incredibly successful entries into the pop charts.
At the same time, though, Gabriel has never been an artist to conjure up pop success for the sake of it. As opposed to some of his pop peers, the songwriter’s work has never lacked substance, and commercial appeal has never been his prevailing motivation. In fact, some of his most beloved works have attempted to tackle some rather complex, almost academic topics.
One such case is 1982’s ‘I Have The Touch’, which saw the former Genesis songwriter move towards the direction of the new wave and synthpop sounds populating the mainstream music scene of that era, and the track was rewarded with some minor chart success in the US. Digging into the meaning, though, Gabriel originally penned the song as a means of examining the attitudes and sensibilities of the English.
Reportedly, the song has its origins in an academic study on the topic of skin contact. Within the study, people of varying nationalities were observed at a restaurant, and their physical contact with others was noted.
While other European nations, like France or Italy, tended to have a lot of physical contact between dining partners, the English participants only touched twice – either to greet each other or say goodbye.
Centuries of emotional repression and the romanticism of a stiff upper lip are likely to blame for the results of that study; the Victorian era ended over 100 years ago, and still the people of England feel the need to dress up their emotional wants and desires in layers of polite awkwardness. Or, as Gabriel put it in the song’s lyrics, “Any social occasion, it’s hello, how do you do. All those introductions, I never miss my cue.”
Throughout the song, Gabriel embodies the role of an emotionally repressed English person, willing himself to reach out and make contact with another human – “I need contact,” he pleads. Whether the songwriting was simply poking fun at the inherent awkwardness of English society or attempting to make a profound point about our lack of emotional connection is up for interpretation.
Either way, though, the song came around at the right time, with the 1980s ushering in a new age in which societal boundaries were routinely broken, and English society became – if only a little – more relaxed. Still, English audiences didn’t seem to appreciate Gabriel’s track, with it failing to chart upon its 1982 release.
