The singer Peter Gabriel called the supreme interpreter: “Amazing voice”
For Peter Gabriel, writing great songs was only one piece of the musical puzzle.
Anyone could find the time to write the songs in their head, and while it might take a certain discipline to perfect them in the studio, all that mattered was whether the audience were going to feel the same way whenever you went onstage and performed them. And while Gabriel was known to get more than a little bit strange whenever he put on a show, he also knew when some artists could wipe the floor with any material they were given.
Granted, it’s not like Gabriel had the kind of show-stopping voice that he expected out of his heroes. He followed in the footsteps of bands like The Beatles, but even when making some of the greatest Genesis albums, there would be times when his ambition was more than his body was capable of. He wanted to hit some of those notes, and even though some of them sounded absolutely pristine by the time he started working on their more ambitious projects, you could hear him slowly turning into a better singer than reaching for notes and not really getting there in the early days.
Then again, some of the biggest names in the band’s record collections were almost impossible to do justice to. Gabriel had a deep love of artists like Joni Mitchell, and Phil Collins followed in the footsteps of classic Motown songs, but it’s not like anyone was going to claim that they were able to sing as well as people like Stevie Wonder or Marvin Gaye or anything. But to his credit, Gabriel always made the best with what he had most of the time.
Because when you think about it, performing is a much different animal than anything that’s being done in the studio. You might go for capturing a band performing live when they’re behind the glass, but Gabriel was used to telling people a story whenever he went onstage. That might have meant wearing insane costumes every single time he played, but all he wanted to do was build pictures in people’s minds the same way his favourite artists did.
Mitchell was always one to paint pictures with her words, but when listening to Otis Redding, Gabriel heard someone who could own any spotlight that he had. While not every tune that Redding ever made got the recognition it deserved, you can feel the time and place whenever listening to ‘Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay’ or the absolute power behind his voice on ‘Try a Little Tenderness’.
Not everything that Redding sang was written by him, but Gabriel felt that he could even manage to surpass a legend like Sam Cooke when singing a song like ‘A Change is Gonna Come’, saying, “When he came on it was like the sun coming out. It was this amazing voice. Totally in command. Great band. The way that Otis put the message over. [He’s] the supreme interpreter. And what a heart.”
And while Gabriel wasn’t going to end up making his answer to R&B whenever he played with Genesis, the roots of Redding’s music is still there if you know where to look. ‘Sledgehammer’ is the closest thing to a pop track that Gabriel has in his discography, and when you listen to those horns come in, you would have sworn that the song had come out of Memphis and was suddenly resurrected for the 1980s.
But all Gabriel could really do was bow his head in reverence to what someone like Redding did so effortlessly. His was a voice that was taken far too soon, and judging by what he was making towards the end of his life before that tragic plane trip, he would have surely been one of the leading figures pushing soul music forward.
