When you get to a certain age it's alarming, isn't it, to see the idols of your youth growing old. Once upon a time Peter Gabriel, the lead singer of the legendary prog-rock group Genesis, was a lithe Adonis in flares who brought the band's mythic songs to life with graceful mime and surreal costumes.
Today, at the age of 61, he's a stout fellow with a white goatee who resembles Burl Ives.
Gabriel left Genesis in 1975, at what was then the peak of the band's popularity. But while rock music is littered with self-destructive egos and one-hit wonders, with stars who failed to move on or whose fans refused to let them, he has led a career of variety and invention and, happily, global success.
From Biko, the first pop song to celebrate the resistance to apartheid, to Xplora, the world's largest-selling music CD-ROM, to On Demand Distribution (OD2), one of the first music download services, he has consistently stood at the point where music, technology and politics converge.
The man whose recording label WOMAD introduced world music to millions in the West appears at a restaurant that overlooks London's Knightsbridge. Gabriel's here to discuss his 17th solo album, New Blood, which gives the orchestral treatment to a selection of his own greatest hits in a grand CD and 3-D DVD package, mixing international rhythms and inflections in the musical melting pot he has championed for years.
"I've lived and slept and eaten and drunk these songs for so long I know them inside out," he says in the husky voice his stocky body now produces, "but we were trying to approach them in a different way. The brief was to try something skeletal in places and rich and fleshy in others. We were trying to let the songs speak but using the colours of the orchestra."
The meeting of pop with classical has produced some stinkers (the Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra's Rolling Stones Songbook), some triumphs (Frank Zappa's The Yellow Shark) and a whole lot in between. There have been bluesy dates (Deep Purple at the Albert Hall), gothic tempests (Within Temptation) and symphonic metal collisions where guitar riffs and Beethoven bang, for better or worse, like hammer and tongs (Metallica). So, what makes it work, when it works? What do the new arrangements reveal in the old songs?
"Well, we didn't want to just have the orchestra scraping out the melodies in a literal way. You'll get bands with orchestras sampled on their keyboards, and they just plonk out the chords. I myself was ignorant about where the individual instruments speak best, and what range of sound possibilities they all have, but with the wonderful John Metcalf arranging for me, we laboured hard on capturing the warmth of the instruments, the timbre and texture – the wood and the strings, and achieved a certain to and fro."
Gabriel's collaboration with Metcalf (the British violist and composer who's worked with Blur, Simple Minds and numerous other contemporaries) began with his last album, Scratch My Back, on which he covered songs by artists as diverse as Lou Reed, Bon Iver and Vampire Weekend. But he's actually no stranger to orchestration, having also worked on his album Up with Will Gregory (of Goldfrapp) and composed the soundtracks to Birdy (1984), Passion (1986) and Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002). Some of the songs on New Blood have an emotional impact in the best movie-score tradition. The new rendition of San Jacinto, about a Native American watching his culture trampled by modern white society, evokes the panoramic aural landscapes of a Terrence Malick film. Mercy Street conjures the atmosphere of film noir.
At first listen, some elements that fused Gabriel's reputation for marrying musical cultures seem disappointingly absent: the bagpipes and African choir on Biko, for example. But then you realize the inflections are still there – just, as he says, in a different way. On The Rhythm of the Heat, a song based on Carl Jung's experience observing a group of tribal drummers in Africa, "We really worked to capture the sex dripping off the bows of the violins. To have that primal, Stravinsky-like urge. We stripped out the African blood of the drums themselves, but gave the interweaving polyrhythms to the string section, so there's still that intensity. It's the rhythm, often. If I taught music to young people, I would say you can't start with the head. You start with the hips and then it percolates up to the head. If you try to understand music too intellectually, starting with the head, then you can't find your hips."
On YouTube there's a clip of Gabriel at London's Hammersmith Apollo last year, beginning that song, with its lyric, "The rhythm has my soul," where he's so visibly taken up listening to the orchestra behind him he forgets his vocal cue. You get a vivid sense of how he's rediscovered the meanings behind his own compositions.
"Well yes!" he says, laughing. "You perform these songs so often you don't always feel the emotion, or at least you don't know when you might. Sometimes I'm drifting off, right there on the stage, drawing up my laundry list. The tour you see on the DVD was only three weeks long, so I never got to the point of routine anyway, but yes, the fresh arrangements did mean I could suddenly find myself overwhelmed."
Early listener reaction has borne out similar emotions: "In my garden beneath the moon with a glass of wine," writes one blogger. "Not the same glorious orchestral treatment, but more glorious." With its dramatic soundscapes, New Blood focuses you on the raw subject matter of Gabriel's songs: depression; childhood terrors; the murderer's inner urge; poison rituals of the Sioux; the poems of Anne Sexton; his breakup with Rosanna Arquette.…
"I was trying to illustrate a psychological space musically," he says. "I deliberately wanted this record to be a little hard work, for you and for me. We live in a junk-food culture, but I'm encouraged by that experiment where teenagers are given free rein of the supermarket. They start out gorging on pizza, of course, but after a month they're choosing the vegetables. With New Blood we've tried to present something that's rich enough to reward your efforts."
Gabriel has been a multimedia innovator from his days with Genesis. Early though it was in the evolution of computer entertainment, his 1997 art and music adventure Eve pushed the degree of psychological and emotional engagement a game can offer. The DVD half of New Blood is as immersive as 3-D technology can offer today, not just placing you onstage among the musicians, but also in some peculiar dimension where live action is blended with evocative images projected above the stage.
By comparison, and sadly for some, only a few Genesis clips survive, like snatches of dreams – shadowy and out of focus. The diehard fans who pine to see the young man in a red dress and a fox head can make do with Quebec's the Musical Box, a Genesis tribute band that plays to sold-out crowds around the world and whose replica of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway this fall is so note-perfect that all the members of the original Genesis, Gabriel included, have endorsed it. Still, it makes you wonder what he could have done then to bring the fantastical imagery of Genesis's songs alive with the technology of today.
Special to The Globe and Mail