“Pretty extreme”: The cover Peter Gabriel began to regret
With an extensive and celebrated back catalogue behind him, Peter Gabriel is no stranger to having his work covered by other artists and transformed into completely different-sounding works.
His debut solo single, ‘Solsbury Hill’, was famously covered by synthpop group Erasure in 2003, where they subverted the song’s famous 7/4 time signature for the majority of the song and turned it into a common-time track. Then there’s his most famous hit, ‘Sledgehammer’, which has been covered to death, and its famous stop-motion animation video created by Wallace & Gromit creators Aardman has been parodied just as many times.
Having begun his career as the leader of the progressive rock group Genesis, Gabriel made a name for himself as a singular songwriting talent, one who was constantly trying to push boundaries of pop music and make complex structures seem accessible to a wider audience. Given this, it’s understandable that it may be a struggle for other artists to get a grasp on how to appropriately approach covering his works and do them any justice.
However, Gabriel himself is no stranger to recording covers of other people’s material, and given his propensity for making the simple things complicated, his versions of popular songs are often pretty out there and otherworldly in their approach. That’s not to say that his covers aren’t good, but they often transform instantly recognisable tracks into totally different and bizarre versions that it might take the listener a while to figure out what the source material is.
In 2010, Gabriel recorded an entire covers album called Scratch My Back, which featured bizarre interpretations of songs such as Paul Simon’s ‘The Boy in the Bubble’, a completely melodically unrecognisable version of David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’, and even some more cultish classics like The Magnetic Fields’ ‘The Book of Love’.
However, sitting at the tail end of the tracklist is the crowning glory of the album: his interpretation of Radiohead’s 1995 single, ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’. The original, while one of the Oxfordshire band’s most beloved songs, is known for being a bleak and depressive acoustic affair that shows of the vocal flexibility of frontman Thom Yorke, but Gabriel somehow managed to take his version of the song to a new level of moroseness, delivering the lyrics in monotone fashion and turning the guitar part into a sluggish piano riff that oozes despondency throughout.
The main issue that Gabriel had with his interpretation of the song was that it massively underperformed compared to expectations and wasn’t well received by critics or fans of both his work and Radiohead. Gabriel would later own up to his intense dislike of the cover by claiming, “It’s pretty extreme, I guess,” adding that, “I have heard since that the band didn’t like what I did with it.”
While Radiohead have never publicly addressed their thoughts on the cover, the fact that they backed out of returning the favour on a Peter Gabriel covers album down the line, despite having the musical chops to pull it off in masterful fashion, kind of goes to suggest that they weren’t particularly pleased with Gabriel’s butchering of the track. As far as I’m concerned, it’s actually a fascinating interpretation of the track, but if Gabriel would rather forget about it, who am I to convince him otherwise?
