Peter Gabriel • Birdy Original Soundtrack Real World Records PGLPRBIRX
Peter Gabriel • Passion: Music from The Last Temptation of Christ Real World Records PGLPR1X
Peter Gabriel • Long Walk Home: Music from Rabbit Proof Fence Real World Records PGLPR10X
ith Peter Gabriel’s Real World studio and record label busy transferring his back catalogue to double 45rpm LPs, it seems like a good time to revisit some of his less-well-known work. After all, if the excellent results on the audiophile favorite So are anything to go by, the new double discs should represent both a sonic and a musical treat. Maybe it’s an age thing, but Gabriel’s early eponymous solo albums are popular amongst audiophiles, with examples of all four to be found lurking in many a record collection, alongside the ever-popular So, with its big hits "Sledgehammer" and "Don’t Give Up," tracks synonymous with the MTV revolution. But Gabriel is nothing if not prolific, and, besides the World of Music, Arts and Dance (WOMAD) Festival and the world-music initiative that brought Real World into being, he has continued to produce his own albums at regular intervals, with nearly a dozen studio and live records released since then. Amongst these, existing as an almost separate body of work, you’ll find these three soundtrack albums, which show a different and arguably more contemplative side to Gabriel’s musical character. One should never forget that Peter Gabriel started musical life as both singer and front man -- indeed, very much the latter. So it should come as no surprise that his voice and persona sit front and center in much of his music. They are what make the songs so powerful and characterful, but they also tend to obscure the deft compositional touches and arrangements that inform the instrumentation. Shorn of lyrics and with a separate narrative to inform them, the soundtracks extend the familiar musical vocabulary and textures to subtly embellish a range of different emotional demands and moods. The movies and the people providing the music for them have always been shameless plunderers of existing influences, with large tracts of the classical repertoire appearing almost verbatim from time to time. In between, they survive on stolen themes and increasingly, on imported hits to add a period feel. In one sense, Gabriel is no different -- except that he’s rifling his own back catalogue. The music for Birdy consists of twelve vignettes, creating a range of different yet connected moods and spread three a side across the two LPs. Gabriel makes no bones about the derivative, recycled nature of these tracks, with five of them carrying direct attributions of and drawn from tracks on his third and fourth eponymous albums. With help from Daniel Lanois, these core themes were reshaped into new soundscapes full of subtle shifts and textures. Listen to the album as a whole and it’s impossible to ignore its looped, sampled, almost ambient quality, techniques that have become commonplace today but were only just emerging in 1985. It also makes you realize just how much is going on behind that vocal focus. There are hard rhythms and stark shades here ("Powerhouse at the Foot of the Mountain"), interspersed between fuller, more developed and more obviously melodic tracks (like "Under Lock and Key" or "‘Birdy’s Flight"), but the consistently dark tonality and cavernous space create a haunted, desperate and starkly reflective atmosphere that is both captivating and affecting. I wouldn’t describe this as easy listening, but then the film is hardly a lightweight bunch of laughs. Instead, it is musically serious and evocative, thoughtful and thought-provoking. It’s also the precursor to Gabriel’s next soundtrack project, the music for Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. Although Passion post-dates Birdy by a mere four years, it’s a world away developmentally, both as a single, coherent piece and in terms of Gabriel’s musical worldview. It coincides with the founding of Real World Records and the long-term success of the WOMAD Festival, and given the subject matter of the movie, it’s no surprise to find a host of African and Middle Eastern influences at work. Vocal contributions from the likes of Youssou N’Dour, Baaba Maal and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan are set against complex mixes built on traditional North African rhythms and instrumentation, layered with the synthesized, sampled and looped material already established on Birdy and in Gabriel’s solo work. The result is exotic and multi-facetted, overlaid and textured, music that enhanced the emotional and spiritual intensity of this controversial film but successfully stands alone too. It’s those ever-present African rhythms that bind this into a coherent whole, with (generally shorter) instrumental pieces interspersed between longer tracks topped with vocal embellishments. I say "vocal," but in this case, both linguistically and stylistically, the singing is effectively wordless, another set of textures to lay against the instrumental backdrop, yet one that’s unmistakably, essentially human. The recording lacks the space and instrumental separation of the Birdy Soundtrack, but makes up for it in terms of presence and intensity, qualities that are far more critical to this movie. In part that’s down to the archived and location-recorded nature of much of the source material, but there’s no mistaking the human anguish, hope and pain that anchor this narrative. The haunted darkness of the earlier score makes way for a more varied, ethnically rooted soundscape, littered with urgent rhythms and otherworldly singing, a melange that reaches its peak on the title track, a seven-and-a-half minute tour de force that mixes a battery of percussion and synthesized sound, layered with color and textural strands from trumpet and voices as varied as a male chorister -- Youssou N’Dour, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Gabriel -- all perfectly worked into a single, monumental whole. As if to prove my point as regards the "borrowing" nature of the soundtrack market, this music predates the highly regarded Blackhawk Down by twelve years. It might lack the explosive impact of that later movie, but then it’s all about a different kind of suffering, a more intimate, more subtle and ultimately more challenging ask. That ability to conjure the necessary emotional sense and environmental color from such disparate sources is what makes this music so powerful, evocative and listenable -- and helps explain why Blackhawk trod so closely in its footsteps. Twelve years later, Gabriel produced his third soundtrack, the incidental music for the movie Rabbit Proof Fence. This trans-outback tale of aboriginal displacement risked being bleak for more than just its subject matter, placing a heavy burden on its mood music. Given the WOMAD connection, you might expect the composer to reach back into his readily available ethnic toolbox, but this is a score refreshingly free off didgeridoo clichés and shades of Crocodile Dundee. Instead, it harks back to the sound palette of Birdy, but matches the more coherent structural whole of Passion. Gabriel adds drones and nature sounds to anchor the music in its landscape, but those and the sparsely used aboriginal voices are more hints than dominant themes. Instead, it’s the evocative string arrangements of Jocelyn Pook and the lyricless choral contributions of the Blind Boys of Alabama that flesh out this musical skeleton. The latter’s simple but haunting melody bookends a powerful fourth side that brings the whole to a satisfying musical conclusion. There’s plenty here to reward the listener on a purely musical level and, like Passion, it succeeds as a standalone project. These three records make a fascinating set. There’s no doubting that in overall musical terms, it’s Passion and Rabbit that are the most complete and the most rewarding titles. But the pared-back constructionalist nature of Birdy has both its own musical power and is a fascinating precursor to the other two -- as well as a remarkable insight into the musical structure of Gabriel’s early solo albums. Fans may or may not already own these albums, but none of the previous versions matches the sonic and musical qualities of the double 45rpm LPs (cut by the experienced Matt Colton at Alchemy Mastering). You’ll never have heard this music sound like this -- and on music this textural and atmospheric, that matters. For those for whom Peter Gabriel rests
somewhere between Genesis and "Sledgehammer," these are records that are well
worth investigating; as I’ve already suggested, they reveal an arguably more subtle,
reflective and contemplative side to the artist. Perhaps more important, they offer a
different and rewarding musical experience. If I was plumping for just one, it would be Passion,
but all three stand as a connected body of work, and it seems a shame to split them up. |
