“That didn’t work”: The one show Peter Gabriel walked out on
Every musician usually needs to go through some rite of passage before becoming one of the best performers in the world. No one comes into their own fully formed the first time they go onstage, and even if they have something special, it takes a few years of fine-tuning before they actually hit on the magic that they are aiming for. When it’s not working, though, it takes the audience all but a few seconds to turn against you, and Peter Gabriel knew that all too well when opening for one particular musical juggernaut.
Then again, it was going to be a bit of a gamble trying to get any version of Gabriel’s stick to land with a standard rock audience. Compared to the other frontmen who wanted to create a laid-back energy or grab the audience by the throat, seeing Gabriel clad in a dress and a fox’s head during some of Genesis’s early shows was bound to inspire either confusion or dread in the unassuming audience trying their best to understand what he was doing.
Looking through his other headlining slots, he wasn’t even beginning to let up, either. His turns as a sexually transmitted disease or a flower were certainly interesting for the time, and even when he started his solo career, some of his biggest performances felt more like cross-cultural events rather than a standard rock and roll show.
If that was the limit for what people thought was weird, though, Frank Zappa had Gabriel beat by a country mile. Outside of the fact that he never stayed in one genre for too long, Zappa’s cynical bent to lyrics and often-twisted sense of humour is what made people either love him or absolutely despise him when working on albums like Hot Rats or making lavish conceptual pieces like Joe’s Garage.
For someone still cutting his teeth like Gabriel, this should have been the perfect place for him to try out some of his avant-garde approaches to the stage. Zappa had already opened the door for what strange sounds could be in progressive music, but it turns out there was room for only one rock and roll weirdo onstage when Gabriel opened a run of the rock god’s shows.
When reminiscing about those days, the audience was ice cold to Gabriel and didn’t let him finish his set, saying, “As an artist, there was a time, which any performer dreads, who I was booed offstage. This only happened to me once, but it was while opening for Frank Zappa in Berlin in 1980, and it was an audience older than my usual audience. I crawled back up onstage and started to do ‘Here Comes the Flood,’ which was literally the quietest number I had at that point, and that didn’t work either. I walked off.”
Then again, comparing Gabriel’s solo career to what Zappa was doing at the time was always going to be night and day. Fans were only a few years away from Shut Up and Play Yer Guitar, and since everyone was ready to see Zappa dominate the stage, seeing a scrawny kid singing about fanciful tales on songs like ‘Solsbury Hill’ or even ‘Games Without Frontiers’ was going to be a tough sell.
But looking back on where Gabriel went, he didn’t have to worry about audiences turning against him for too long, with So putting him in the same conversation as his Genesis bandmates with songs like ‘In Your Eyes’. If anything, the fact that he was able to get through that gig and survive only made him a stronger performer when he finally did reach the big time.
