Peter Gabriel becomes 75: The anti-superstar of pop

At the upper age of 75, Peter Gabriel can look back on a highly idiosyncratic career. Even if he conquered the charts with super hits such as “Sledhammer”, “Red Rain” or “Don’t Give Up” in the 1980s, he made great trouble to escape a classic pop-star existence over long stretches of his musical career.

The first signs of his characteristic obstinity became recognizable when he suddenly gave up his job as a singer of the progressive rock band Genesis in 1975 at the height of the success. Since its foundation in 1967, the band had become one of the largest rock acts of Great Britain, the big breakthrough in the USA was imminent at the time.

It had not only brought Genesis to celebrity through orchestral Soound experiments, but also significantly due to the extremely eccentric stage performance of her singer. In order to underline the spherical sound of the band and the surrealistic texts of the songs, he slipped into new bizarre disguises and turned into bats, singing flowers or foxes in the flowering ruffle dress.

For his farewell to the band after a world tour to the last album “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”, Peter Gabriel mainly led private reasons. In addition to greater artificial freedom, he needed time for his first daughter Anna, born in 1974. According to the zeitgeist, the musician also used his self-prescribed rock’n’roll break for extensive self-research, learning various yoga techniques and growing vegetables. In the meantime, the Genesis drummer Phil Collins (74) led the band to a new and no less successful era.

From 1976 Peter Gabriel started with fresh energy at the start of his solo career, which in the following years should initially take a rather tough course. Between 1977 and 1982, the dropout released four albums, which he did not give any official title confusingly. Even if some pieces of it, like his debut single “Solsbury Hill” (1977) or the political anthem “Games Without Frontiers” (1980), gave him a few chart successes, the headstrong musician on these first solo works indicated it on it not to fit into the drawers of the mainstream pop.

The pieces contained on them, in which Gabriel increasingly experimented with digital recording techniques, often failed very slowly and dark, were rarely linearly structured and be stubbornly withdrawn from any radio suitability. These first solo albums were well received by music criticism, but did not give an idea of ​​the spectacular success, which Gabriel was supposed to celebrate in 1986 with his hit album “so”.

This year, the previously moderately successful musician pulled all professional registers in order to finally master the big breakthrough as a solo artist. His new album, on the cover of which he presented to the viewer with a determined look and a decent hairstyle, was bursting with radio -compatible hits such as “Sledhammer”, “Big Time”, “Red Rain” and heart -ranging ballads such as “Don’t give up” Or “in your eyes”.

Gabriel’s elaborately produced videos on today’s classics of the 1980s also caused a stir. The surrealistic clip for his number one hit “Sledhmert” produced in the stop-motion process quickly became the most influential music broadcaster MTV at the time. At the MTV Video Music Awards in 1987, the video cleared entire prices and set up a record that was still unbroken to this day.

Despite this huge success, the musician, who rose to a superstar, was first six years after the resounding success of the album “So” until he added his second solo work “Us” in 1992. Instead of connecting directly to his gigantic success, he had in the meantime devoted himself to the composition of a soundtrack for the feature film “The last temptation of Christ” (1988) by star director Martin Scorsese (82).

In the further three decades, Peter Gabriel almost completely disappeared from the scene as a solo artist and was given as much time with the release of new albums like no other artist in recent music history. Another ten years should pass by his next album “Up” (2002). In 2010, the Briton surprised with the cover album “Scratch My Back”, on which he reinterpreted songs from other musicians such as David Bowie (1947-2016), Lou Reed (1942-2013) or Neil Young (79).

On a album published in 2011 entitled “New Blood”, he played his biggest hits with an orchestra to date and then did not hear anything about himself for over a decade. It was not until 2023 that he presented a late work with his latest album “I/O” a late work received by the criticism and his patient fans.

But even if Peter Gabriel rarely launched his own albums in the past three decades, he was highly active in other areas during this period. So he with his own record label “Real World Records”, founded in 1989, heches musicians from all over the world state-of-the-art recording opportunities and offered them a well-respected stage on the “Womad” World Music Festival, which is still regularly taking place.

He also acquired his reputation as a “good person of pop” through his years of commitment to human rights organizations such as “Amnesty International” or “Witness”. In 2007, together with the star entrepreneur Richard Branson (74) and the South African political icon Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), he founded the organization “The Elders”, an amalgamation of outstanding peace activists and human rightsists with former state drivers and prominent intellectuals. It is to use the collective experiences and areas of influence of its members to work together for peace, human rights and a sustainable handling of planet earth.

After the release of his last album “I/O” in 2023, Peter Gabriel justified that after the release of his first album “I think people can be over-saturated, and then they are that he justified people, and then they are Bored by you.

About his political engagement: “I myself am now less in the foreground, but I support the political issues that are important to me, all the more sustainable. I find it stimulating to start political think tanks or find out how new communication technologies can help us to violate human rights To make a waste of time.