Why did Peter Gabriel refuse to name his first albums?
When putting together any album, it’s almost a no-brainer to have the naming process at the top of the list during the marketing stage. Most people need to at least know what the record’s called before they pick it up, and even if the artists themselves aren’t on the cover, it’s nice to have a clever turn of phrase to tie all of the songs up. That’s not how Peter Gabriel thought, and for the first half of his solo career, he couldn’t be bothered to have several clever titles for any of his albums.
Which is strange considering the amount of time and effort that went into the making of Gabriel’s Genesis-era covers. Looking through their biggest success stories in the 1970s, the lady with a fox’s head on the cover of Foxtrot is insanely gripping, and no one would have put as much effort into the cover of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway if they weren’t planning on serving a purpose in the context of the concept album.
As soon as they finished their double record, though, Gabriel decided that he wanted to spend more time with his family, which led to him leaving the prog giants for a solo career. But once people started getting a look at what his album covers had to offer, they weren’t exactly given that much to work with in the beginning.
While the albums had subsequently been given names based on their images on the cover, Gabriel sitting in a car, clawing at the album artwork, and having his face melted don’t exactly invite people into the greatest headspace when buying the album. But this was art, not pop music, and Gabriel was proud to have every one of his albums have no title.
When talking to Spin, Gabriel thought that the best way to have his music stand on its own is not to put any kind of title in front of him, saying, “I originally thought I would avoid titles and make my records like magazines. When you look at home at a pile of magazines, you remember them usually by the picture on the cover; I wanted it to look like a body of work.”
It’s not like he doesn’t have a point. When looking at even the better covers from the 1960s, like The Beatles’ Rubber Soul, putting the group’s name in big block text makes them look less like artists and more like salesman trying their best to put together an album cover like a piece of advertising.
And when looking at the way Gabriel looks on each of his first solo records, it’s not like the picture doesn’t tell the album’s story. The image of him in a car could have easily represented him travelling away from his old work in Genesis, and considering his work with Robert Fripp on his scratching sophomore album, it looked as if he was literally clawing at his sound just like he was doing on the album itself.
Even when he decided to have a few words on the title, So felt less like an album title and more like a graphic that happened to go along with the picture that Gabriel had of himself. There are many ways that artists have tried to capture fan’s attention with their album covers, but listening back to Gabriel’s first few outings are the purest examples of the phrase ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’.
