There’s plenty of “dancing on the tabletop” as we discuss Peter Gabriel’s fourth solo album. Adam Kromelow from the Genesis Piano Project brings his musical expertise (aka, nerdiness) to help breakdown the genius of these eight tracks, which turn–SHOCK!–40 years old this year!
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I remember this when it came out in 1982. I was 11-12 years old and Shock The Monkey was played all over the radio at the time. It was a very strange album for me at that age. However, I felt guilty liking Wallflower at that age because I thought you always had to like the hits of an album. What did I know? I was just an impressionable kid.
Forward 40 years and now I run the Peter Gabriel Fans page on Facebook and have nearly 20,000 members. I recently ran a poll about this album and what was everyone’s favorite song was and the polling ended up this way.
San Jacinto 40%, Wallflower 16%, I Have The Touch 13%, Rhythm of The Heat 10%, Family And The Fishing Net 8%, Lay Your Hands On Me 6%, Shock The Monkey 5% (shocker), Kiss Of Life 2%.
It is a beloved album on my page as many reference it to be their favorite. Personally, I have grown to love the album as Rhythm, San Jacinto and Wallflower are my favorites. However, I find the songs are better live than on vinyl. He has mastered playing them with all his theatrics and actions being very memorable from Rhythm starting from the back of a concert hall to the “trust fall” during Lay Your Hands On me. It is a perfect concert album. The weirdness I just see as unique and different from most music out there. It is what makes Peter…..Peter.
I do agree that Kiss Of Life should have been tabled for I Go Swimming. Swimming is the better and more fun song. Also, weren’t there other songs in the pipeline like John Has A Headache and Bully For You during this time? All better than Kiss Of Life in my opinion.
Anyways, great job on the podcast.
Sincerely,
Warren
Peter Gabriel’s solo albums 3 and 4 were heavily influenced by his admiration for Steve Reich, the minimalist composer active from the 1960s, composer of Music for 18 Musicians and other works. The repeating, drawn-out, shifting suspended chords which resolve only slowly are a hallmark of minimalism. Other well-known classical composers in the minimalist camp are Terry Riley and especially Phillip Glass.
The narrative of “San Jacinto” and the line “And the tears roll down my swollen cheek” always reminded me of the public service ad (“Keep America Beautiful”) on American TV when I was a kid in the 1970s, showing a native American shedding a tear over the litter that other Americans were dumping out of their cars. Anti-littering campaign, which succeeded better than expected.
Great episode BTW. Say hi to Adam! We saw Genesis Piano Project at M. Steinart & Sons in Boston in 2016 (?), a wonderful night. RIP Angelo.
In this video of Peter demonstrating the Fairlight, he shows how he came up with the primal theme for “The Rhythm of the Heat”. (it’s played in a different key on the album [down my a minor 3rd]). He hums a whole-tone melody while playing along to it that sounds like one of the melodies from “Slowburn”‘s ending instrumental (which he apparently later discarded). It’s remarkable getting this inside look into his creative process, and he briefly shows us some of the component rhythms of “The Rhythm of the Heat”: https://youtu.be/7Xfj5n1kYXY?t=171
Been catching up with the podcast the past couple weeks and just got to this one, and, where you ask “could you hear Genesis do any of these songs?”:
when I was collecting all these albums years ago, some time after I first got Peter Gabriel 4 I got the intro to Kiss Of Life in my head and couldn’t remember what it was, but was *sure* it was Genesis. Those chords feel so Tony Banks to me, and the chords in the chorus do as well, both of those chord progressions feel like they’re of the same fingers as the intro to Behind The Lines.
And having finally listened through Phil Collins’s solo albums recently, the sort of partyesque rhythm of Kiss Of Life feels much more like *his* wheelhouse than Gabriel’s. If Peter Gabriel hadn’t left Genesis and Kiss Of Life ended up on a Genesis album, I’d be very surprised, in that alternate reality, to not find it credited to Gabriel/Banks/Collins.