The classic song Peter Gabriel created using a nappy: “Talk about dampened”
If you think that his tenure as the frontman of Genesis was the era of Peter Gabriel’s career that produced the wildest and most imaginative ideas, think again.
While the first six albums by the British progressive rock titans were ambitious in scope and sound, Gabriel became more adventurous after he embarked on a solo career in the mid-1970s. His first four studio records, all titled Peter Gabriel, were filled with experimentation that brought him little in the way of commercial success save for singles such as ‘Solsbury Hill’ and ‘Games Without Frontiers’, but there were plenty of praiseworthy elements to these records.
He and drummer Phil Collins, who had replaced him as the lead vocalist in Genesis following his departure, inadvertently pioneered the gated reverb drum sound on his 1980 song ‘Intruder’, which would later become a staple of pop production later in the decade. Despite having discovered how to produce the sound by complete accident, if it wasn’t for his willingness to experiment and take risks with his sound, pop drums from this point onwards could have had an entirely different sound.
However, on his fifth studio album, which he opted to call So instead of continuing his tradition of releasing self-titled records, he managed to create a vibrant art pop record that saw him achieve considerably more mainstream success, with songs such as ‘Sledgehammer’ and ‘Don’t Give Up’, a duet with Kate Bush, becoming two of his most popular tracks.
That doesn’t mean that he didn’t take the opportunity to experiment with new sounds on this record, and his fusion of ‘world music’ with Western pop tradition was one of the reasons why the album ended up becoming such a revered and groundbreaking piece of work. Despite this melange of influences, it was bassist Tony Levin who ended up producing one of the most unusual sounds on the record, which came about by accident, much like Gabriel and Collins’ drum sound had done six years prior.
In an interview with YouTuber and musicologist Rick Beato, Levin explained that when he’s trying to compose basslines for a song, he envisions the sound that would work rather than a sequence of notes, and while he was searching for the right tone for ‘Don’t Give Up’, he ended up altering his sound in the most bizarre fashion.
“My daughter was two months old, and she’d come along [to the studio], so I had packed diapers in the bass case,” Levin remarked. “I was looking around the studio during the end part, and there were the diapers, so I put one of them beneath the strings.”
Muting the strings on a bass guitar isn’t exactly a new technique, but creating this effect with Levin’s infant daughter’s nappies ultimately took the song to another level, even if this makeshift alteration didn’t catch on in the same way that Gabriel’s earlier recording mistake managed to transform production styles.
“It sounded great – talk about dampened,” Levin added. “Peter named it the ‘super wonder nappy sound’, he loved it.”
