Peter Gabriel
Peter Gabriel IV

The day after the release of Peter Gabriel's untitled fourth album (1982, 'Security' in the States), a friend and I skipped school to buy it, and we locked ourselves at home to listen to it in peace, full of anticipation for what the wonderful predecessor from two years earlier had hinted at. A careful examination of the cover led us to dim the room for the sake of atmosphere, and in the silence, the needle dropped onto the distant crescendo of synthesized drums in 'Rhythm Of The Heat'. After the first two tracks, we were literally frozen, and the temporary pauses of relative normality did nothing to ease the pathos of the terrifying 'Family And The Fishing Net' or the dramatic 'Lay Your Hands On Me'. A shocking listen, an innovative and extremely bold album, another reason to accept Gabriel's long-past and completed defection from the Book of Genesis. Too different, too alien and intellectual, too far from the origins of rock.

'Peter Gabriel IV' (as the album has always been called) is still one of the records that have marked the lives and artistic sensitivity of many of us. The crystalline beauty of the third album, very futuristic in sound yet somehow still understandable and 'rock', here turns into a dramatic, engaging and captivating essay on human anthropology, on existing and vanished cultures, on world music and the primal collective unconscious, on man's fears and the Africa within each of us. Gabriel dons his latest terrifying mask—an African mask—and it's no coincidence he calls on his friend Peter Hammill, whose contribution to the kick-start of the esteemed Womad project was in 1980 the terrible and mysterious track 'A Ritual Mask', an African nightmare of rare strength and dissonance. (Gabriel's own unreleased contribution, 'Across The River', prefigured for those attentive to the double vinyl the themes and epic nature of the upcoming album).

The opening is one of the most intense one can imagine, where a strangled warble over the hypnotic carpet of percussion throws us into the primal nightmare of Carl Gustav Jung's shocking experiences in Africa. The dark African, the power of the earth and the spear that wounds and kills, the heritage and call of blood, the rejection of technology and the Western world ('smash the radio') reach a terrifying climax in the tribal roar of the Drums of Burundi, to fade into an echo full of pathos and welcome the asymmetric marimbas of 'San Jacinto'. It's a circular pattern in odd times, taken directly from Steve Reich's minimalism, which takes us to an imaginary burial place of the Native Americans, imbued with similar magic and elemental spirits: a place of supreme power and suggestion, where from the earth rise the voices of dead Indians speaking of a proud and brave people, of its tenacity, its right to live, and its union with the spirits of animals and nature. A poignant and deeply lyrical piece, perhaps Peter Gabriel's best ever interpretation (clearly very emotionally involved), seeing in the conclusion of the first part ('I hold the line...') the most epic point of his civil, cultural, and political testimony. Even in concert, the long track will conclude with the voices of the dead Native Americans, a terrible indictment for a terrible page in human history, and thousands and thousands of spectators in arenas worldwide will raise their fists and voices with Peter, as they had shouted and will continue to shout for the sacred memory of Steven Biko and the martyrs of apartheid.

Needless to say, the rest of the album maintains the alien coordinates of the initial two tracks. The context being clearly defined, the author allows himself some excellent interludes that are only seemingly less demanding—'I Have The Touch', the famous 'Shock The Monkey', the concluding 'Kiss Of Life' (in 10/4!)—without which we would have collapsed well before consuming the album, but the sonic exploration remains at the highest levels with constant use of steel drums, noise gate, Tony Levin's innovative stick bass, Jerry Marotta's tribal percussion, and especially the Fairlight, which is certainly not used here as on Ramazzotti’s records (no offense to Ramazzotti). The superb Fairlight sampler allows David Lord and Larry Fast, and Gabriel himself, to utilize fragments of the most sinister and unusual environmental sounds (sounds of water, wind, and rocks), processing them to modify the sound of instruments, particularly (but not exclusively) keyboards. The strange percussive pattern of the unsettling and tribal 'Lay Your Hands On Me' (during which performance PG will start to let himself be physically carried by the audience) derives, for example, from the sound of a rolling pebble.

Sounds and whistles and cavernous voices, and backward drums, and stick bass and Fairlight as if it were raining, instead compose the terrifying 'The Family And The Fishing Net', in which Peter Hammill's conceptual contribution is significant. It is the most 'fearsome' and dark track ever made by Peter Gabriel, a story and bloody nightmare of tremendous tribal marriage rites and blood and flesh unity, a piece without resolution and without exit with an irregular and menacing metric. Also a nightmare live, on the album it contrasts with the only truly light-filled song on the record: the beautiful and vibrant 'Wallflower', a song of protest but also of hope, a story and account of all those tortured and killed for ideological reasons worldwide, with particular reference to the South American disappeared. As always, Gabriel does not simply sing and mourn their fate but calls for civil and political engagement, the voice is firm and proud, the fist is raised once again, and ours with his, once again. Peter came to Italy on the tour that followed the album, and I too got lost in the sea of raised voices and hands, one of the most beautiful and engaging live sets I have ever had the fortune to attend, also because in those years he had an unparalleled voice and an unmatched stage presence and expressive intensity.

At the end of the exhausting series of concerts, Peter will release an exciting double live album and will stop for three years to rethink his artistic path, aware that he could not go further in this direction. Culmination and sum of all the insights that had taken him in six years from 'Here Comes The Flood' to 'San Jacinto', Gabriel's fourth album remains the most extreme and incisive work ever recorded by this artist and one of the most personal and courageous ever made. A record to take to a desert island, to give to your children so they know and won't be drowned by musical and cultural rubbish, an album that hits the stomach and shines with an inextinguishable light despite the thirty-two years since its release.