Peter Gabriel – San Jacinto
page 5
Ovo is an odd document. Commissioned for the turn of the millennium as part of London’s Millennium Dome celebration, Ovo is a concept album of sorts, the soundtrack of a multimedia theatre experience relating a somewhat confusing creation myth involving sky people and water people as they deal with issues of faith and technology and prejudice and who-all-knows what. Although it bears his name, Ovo is a soundtrack more than a Peter Gabriel stand-alone album, which is why it may not have received distribution outside of England. Ovo was supposed to be quite a spectacle – a visual feast – but without those visuals, the album falls a little flat. Although covering a wide range of material – from rap to ambient to Irish jigs – the album never quite coalesces, and tracks and moods bump awkwardly into each other. The quality of the material is quite uneven too, despite the collected efforts of, among others, Elzabeth Fraser from the Cocteau Twins, Neneh Cherry, the Electra Strings, the Afro-Celt Sound System, and Paul Buchanan from The Blue Nile. It’s a very uneven affair, for while it contains some of the worst material ever recorded under Peter’s flag (the opening track is horrifically bad), it also contains a few beautiful gems. One of the most beautiful is the heartbreaking Father, Son.
Most men, if they want children, picture a future of playing catch in the backyard or going fishing or laying in the hammock and talking with their adoring progeny. Almost no man pictures themselves with an infant. There’s a reason for this. It’s because it’s AWFUL. Early childhood has to be one of the most irritating and frustrating stages of a person’s life (for everybody involved (including the infant), although I say this having yet to experience adolescence from the other side). I knew it would be difficult, but I really had no idea how difficult it would be. When Ovo came out, my son Owen was 2, and I was just about at the end of my rope. For months, when I came home from work, he would burst into tears. It was just unfortunate timing, I knew, because he was tired and cranky right before bedtime, but it was getting so that was the only time I’d see him. Plus, he hated going to sleep, and you usually had to lie with him for at least an hour every night, patiently coaxing him to slumber, while he did everything possible to stay awake. If you got irritated – and it was almost impossible not to – then he’d get upset and you’d have to start all over again. It. Was. Awful. And I really didn’t know how either of us were going to survive. Because of my own difficult relationship with my father, I had a great deal of ambivalence about becoming a father in the first place, and now it seemed all my worst fears were coming true, and I was sinking into a well of despair with my own little Eraserhead there to taunt and torture me.
Ovo came out and, because it was the first release from Gabriel in eight years, I made a special trip to the Virgin Megastore to pick it up. My excitement at getting my hands on the new Gabriel album were almost immediately tempered by hearing the first track, but, like that first album of his all those years ago, I persevered. When I heard the sixth cut, my blood froze.
Father, son
Locked as one
In this empty room
Spine against spine
Yours against mine,
Till the warmth comes through.
The music, gently fragile, bolstered by stately funereal horns, is wistful, frightened and vulnerable. Peter’s meditation on aging and fatherhood caught me by surprise and hit me right behind the eyes.
Remember the breakwaters down by the waves
I first found my courage, knowing daddy could save
I could hold back the tide
With my dad by my side.
The image of a boy gathering strength from his father and then watching that strength ebb out was more than I could take.
We couldn’t talk much at all
It’s been so many years
And now these tears
Guess I’m still your child.
I thought about how I felt about my father growing up. How impossibly strong and sure and smart and loving he was. How he could do no wrong. And how, over the years, he could then do no right. And now he was gone and I was the father, and here was my beautiful, frightened, trusting boy looking up to me to hold back the tide.
Out on the moors
We take a pause
See how far we’ve come
You’re moving slow
How far can we go
Someday, Owen will see me for what I am. A mere mortal. Only a man, tired and scared and frayed around the edges. Someday I will hold his hand to feel the warmth of life and he will look at me across the years and feel the cold seeping into my fingers and wonder what became of me.
With my dad by my side
With my dad by my side
Got my dad by my side
With me.
I could hold the tide back no more, and the tears poured out of me, washing me clean.
That was a turning point in my relationship with Owen. He began talking and I let go of a lot of my fears and we tangled together. I still know the winter’s coming, but I’m happy to enjoy the warmth of the son on my face right now.
After one of the longest droughts in current popular music, Peter Gabriel released Up in 2002, his first proper album in 10 years (beating XTC’s 7-year stretch between Nonsuch and Apple Venus, but bowing before Kraftwerk’s awesome 18-year hiatus between Electric Café and the Tour de France Soundtracks).
Up is a wondrous, bleak, beautiful, powerful, terrifying sprawl. Returning after 20 years to the claustrophobic airlessness of Melt, Up is a very personal, very dark album. It’s angry and sad and bristles with energy. It is not for the fainthearted and those rainy-day fans who were hoping for another Sledgehammer will be disappointed, but if you’re willing to put in the time, there’s much to be reaped from this album. The textures and dynamics are foreboding and most of the songs hover around the 7-minute mark, but there is a subtle beauty and underlying strength to the album that are truly astonishing. Facing mortality head on, Gabriel digs deep into the black earth and uncovers startling bones of emotion. It is not a perfect album by any means, but it is enormously satisfying, and worthy of a decade’s wait.
Although we’ve never met, and aren’t likely to, I consider Peter Gabriel to be one of my better friends. More than almost anybody else, he has helped me in times of crisis, and has encouraged me to look within for the strength to live life. His emotional honesty, his musical integrity, and his open-armed approach to the cultures of the world are greatly inspiring. Because of his beautiful music and the noble experiments of WOMAD and Real World, some call him St. Peter, but I prefer to think of him as just Gabriel, the angel, blowing his horn to cleanse the world of hate and fear and call forth the musical rapture.