The “sexual metaphor” that launched Peter Gabriel to new heights in 1986
Despite standing tall in the art-rock world, even Peter Gabriel was never above a good pop tune about mankind’s eternal obsession.
Into the mid-1980s, the former Genesis frontman had jumped to a respectable solo career in eccentric yet atmospheric new wave pop, eventually wading into further sonic immersions via his early use of the pioneering Fairlight CMI synthesiser.
Gabriel was big, his third solo LP even topping the UK charts in 1980, but a hankering for a new direction saw Gabriel finally shake off his signature grab at textured and rhythmic intrigues for a detour into ‘straight’ pop fare.
An old soul boy at heart, Gabriel had years back how sizzingly perfect a marriage pop, and sex stood. A love of Stax and Atlantic’s heyday would find a teenage Gabriel dropping his jaw at an Otis Redding gig in London’s Brixton in 1967, burnishing in him the eternal power of soul’s effortless charge of passionate power. Seeds were sown. Little did Gabriel know, but the trumpeter on stage would wind up playing on Gabriel’s biggest hit nearly two decades later.
Jump to 1985 with his fourth solo album and the Birdy soundtrack behind him, and Gabriel was ready to capture his steamy soul sketch in earnest. Corraling a crack team at his Ashcombe House studio in Bath, Gabriel would handle all his electronic toys, including the E-mu Emulator II, Prophet-5, and his trusty Fairlight, while longtime collaborator David Rhodes handled guitar with Daniel Lanois on second guitar, and old Redding brassman Wayne Jackson ensured his trumpet was committed to record in all its unsampled majesty.
It was one hell of a way to kick off the So sessions. With his Stax nod starting to emerge, Gabriel borrowed a little from Franz Kafka’s “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,” statement that literature’s goal is to awaken the senses, but largely dwelled lyrically in a funfair collage of surrealist explosion, seeing Gabriel chase that “fruit cage” like a “honey bee” and offering his “big dipper… going up and down, all around the bends”.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Gabriel laughed to Uncut in 2012 when asked about his big hit’s theme. Lanois chimed in with a little more light, “It’s the kind of sexual metaphor that you get in blues songs. ‘Squeeze my lemon ’til the juice runs down my leg.’ That’s the Sledgehammer, I guess!”
Phallic analogies and artful metaphors for sex all bounced and teemed through ‘Sledgehammer’s vibrant soul pop, afforded extra promo heft by its iconic stop-motion video that enjoyed heavy rotation on MTV when dropped in April 1986. You can get away with anything if you give it a good tune, and at this time in pop, a flashy visual clip.
It was the only time Gabriel ever topped the Billboard Hot 100. Knocking his old bandmates Genesis’s ‘Invisible Touch’ off the number one spot, Phil Collins later joked to The Guardian in 2014, “We weren’t aware of that at the time. If we had been, we’d probably have sent him a telegram saying: ‘Congratulations – bastard.'”
