When Peter Gabriel broke a door while making ‘So’
Generally speaking, Peter Gabriel likes to take his time between albums. Throughout his first handful of solo releases, Gabriel was reaching for what he wanted to sound like, with every album titled Peter Gabriel and being dictated by the graphic pieces of artwork on the cover. Although Gabriel may have been content being a niche artist, the mainstream came to him on his album So.
With the help of producer Daniel Lanois, Gabriel ended up creating some of the biggest tunes of his career, marrying his weird edge with pop smarts on ‘In Your Eyes’ and ‘Sledgehammer’. Lanois had already earned a reputation as one of the best producers in the game, and his work with artists like U2 on The Joshua Tree gave him the experience of creating songs that fans worldwide wanted to hear.
Even when they met, Lanois thought he would hit it off with Gabriel, saying that he felt like he had known him from the moment he met him. While each of them saw eye-to-eye on tracks like ‘Mercy Street’, Lanois remembered having to get the vulnerable side of Gabriel onto the tape, telling Classic Albums that he wanted “no trickery” when it came to hearing Gabriel’s natural voice.
Despite Gabriel’s insistence on making a great record, Lanois had no tolerance for his constant procrastination when writing lyrics. As Gabriel’s assistant Davis Stallbaumer remembers, “Peter would take a lot of phone calls. When Peter had been on the phone for a while, and Danny decided we needed to get back to work, so he took the phone out of Peter’s hands and smashed it to pieces on the console and then carried on like nothing had happened.” While Lanois may have been adamant about not allowing phone calls during the session, the real dust-up was yet to come.
When Gabriel kept putting off lyrics, Lanois thought he would force him to deliver what he could, eventually bolting the studio door shut behind him. After telling him to go into the studio’s main floor, Gabriel started thinking of different lyrics while Lanois continuously hammered the door shut in time with the music.
Though Stallbaumer is adamant about Gabriel having a calm demeanour, none of that was to be found at that moment, continuing, “Peter didn’t hear him while he was doing that. [When lunch was called], he managed to take the doorframe right out to open the door so he could get out, which was quite a feat. It was a big solid door with double layers of cinderblock and concrete, which was quite impressive.”
Once freed, Gabriel was less than enthused about being trapped in his workspace, as engineer Kevin Killin explained, “Peter walked over to Dan and said, ‘Can we have a word outside?’. So they went out and exchanged a few words, and then they came back in, and we continued on as if nothing had happened.”
For all of the tension between the pair, the results spoke for themselves, bringing Gabriel’s progressive leanings to living rooms worldwide with the brilliant videos for ‘Sledgehammer’ and ‘Don’t Give Up’. Though Lanois may have been a bit hard on Gabriel during the recording, he did commend the job that he did towards the end, saying, “I know that this was made by a man who did absolutely nothing else with his life for a year. I feel like I know what it’s like to live the life of a monk now.”
