The singer Peter Gabriel said made the best live music: “A prodigious talent”
From the moment that he started performing with Genesis, Peter Gabriel was always a creature of the live stage.
While there had been many showmen that showed everyone the ropes of what could be done in a rock and roll show, Gabriel was the one constantly pushing it to the brink whenever he played, whether he was trying to provoke the audience when wearing a dress and a fox’s head, or when the tour for The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway started and he tried to represent an STD. For him, it was about much more than the music onstage, and if he was entering the 1980s, he wanted to do the same thing as a solo artist.
Because even with all of the great music Genesis could make, Gabriel never saw their performances as strictly musical. He wanted to take the concept of performing to the nth degree whenever he could, which explains why Steve Hackett was seated some of the time when the frontman started making his grand entrances. The music was practically a backdrop for his stage productions half the time, and while that might have driven the rest of the band up the wall, it did make for some fantastic visuals onstage.
So when he went solo, why wouldn’t he try to keep things up? After all, he had more freedom to work on whatever sounds he wanted without having to satisfy his bandmates, but when MTV started to really grab hold of rock and roll culture, Gabriel started to rethink what he wanted to do whenever he got up onstage. He could still be outlandish, but there had to be a few more limits.
To be fair, though, Gabriel’s approach to the stage was an archetype for what art rock bands were bound to sound like in the 1980s. His approach to crafting sounds in the studio and making the best shows that he could were on full display when looking at the first major videos on MTV, so when he started to flirt with popular music on So, he was already coming at the medium from a position of strength. Still, there was no way he was reaching the same heights that someone like Prince did.
While Michael Jackson gets credit for being the true innovator on MTV, there was hardly anyone who could touch ‘The Purple One’s ears and eyes. Purple Rain might have been him operating at the peak of his powers, but even before he started to make videos, his stage act was like watching the Second Coming of James Brown if ‘The Godfather of Soul’ had been born with the ability to make mind-bending guitar solos.
It was a lot for anyone to take in, so when that flame was snuffed out, Gabriel could only remember the massive impact Prince had on the world, saying, “Prince gave me some of the best live music I have ever witnessed. He had a prodigious talent, as a musician, writer, guitarist and bandleader. It was obvious that he was already totally in charge of his medium and I’ve been a fan ever since [I first saw him].”
Then again, it’s hard to think of any casual fan of any genre of music that can’t find at least one song to love from Prince. He may have been a little bit too risque for what the parents would have wanted back then, but even if half of his catalogue was about sex, it didn’t matter so long as he was still making some of the catchiest tunes imaginable, whether it was funk brilliance like ‘Kiss’, trying his hand at New Jack Swing on ‘Gett Off’, or making people weep on ‘Sometimes It Snows in April’.
This was someone who had enough talent for four different musicians, so hearing of his passing wasn’t like hearing about any other rock and roll legend. Prince was practically a musical superhero, and while he’s no longer around, no one will ever forget how he made them feel whenever he strapped on that guitar or got behind the microphone.
