“Extraordinary”: The Beatles song that blew Peter Gabriel’s mind
In 1967, 200 million people saw The Beatles play ‘All You Need is Love’ via a ground-breaking satellite link-up.
At the time, that wasn’t far from one in 16 people on the entire planet receiving a message of unified peace in one fell swoop of sonic beauty. Capturing such an audience was an untold feat in human history, and amid tempestuous times, the Fab Four broke through clouds of uncertainty, dooming war and assassinations, with an assegai of hope and exultation.
Certain cynics might think of the track as twee and naive in retrospect, but at the time, it sounded like a fresh alternative to humdrum drudgery. Peter Gabriel had only recently turned 17, and like many his age, he saw the band he had grown up with in a new light. Fittingly, his own ambition dragged along by the Fab Four, he began to see himself in a new light, too.
“It was an extraordinary felling,” he once proclaimed, “That suddenly, this group that we’d seen from very small beginnings were really holding the flame for the world.” For Gabriel, they were not only a beacon of hope in the broadest sense, but on a personal level, this also illuminated a potential future in the world of music. He was keen to be part of their progressive revolution.
Thus, it comes as no surprise that he has always held the band dear. And his favourite anthem goes right back to those humble beginnings. “The first record I bought when I saved up my pocket money was With The Beatles,” Gabriel told ABC regarding the group’s debut album when discussing his favourite songs of all time.
“‘Please, Please Me’ was coming over the radio. I would sit in the back of my parents’ car when we were on these long drives down to the coast,“ he said, crowning his favourite track by the band. “And what people forget, I think, is that at the time, it was really rebellious, rough, mischievous and full of life, and irresistible to any young person.”
The whole memory sounds a bit like Brighton Rock, and it was just as literary for Gabriel. He continued, ”The Beatles were a huge influence as I was growing up, and continued to be as there was all that revolution around their success.”
It was on the brink of The Beatles’ seismic broadcast that soon followed ‘Please, Please Me’, thanks to the whirlwind of Beatlemania, that Gabriel first formed Genesis with his boarding school buddies. He had been stirred to emulate their revolutionary ways in some fashion. Recalling their impact, he explained: “It was to my mind and my ears, far more of a breakthrough than, say, the Sex Pistols, which was more stylistic, I think, and not really about the music or revolution.”
With that in mind, he wanted to carry that sense of newness into the work he started crafting with his own little group of mates: Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford, Steve Hackett, and (a little later down the line) Phil Collins. So, they set about combining an assortment of their influences. “I grew up listening to the blues and Bach, and I never thought that they would meet and create a third thing,” Steve Hackett says.
Adding, “The two styles seemed to be at odds with each other.” Alas, the band successfully created a third thing by blending those disparate influences and, as such, had their own walloping impact on music. But at the core of their prog revolution, the pulse of ‘Please Please Me’ remained.
That makes it all the more shocking to consider that it was cooked up by a young kid, as Lennon recalled, “I wrote it in the bedroom in my house at Menlove Avenue, which was my auntie’s place… I remember the day and the pink coverlet on the bed and I heard Roy Orbison doing ‘Only The Lonely’ or something. That’s where that came from.”
Maybe that’s why it moved Gabriel so much: it was unapologetically music for the youth, by the youth. It remains vital and timeless on that front to this day.
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