![peter gabriel in your eyes peter gabriel in your eyes](https://i.etsystatic.com/16399689/r/il/7182c4/1975896842/il_570xN.1975896842_d2m8.jpg)
But in the end, it’s Birdy who’s strong and his friend who’s cracking. “It was about the interplay between the traumatized Birdy, the wounded victim, and his best friend, who’s ostensibly the tough one. “ Birdy was about the struggle of the spirit,” says Gabriel. As Gabriel offers the cheery comment, he shows a radiant but characteristically fleeting grin and gazes out over the rooftops of London’s sedate Chelsea section. “Nice day to be a bird,” assures Peter Gabriel, the man who composed the soundtrack to Birdy, director Alan Parker’s stunning 1984 film adaptation of William Wharton’s cult novel about a mentally and physically scarred Vietnam vet obsessed with birds and flight. “I’ll miss the spirit we shared in the face of the horrible pain the prisoners of conscience must face.” One look at his elegantly lined features, the sad eyes fixed in a fiery stare, and it was plain that this was a fellow who understood suffering. “I feel empty and hollow now that this tour is done,” Gabriel confided in a quiet moment after the show. The 55,000 in the stadium were left dumbstruck by the profoundly moving rendition. “This is a song for a man of peace,” Gabriel prefaced, as his new band pounded out a solemn cadence, “and it’s dedicated to all the people of South Africa who’ve just been imprisoned in the last weekend.” He stood sentinel-like in high-collared, drab-olive shirt and midnight slacks, sweating profusely as his singing cut the still ninth with the skin-tingling elegy to the slain South African poet-activist Steve Biko. Gabriel’s solo presence has long since been stripped of all theatrical trappings and artifice, as was made apparent by his electrifying Amnesty International tour performance of “Biko” at the close of the “Conspiracy of Hope” caravan at Giants Stadium, in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Drummer-singer Phil Collins took the helm in 1976 and he made it possible for the group to produce such commercial smashes as “Invisible Touch.”Īnd Peter Gabriel, back from a year of creative solitude and domestic travail, is now the source of the adrenalizing “Sledgehammer” from So, a stunning collection of neoteric Brit R&B spiced with elements of Nigerian high life, Brazilian grooves, and Senegalese griots.
#Peter gabriel in your eyes professional#
One either adored the queer, dense, Lewis-Carroll-like display or utterly disdained its precious, unhurried sense of detachment.įollowing the elaborate 1974-’75 tour supporting the release of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Genesis’s two-record rock opera of urban angst, Gabriel bowed out, murmuring that a series of personal and professional crises of confidence were overwhelming him. Genesis’s rambling compositions, with titles like “The Return of the Giant Hogweed” and “The Fountain of Salmacis,” were brooding, mythical suites punctuated by Gabriel’s tart oboe tenor.
![peter gabriel in your eyes peter gabriel in your eyes](https://archive.org/services/img/Peter_Gabriel-In_Your_Eyes/full/pct:200/0/default.jpg)
Gabriel would take the stage in fox-head masks, inverted-pyramid headdresses, giant daffodil casques, glowing-eyes and bat-wing get-ups, abstract Roman-helmet makeup, and eerie, silvery whiteface. Genesis was British pop’s most intrepid purveyor of rock ‘n’ roll dramaturgy, and Peter Gabriel was its principal vocalist and ominously costumed Grand Guignol character.
![peter gabriel in your eyes peter gabriel in your eyes](http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/aSV3N6R5cvQ/hqdefault.jpg)
So it’s not surprising that “thick, depressive, and pathetically unathletic” Peter Gabriel, as he remembers himself, was burst straight from its gloomy carrels” (private desk nooks) and Gothic dorms into the leadership of a stubbornly phantasmal band called Genesis. The Charterhouse monks, not to mention the Tom Brown’s School Days-styled headmasters that came after them, were notoriously stern men. He was born into an upper-middle-class British family in the semirural county of Surrey and educated at Charterhouse, the famed 17th century English “public school” named for the former Carthusian monastery in London in which it was installed. It was a desperate act to stand apart from others at a time when the completion in the rock ‘n’ roll profession was so terribly intense.”Īrt rarely has an opportunity to imitate domestic life with such medieval severity, but then there have been few passages in the rock annals to match the grievous rise of Peter Gabriel. “Now, I look back on it as a cheap, exhibitionist gimmick,” says Peter Gabriel. Initially startled, her equally intense, impulsive spouse responded to her baldness by also undergoing tonsure. “I think I was just stamping my foot for attention,” she would later say of the 1973 infidelity. The act was in atonement for the affair she’d had with a friend of her husband’s, shortly after conceiving their first child. A darkly handsome young woman with regal cheekbones and easy poise, she rashly eradicated her innate dignity, razoring her lustrous mane right down to the scalp.
![peter gabriel in your eyes peter gabriel in your eyes](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-bnr350xzri/images/stencil/1280x1280/products/15804/16061/SLPTBKH5197__59136.1562145336.jpg)
This article originally appeared in the September 1986 issue of SPIN.