It used to be the philosophers, poets, playwrights and priests who shaped our understanding of the world around us.  The highly educated would lean into Sartre, Locke, Keynes, Shakespeare and Donne to illuminate our thoughts about the human condition.  But, as you know, no one reads books in school anymore, and universities (other than a very tiny ancient elite) are too enormous, amorphous and commercially obsessed with student numbers to impart very much deep learning.  So, we absorb and pertain to the world though our shared popular cultural experiences – TV shows, movie characters, influencers and via social mediums, we are connected by musical artists.  Billions of people on planet earth know all the words of Bohemian Rhapsody, but don’t much care whether Galileo was magnificent or not.  I went to School, graduated from university and tried to read a few books, but I have increasingly found that another modern-day poet, The Boss, was right when he said he “learnt more from a three-minute record, than I ever learnt in School”. 

Well Springsteen is on tour in Europe again.  But at a price point that made even investment bankers pause before booking.  So is everybody else.  And So, after too long away, is the amazing Peter Gabriel.  Three things then about the extraordinary artist.  

1. Gabriel as a Creative Artist

Forty years ago, as the front man of Genesis, Gabriel dressed-up on stage as Fox in a red dress and sang 24-minute-long songs, while jerking in 9/8 time, as if in a fit, hitting a tambourine and shouting about “a flower!”  He has, to say the least, moved on some way from that early incarnation in his career, with a series of moody innovative solo albums, a massive global hit album ‘So’ (with its humongous world-wide hit Sledgehammer), written several film scores, produced a millennium show, championed civil and human rights, embraced world music and co-founded the Womad festivals.  He has also been at the cutting-edge of embracing technology, pioneering digital distribution methods, built Real World studios, and his recording techniques, music videos and live shows are an extraordinary fusion of creative imagination and digital adoption.

2. Gabriel as a Technology Trailblazer

Recently his technology fetish has also embraced AI and, despite what he described as something of a “backlash” within the music and arts community, he recently ran a competition with a firm called Stability AI called the ‘Diffuse Together Challenge’. Entrants could use six songs from Gabriel’s catalogue, including Sledgehammer, to create AI generated animation videos.  Gabriel’s response to the negative feedback, and concerns over copyright, and financial dues to artists, is posted here, but, in essence, he argued that creative artists should not fear the adoption of technologies like AI, but embrace it. “Like the wheel, or the industrial revolution, I believe the changes coming with AI are unstoppable,” he said.  You can find out more about the project and extraordinary results on Gabriel’s website.   

3. Gabriel as a Revolutionary

The amazing thing – and I mean spookily amazing - is that Gabriel in 2023 is wholly consistent today about his confidence in the adoption of new disruptive technologies as he was, way back in 1986 when he similarly talked about the adoption of computers in music recording and production as a new “industrial revolution.”  Many readers here will be familiar with a popular clip of a 1999 interview that David Bowie did with the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman. In that interview, Bowie, talking in the early days of painfully slow ‘dial-up’ internet, describes the internet like an “alien life-form” that has landed amongst us, and none of us had yet realised what that impact would be.  To quote the great man:

“The actual context and the state of content is going to be so different to anything that we can really envision at the moment, where the interplay between the user and the provider will be so in-simpatico, it's going to is going to crush our ideas of what mediums are all about.”  David Bowie, 1999. 

Bowie’s vision, and notably, his way with words, was light years ahead.  But some 13 years before that interview, Gabriel was asked by a journalist about his adoption of “new technology, gadgets and computers”.  Gabriel was starting to use digital recording techniques, a Fairlight sampler, sequencers, and creating stop-motion animation ideas for MTV videos that would change the way the world viewed music and artists. The clip is posted below from the same artist now co-creating music videos using AI.  It’s pretty remarkable and you could copy it from the past and paste it into his response about the dangers of AI today.  

“I think that it is like seeing a Revolution take place that is this fundamental as the Industrial Revolution and it and, it's only just beginning. So I think the opportunities that it presents to anyone in all areas, and it shouldn’t be underestimated at all. I mean either the technology has made our ally, or it's our enemy, and I think life will be a lot happier if we make it our ally and come to grips with it.”  Peter Gabriel, 1986. 

Gabriel back in Greenwich

Gabriel is remarkable and at 73 seems as vivid and compelling as an artist today as he was in the 1980’s when he became a global star.  In 2000, he produced the ‘Ovo’ show for an ill-fated millennium exhibition under a huge canvas on the Greenwich peninsula. He invited Paul Buchanan and Liz Fraser to sing the closing song, Make Tomorrow Today, which sums up much of his approach for half a century as a creative artist. Gabriel is on tour with his new album i/o in June, before heading the States in the autumn. 23 years later, he will be back in Greenwich, under that same Canvas, in what is now called “The 02”.  I think this time, worth the ticket price.