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U2 Connections: Peter Gabriel
by Khoa Tran
 A
few years back, I saw a film called Waking the Dead. Directed
by Keith Gordon, and with Billy Crudrup and Jennifer Connelly
in the lead roles, it wasn't the most commercially successful
of films, but it's a powerful story nonetheless. The emotional
climax of the movie was accompanied by a song that just struck
me numb. It was a soft, subtle piece of synthesiser-based music
with a gorgeous ambience. The voice wasn't Bono's, but I thought:
this song wouldn't be completely out of place on The Unforgettable
Fire. The end credits revealed that the song was Peter Gabriel's "Mercy
Street." Some quick 'net searching soon explained everything: "Mercy
Street," is from the So album, produced in 1986, two years
after The Unforgettable Fire, by none other than my favourite
fellow transplanted Franco-Canadian, Daniel Lanois. As I became
a fan and learned more and more about Peter Gabriel, I discovered
that he and U2 have crossed musical paths on more than one
occasion and in quite some interesting ways.
At first glance, U2's and Gabriel's musical carreers started
out differently enough. Gabriel was the colourful, charismatic
lead singer of the progressive rock band Genesis. The members
of U2 were, or at least thought they were, in a punk band,
which is about as far away from prog rock as you can possibly
get. Oversimplifying somewhat, Progressive Rock was a style
popular in the 1970s (and to a lesser extent in the decades
that followed, right up until present day) which featured bands
with virtuoso musicians writing longer, more complex songs
and instrumentals, fusing elements from jazz and classical
music. While prog was able to produce some great music, it
is often criticised for musical excess. Punk rock can be seen
as a musical reaction to Progressive rock, with stripped-down
arrangements and simple songs usually featuring no more than
three chords. Bono is famously dismissive of Prog, identifying
himself more with the punk movement. In the early days, he
and the rest of U2 were teenagers who, though extremely limited
musically, had something to say, and had a passion and the "do-it-yourself" punk
attitude that was seen as a breath of fresh air from the musical
snobbishness associated with prog. (As an editorial aside,
I'd like to point out that while prog was responsible for some
garishly excessive musical missteps, punk was equally responsible
for some overly simplistic and banal output. Punk's anti-musicianship
attitude was a less than positive one, and both genres produced
good and bad music).
From these two rather opposite ends of the rock music spectrum,
U2 and Peter Gabriel ended up meeting somewhere in the middle.
Gabriel eventually left Genesis and produced some very accessible
and commercially successful music (though notably very artistic
and experimental music all the while). U2, on the other hand,
soon outgrew its early musical limitations and matured to write
and produce music, which although stylistically and thematically
inventive, has remained essentially accessible to popular music
audiences and critics (to which the band's immense success
over the years with Grammy awards can no doubt attest).
Their early careers paralleled one another in the sense that
it wasn't until their respective fifth albums, The Joshua
Tree,
and So (both of which involved Lanois) that they really achieved
commercial success. Both have supported Amnesty International,
and both of their careers benefitted from the Conspiracy of
Hope tour in 1986: U2's "Bad" and Gabriel's "Shock
the Monkey" were reputed to have been among the highlights
of the set.
The Lanois connection is definitely the most palpable, as
he has produced career-defining albums for both of them. In
between
working on The Unforgettable Fire and The Joshua
Tree,
Lanois produced So for Gabriel. After the difficult Achtung
Baby sessions,
he tackled Us.
But aside from Lanois, they've shared another
common producer. In 1980, the same year he produced Boy for
a fledgling U2, Steve Lillywhite worked with Peter Gabriel
on the latter's untitled third album (his first four albums,
in fact, were deliberately untitled, and are commonly referred
to by their album cover images. In the case of the third album,
it's sometimes referred to as "Melt"). This album
yielded the well-known hits "Games Without Frontiers" and "Biko." "Biko" could
be thought of as Gabriel's "Pride (In the Name of Love)." While
the U2 song is a tribute to the late Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr., "Biko" deals with the torture and death of South
African anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko in 1977.
In addition to Daniel Lanois, U2 and Peter Gabriel have yet
another Canadian connection from Québec: Bono and Gabriel
both contributed songs to the 1995 Leonard
Cohen tribute album
(Cohen is from Montréal, and Lanois was born in Hull),
Tower of Song. Bono offered a haunting, yet gritty, almost
acid-jazz rendition of "Hallelujah," while Peter
Gabriel contributes a version of "Suzanne." Cohen's
original, with its sparse, troubadour-like singer and a classical
guitar arrangement, lets the song's lyrics evoke hazy images
of a relationship with a half-crazy woman down by the river.
Peter Gabriel tries to replicate this effect in the music itself,
slowing down the song's tempo and using lots of atmospheric
synthesiser padding.
Peter Gabriel, in his Genesis-fronting days, was known for
his elaborate costumes and onstage charisma. One might find
the link a bit tenuous between his "Britannia," and "Flower" costumes,
and Bono's The Fly, Mirrorball Man, and Mr. Macphisto personae,
but there's something else he might owe to Gabriel. Bono's
stage-diving (at least the intentional ones) might never have
happened had not Iggy Pop and Peter Gabriel pioneered the stunt
in the 1970s. While Bono's "unintentional stage dives" over
the years have left him with a dislocated collar-bone, a sprained
ankle, and a bruised ego, Gabriel once broke his leg during
a stage dive as the lead singer of Genesis, but reportedly
got back on stage and was able to finish the show.
Peter Gabriel has had an array of guest singers and musicians
contribute to his records and to his live performances, counting
among them J. Shankar (who played violin on a live version
of "Bad" with U2 at a 1993 ZooTV show in London),
Kate Bush, Paula Cole, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, his own daughter
Melanie Gabriel, as well as the popular and controversial Irish
singer, Sinead O'Connor. O'Connor, of course, is known by U2
fans for having collaborated with U2 (and variously the members
of U2) on "I'm Not Your Baby" (from the soundtrack
of Wenders' The End of Violence), "You Made Me the Thief
of Your Heart" (from the soundtrack of In the Name
of the Father), and "Heroine" (from the soundtrack of
Captive, a film which had its score written mostly by the Edge).
She was also the voice of the introduction to "Bullet
the Blue Sky" during the Elevation Tour. Sinead O'Connor
features prominently on the Lanois-produced 1992 album Us,
providing backing vocals to such songs as "The Blood of
Eden," and "Come Talk to Me."
@U2's resident Answer
Guy was able to provide me with some
valuable insights, as a fan who has been fortunate enough to
have seen (and to have been of an age to have seen) both U2
and Peter Gabriel many times over their long and storied careers.
Answer Guy would argue that "Biko" is also U2's "40": "There
would be no one-guy-leaves-at-a-time-at-the-end-of-the-show
with U2 had Peter Gabriel not done it first." As well, "there
would be no 'outside it's america' spotlight play by Bono,
had Mr. Gabriel not done it in his live shows. Long before
Bono cut his chin on a hand-held spotlight, Pete was shining
his light on the crowd." Finally, AG concludes nicely
that U2 and Peter Gabriel have "copied each other especially
in producers and in what they wanted to accomplish live. Bono
begs for attention on stage and Gabriel somehow "demands" it
through some force of will. '40' made me happy at the end of
U2 shows. 'Biko' brought tears to my eyes every time."
And perhaps, in the end, between U2 and Peter Gabriel, producing
decades' worth of great music and moving audiences with compelling
live performances are the greatest connections of them all.
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Gabriel
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A442810
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Conspiracy_of_Hope_Tour
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stage_diving
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