Peter Gabriel recently won the Classic Pop magazine’s “best vinyl” award for the re-mastered re-release of his first four albums.  No I haven’t heard of the award either but the legacy of the ex-Genesis frontman is not in dispute.  Whilst his opening hit Solsbury Hill and first album are largely read in semi-autobiographical terms, they paved the way more accurately for the game changers that were his third and fourth albums.  Before the 1980s caught up with drum patterns and synthesisers there was Gabriel.  Before the bandwagon that was world music and Live Aid there was Gabriel.  And before Massive Attack got creepy there was Peter Gabriel 3, otherwise known as “melt” given its lack of title and gooey faced cover.  Gabriel always was a drama queen famed for his outrageous outfits and antics when fronting Genesis but here the drama became the music.  PG3 is primarily a spooky, on occasions scary, and above all claustrophobic listening event.  Thundering and smacking drumbeats stripped of high-hat and percussion yet layered with added Linn and Fairlight programming accompany a series of songs about criminality, mental breakdown, and confinement (Intruder – burglary and stalking, I Don’t Remember – interrogation, and most powerfully Family Snapshot – a portrait of an unhappy little boy with some big, bad ideas).  All of this is then layered with psychological paranoia remarkably akin to a teenage horror movie (No Self Control – domestic violence, Not One Of Us – the playground bully) before our antihero enters the lunatic asylum “playing silly games” (Games Without Frontiers – the album’s one commercial hit), “eating with a spoon, they don’t give you knives” (Lead A Normal Life) and awaiting – as it were – execution (Biko – the album’s climactic closer, an elegy and homage and a half to anti-Apartheid activist Steve Biko who died in police custody in 1977).

The influence of all of this was, at the time in 1980, unknown – the album was a hit but not a huge one and jostled alongside the likes of Abba, Blondie and Olivia Newton-John.  Yet just about anyone who is anyone in the music business now will quickly cite Gabriel’s influence over the Africa meets pop phenomenon and or the new studio technologies of synthesisers and drums that would come to define an entire decade of popular music.  Most particular among these was that other bastion of British weirdness her highness Kate Bush who publicly thanked Gabriel for “opening the windows” on her own self-penned number one album Never For Ever the same year.  The parallels in their careers are no less spooky – a path breaking third album that began to earn “serious artistic credibility”, an inevitable wobble with an uncommercial fourth album, and then critical and commercial acclaim with number five (So, Hounds of Love), let alone the snogging on the video for that duet (Don’t Give Up).

For Gabriel the wobble was PG4, entitled “Security” in the US, which brought his African sympathies both lyrically and musically to the fore.  Still exciting sometimes (The Rhythm Of The Heat, Lay Your Hands On Me) and still creepy (particularly the cinematic Family & The Fishing Net) but also a bit soggy and sentimental in places (Wallflower was no Biko).  Despite the disco funk of lead singles Shock The Money and I Have The Touch, PG4 was a far lesser commercial hit.  Of course, as with Bush, the blip was temporary as all this drum banging psychodrama and political questioning became welded to a more commercial whole on So.  It could not last.  Subsequent albums have not had the same impact, sometimes tipped into solipsism (Gabriel’s Us and Bush’s The Red Shoes equally), or just dried up as Gabriel increasingly put his efforts into “real” world music period.   Like his younger sister Kate he can still do it when he really wants to though.  2002’s Up was deeply impressive if flagrantly un-chart friendly, not unlike Kate’s twelve-years-in-the-waiting Aerial that cemented her greatness once and for all.  It is timely, then, in an era of the horrors of X Factor, sound byte compression, and the collapse of “world” and “black” music into rap, to be reminded just how provocative, intelligent, or downright scary popular music can be.