Loops peter gabriel in your eyes
It’s just leaner, sharper, quicker to make its points. With me there is still quite a large functioning of randomness, accident and mistakes.” Going on to praise Bowie’s willingness to keep moving, he added, “You must let go of what you’ve got, cause if you try and clutch on to something which you think is yours, it withers and dies.” It would be facile to pin this album as an anti-Genesis statement though: much of it is every bit as self-important. There’s not too much coincidence emanating. Challenged by the NME at the time about Bowie comparisons, he replied defensively, “I get the feeling he’s more calculating. Songs, themes, sonics and presence come together to create a cohesive yet many-limbed piece which pitches up somewhere between Lodger and Scary Monsters. PG3 is where Gabriel ascends, where he hits the perfect point on the curve between artistic ambition and accessibility, between dark and light, between floridness and reticence. Phil Collins appears on drums here, as he does on so many exquisite albums of the era, putting down markers despite the world of music journalism’s lazy, petty, perpetual loathing of him. Besides, far from feuding and falling out with the remaining members of Genesis, he was on good terms with them. The first two solo albums – despite moments like “Solsbury Hill” and “Modern Love” – had begun to define him in a separate space, but not yet clarified what was going on in that space. He’d punned and fretted his way through four sides of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. He was the man who’d pondered, “A flower?” in the 26-minute 'Supper’s Ready' while wearing a fox head and a red ballgown. He was more identified with the band’s earlier, baroque work than he was with his own. At this time, remember, Gabriel was still trying to lay the ghost of Genesis. It reveals fresh treasures and kinks even 40 years on. Here be monsters, in icy, literate, tales of stalkers, assassins, persecuted immigrants, ordinary people who fear they’ll do some damage one fine day, outsiders all. You look in its eyes and you fear for its safety, and maybe your own. The third successive solo album to be called, officially, Peter Gabriel, it attracted the nickname Melt, because of its Hipgnosis sleeve. What made him unique is all over 1980’s Peter Gabriel 3 to the point of making it sticky, clammy. He got so big and benign and respected that he couldn’t risk confessing any more, wouldn’t document the pirouettes of his hungry psyche.
Over the course of the 80s Gabriel got very successful and revered and politically correct, and lost what made him unique. I’d assumed So was his best-loved album, because by then Hollywood were using his material in movies and the dreadful, plodding 'Sledgehammer' had that ubiquitous, admittedly pioneering, video.
My impression was that it sold well on the back of the hits 'Games Without Frontiers' and 'Biko', but that its chilly jaggedness was too much for the consensus and that it was only fully appreciated by freaks like us. Research for this piece – a few clicks – tells me this is "generally regarded as Gabriel’s finest record”.