Peter Gabriel's Peter Gabriel (the Third One): I Liked Him When He Was a Fugitive

 Genesis were before my time but I tried to get into them after finding out that the guy who did this video used to be their singer.

I liked it because while it was mainstream rock it was funny and imaginative. Great chunky riff and no guitar solo to ruin it. When I found out he'd just knocked off from leading a big prog rock dinosaur band I was even more impressed.

I didn't get the album that song was on as I heard it was stylistically all over the place. The next album came out the year after and I tried that, hearing it was more disciplined and less commercial. It was. None of it sounded like prog. It was stark and depressing. The synths sounded like Brian Eno rather than Emerson Lake and Palmer and the guitar was subdued power chords and the weird little whines of Robert Fripp (who indeed played on it). I played it on a mild spring evening and when it came to the gentle but troubling Mother of Violence I heard the lawn sprinklers hiss outside and the two sounds combined in an eerie blend. I haven't been tempted to listen to the album since those days but the memory is a pleasant one.

I did eventually get the first album and apart from a very few tracks the thing was unlistenably over produced. There's a little block harmony that stabs out of Slowburn: "but don't get me wrong (aaaah!) I'll be strong" that could have come from a Toto song. It was 1978 and the punk statutes were still in force. That had fallen away like baby fat on the second one. So it looked at least like the guy had learned a thing or two.

Two years after that I was in Brisbane living with my brother's psycho marriage and keeping to myself, writing handwritten letters to my friends back home about how horrible the world had turned. I'd send and receive about two per week. My favourites came from my old friend Win who matched my cartoon versions of events with his own and our absurdist humour gave a lot of comfort. One phrase he wrote I remember really bolstering my resolve went: "why does your sister in law scream about the price of eggs when she doesn't even eat them." That really was a comfort. And it was Win who sent one of the best things I've ever got in the post. It wasn't a letter but came in a chunkier padded bag.

I tore it open. A cassette. I didn't even check the writing on it before it was in the player while I read the letter. He'd remembered my birthday. It was June and so colder than normal. I made one of my long black Prince of Wales teas and hunched on my bed with the letter and the sound.

The first track had this big clunking percussion which sounded like someone moving a piano down a staircase. Whistles in the dark and an oafish whispered vocal. "I am the intruder..." it breathed. It was creepier than any movie I'd ever seen and sounded like it came from one. What?

Peter Gabriel's third album was just called Peter Gabriel same as the first and second. I thought that was cheeky. I'd already seen the vid for his single Games Without Frontiers which I thought was great. The video for it showed the same kind of imagination as Modern Love a few years before, mixing a kind of setpiece in the dinner party where the uppercrust guests talked to each other in complete ignorance of PG ranting into their ears and images from It's a Knockout which the song referenced in conjunction with the late Cold War politics it targeted. No Self Control was intense, a fevered vocal over restless marimbas. Kate Bush screamed in the distance and in the big noisy chorus. Family Snapshot was a shifting interior monologue about Lee Harvey Oswald.

Quite a lot of it was a slightly edgy reading of the predigested post punk that other old guarders were doing. The standout tracks were well above this and, apart from the puzzling muzak sax solo of Start, I happily left the whole thing on as it kept the screaming futile arguments that were happening outside my bedroom door. I hadn't brought any of my records down and there was nothing to play them on anyway and on the tough love $25/week my parents gave me to live on I wasn't about to buy any discs or player. I was alone.

Actually, I wasn't alone. While school had started feeling stark and unfriendly I quickly folded in and was part of its social realm within a month. At home, my brother's marriage involved a screaming match every morning and that was just the adults. My brother and his wife hated each other. The child between them somehow made it through this (a lot of assumptions there). My sister in law is  the most contentious person I have ever met. She fought with everybody and violently. She constantly accused my brother of keeping money from her (probably true) and reminding him of an affair so constantly you'd think he was still deep in it (definitely untrue) and anything else she could think of. The only reasons she stopped fighting with the other brother who lived there were because he fought back harder and eventually fell off Mount Coot-Tha on his oversized motorbike. For an upper middle class family that all sounds quite white trash, doesn't it? Well, it felt like it, too.

When it came my turn to own some blame she staged a situation...

I've written the account of this twice and I was shaking both times. All I say is that this incident ended in false witness, accusation and (most difficult for me to relive) my acquiesence. Now I step back and think of it, the lesson from it is never to accept undue blame, especially not to placate anyone. Also, all I really need to recall is that, years later, in a different location far from where I was, her neglect led to something far far worse. The solid, unbending hatred I feel for her knows that she has to live with that other thing. FOR. EV. ER.

So Win's letters were a great comfort. And when I and the others around me at school thawed out I rightly found comfort in the world beyond the walls and grew to enjoy my first year out of home. But there within those confines, that voice that told of torture and inner violence felt more like home than the place where I slept.

I saw Win every holiday. At one point he was even thinking of moving in. Those plans went fuzzy and were dropped (Dad's stern response to this was almost a relief after what I had grown used to) but we stayed friends and partied when we met.

And then the contact stopped. By the end of Uni the only time I'd see anyone from Townsville was when I went back up for Christmas and I recall even the letters trailing off. The year after uni was mostly a fun share house situation. We even got to know the girl sharehouse next door. It was like a sitcom. There were conflicts (see the post about the Capella Correlli) but mostly it was creative, productive and fun. And then one day I got a telegram which chilled me a little.

I threw it out decades ago so I'll have to paraphrase: "Arriving Saturday 8pm Cindy Lauper stop"

I didn't know anyone who would joke like that. At the end of my B.A. I was a self-designed sophisticate and except for the reprobates I shared with everone else I knew was a self-designed sophisticate, too. The lot of us were so incapable of unscripted humour that we would shudder at such an incursion.

So I ignored it.

Come Saturday, deep into a night of drinking and jamming and jibing and stuff we heard a thudding on the stairs and watched expectantly as the door opened and Win entered, alsmost collapsing under the weight of the ton of luggage he variously held or had tied to his body. He gathered himself and found a chair.

All of us knew Win, he was deeply set into the social whirl of the contemporary deep north. But no one had seen him for a while. We looked at him in silence and he looked back at us. We'd had a string of transient northerners through the place for months. They were all travellers and few stayed longer than a couple of days. Two weeks later, Win was still there staring out in front of him like a possum in a torch beam, saying weird things.

And he was getting taken by my brother (another one) at any opportunity that involved a night out or drinking. I carefully avoided joining them. Stephen was incapable of restraint once he'd been allowed to do something and was impossible to deal with. Meanwhile, Win was bleeding out.

At one point I wanted to show my old friend the second hand record shop I went to if only to see a little of the same spark we'd shared at school when we'd been awed by a musical discovery. He seemed so fragile it was hard to do anything with him. He perked a little at the Record Market, picking up a few old imports. Then when I went to the bank he tried to get money out of me, something completely invented. It wasn't much, a token of the plunder Stephen had conned (not itself amounting to a fortune but significant at our shared scale).

I tried to reason with Win but there was nothing in his dead blue eyes that suggested he was aware of it. He was just transferring one sin to someone else because ... well, because. I acquiesced and took him to the White Chairs for a drink so we could cool down about it. While I was at the bar he murmured something that I took to mean he'd find a table but when I turned around with the beer he was gone. (Remember that stuff about the life lesson of never accepting undue blame? It works if you aren't crushed by the sadness of the situation.)When I got back home he was out the back with the others, talking with more spirit than he'd shown all that time. When housemate Rick came in I told him what had happened and he said Win hadn't mentioned it. Finally, toward evening as I was changing the record Win came up, handed me my money back and said: "sorry, I was in a bad mood."

I accepted the note in silence. A day later he announced he'd be moving on, with a forced smile as though sharing our relief. He came back a week later and moved back in, having never asked once if he could move in at all. If you're young enough you will close something like this with cruelty. That's what we did. Rick and I went about the pasta ritual, chopping and preparing, boiling water and nurturing oil, bay leaf, mince, olives etc into a rich red sauce. This we did in front of Win who by now was reduced to barking out odd non sequiturs between great chasm-like stares. He sat at the table while we jibed each other and listened to whatever was blaring from the stereo. As planned we doled out the pasta between the two of us and in showy ignorance took it out to my balcony to eat.

Twenty minutes later he was packing his junk into a taxi and out of our lives.


A year later I was going to the shop and happened to look behind me and saw a figure come down the ski ramp curve of my street. A young male. He stopped as though he had seen me and though he was too far away he seemed to be looking at me.  I turned and continued but couldn't shake it and checked again. Again he stopped. I turned back for home and waited by the mail box for Win to catch up.

"How about a coffee?" I asked.

"That's what I'm here for."

None of the others were there which made it easier. He sat at the table while I put the coffee on. We said nothing at all while the drip filter bubbled and rasped. Our eyes met a couple of times and there was a sense that there was nothing to say but this was without tension. We just recognised it. Finally, he did speak.

"I left a few things here. Could I pick them up?"

"Of course!" I said too loudly and got up too quickly.

We went into the middle bedroom where he'd been but it was empty. I then took him downstairs to the room under the house in case they'd been put there. I tried the cupboard but found nothing. When I looked up he had gone.

My sister later commented on this, saying that it sounded as though he'd been profoundly hurt somewhere along the line and it made me think beyond the initial memory of his odd tense staring and silence. I went and found the tape and played it to the end.

That cassette of the Gabriel album was too short for one side. It ran out halfway through the seemingly inconsequential Lead a Normal Life and never got to Biko, the anthem most people remember it for. For me, though, the quiet whimper of the end of the tape feels like the legacy of its time as I experienced it: big and loud and troubling and then a sigh and then silence. A bed of marimbas, cooler and comforting this time play a pleasant cooing figure. Gabriel's voice enters: "It's nice here -" and the tape cuts out. No resolution, no anthem of defiance to follow, just the bright gold of Brisbane afternoon light and "it's nice here".  I gazed at the wall for a few seconds, flipped the tape out of the player and dropped it in the bin.

Top 10 110214

Kaleidoscope - Siouxsie and the Banshees: You're meant nominate the first album, The Scream, if any Banshees title makes the list. It's mix of punk snottiness and musical sophistication packed the punch of the attendant blend of the London of John Webster and the 1976 garbage strike. But to my ear, this third effort found the band free of the uniform but still pressing forward into what would soon be known as goth but for the moment went happily unclassified. Leslied guitars piping a minor key birdsong, distant whistling and the slightly offpitch humming and oddly busy drumming that built Happy House didn't seem to come from anywhere but scary movies. Siouxsie's lonely owl hoot and curlew whistle take us into the fade and a night that will feel eternal. That's just the first four minutes. Tenant broods, hi hats and dark bassy synth. Hybrid begins with an air of resignation, leading somewhere difficult, wounded saxophone trading off note wails with Siouxsie. I have never stopped to find out what this is about but it always fills me with the same sadness as anything crushing and inevitable. Christine with a humming bass and crisp acoustic guitar and another saddening vocal from Sioux from another dark room in a movie. Desert Kisses floats on heavy waves of synth and processed guitar, Siouxsie sighing through another tale of wrong. Red Light freezes its pornography rooms with a steady dark stepping, the rhythm aided by the click and wheeze of a camera motor wind and the vocal rising from a Dietrich croon to an angered wail. Neither before nor since did this unit come up with anything so accomplished, so unsettlingly light and nasty, so arresting and so saddening.

In a Silent Way - Miles Davis: At the other end of the 60s Miles and a new crew play one song per side. Delicious grooves by restless percussion and keyboards and Miles coming in like Gideon distant but gigantic. Sudden edits take us from moments of exhaustion to bright new paths. It's long and at some point it just ends but it always still feels like too little. An inspiration for the great local improv trio The Necks. No surprises there.

The Necks - Drive By: Thinking of the last one made me think of this one. Gently insistent percussion brings a softly rising bass to the surface and a languid piano figure follows. It all changes without you noticing. Spoken word samples mutter into either channel and then fall back beneath the swell. You can either concentrate on it or let it bear you as you drift. Both work.

 



Quasimodo's Dream - The Reels: Australian post punk was as rich a vein of exploration as the sounds coming from the U.K. There was no uniform nor primer, you did what you were inspired to. This second album from the demons of Dubbo remains not just their best but the apex of the Australian scene. From the bright pop of Colourful Clothes through the breezy instrumental Smokey Dawson Show to the mighty architectural beauty and epic melancholy of the title track, nothing else comes close.

 

Remain in Light - Talking Heads: I'm still a little afraid of The Overload, the landscape sized stasis and severe drone of the vocals coupled with the disjointed lyric give it the same unnerving feel as looking at one of De Chirico's night landscapes. I have always found funk easy to resist but here it's frozen solid and put to a travelogue of other influences and mental states in the lyrics. From the spooky desperate monologue of Listening Wind to the joyous estrangement of Once in a Lifetime. One to leave on.

 

Ocean Rain - Echo and the Bunnymen: After their first three platters of operatic doom the Rabbitohs came up with their most varied set yet. The Spector-scaled Killing Moon starts off with a delicious arch chorus and continues through smooth pop thills like Silver or Seven Seas to the epic title track whose melody alone somehow evokes every atmospheric seastory I've ever read. Their last great one is a more durable than the angst of the others which can get cloying and bratty. Here it's great writing, playing and singing.

Second Annual Report - Throbbing Gristle: I knew about musique concrete, John Cage and the whole avant gardist shower but nothing prepared me for the cheek and violence of TG. Synthesisers dub effects and terrifying monologues that actually seem to cause pain. Unpleasant listening but it opened doors.

Magical Mystery Tour - The Beatles: In which the fabs manage to sound both exploratory and firmly mainstream. Over a busy bed of twirling tape manipulations, radio broadcasts and whatever else they came across the Beatles deliver a set of perfectly contemporary pop songs about going on trips, Lewis Carol's walrus, being lost, flying and the village schizophrenic. The production is thick and orchestral and always on the verge of trippy. Usually unsung tracks Flying (great instrumental of big guitars through amp tremolo, organ and mellotron) and George's three in the morning slow-down ode to perdition Blue Jay Way. The original side two was all singles and b-sides but what singles and b-sides. Huge, brash Hello Goodbye, the flavoursome drugdrag of Strawberry Fields, the dazzling city morning of Penny Lane, the cool and funny Baby You're a Rich Man and the big summer anthem of All You Need is Love. Nothing says 1967 in swinging London so much as this except maybe The Stones' Satanic Majesties.

Blue Wonder Power Milk - Hooverphonic: I bought the debut of this Belgian duo plus changable singer in 97 because I wanted more Portishead until the next Portishead. I got one song which was a clear tribute and a host of others which went off in a completely different direction. This second album ought to suffer from the transition from one vocalist to the next but that ends up as one of its strengths. Some tracks have Lisje on lead tonsils, others have the incoming Geike and the rest are voiced by the lads themselves in a kind of whispering Fleming learning Anglais. This serves to present the set as a unified front of high pop sensibility and melancholy cinema. Battersea's lush strings and helium vocal singing images of a breakup administered by a dark manipulator who terrifies the narrator. One Way Ride glitters with synthesisers from old stereo demonstration records, a cor anglais from a 50s muzak LP and a whispered vocal. Someone is puzzled. Dictionary starts with the bell like keys of a two chord figure from a suspense film. Vocals are whispered but fresh rather than sinister. Club Montepulciano  breezes cool and drunken with cocktail names and characters so relaxing they fall asleep. And more. The mood shifts. The vocals change. The lyrics are range from naive to plaintive and you start to feel like you're watching the best French language movie ever made as Jeunet, Godard, Besson and Chabrol take turns at seducing you from the screen. Out Of Tune has a breathy wonder that I remember afresh every time I hear it and Eden's French horn figure melts my ears long enough for Geike to enter with her big sexy breathy sadness. I can never get sick of this album.

In The Aeroplane Over the Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel: I shouldn't like this album. It's made by a band around a magnetic central figure who are the type who change instruments every song when they play live just so you get to hear how crappy they can sound when they want to. But there is a strange confluence of eccentricity, melodism and eclectictricity in the approach to these songs which, when you listen to the words can make you cry or shiver. Jeff Mangum's writing, while his melodies return too often to the same figures, is like the best of David Lynch's imagery, short of total whimsy but long dropped overcontrol. From the opening track that sounds like a warm nostalgic thing until you notice lines about mum driving forks into dad's chest. The quiet and sinister O Comely, swinging between major and minor without formal modulation, the lines crammed with syllables as though turned musical from a rambling confession, Mangum's frequent springs to the height of his treble stave is like Syd Barrett without the affectation. "Your father made foetuses with flesh licking ladies ... smelling of semen all under the garden was all that you were needing ..." And through the album's obligatory Anne Frank reference we get to the coda: "Goldaline my dear we will fold and freeze  together far away from here there is sun and spring and green forever but now we move to feel
for ourselves inside some strangers stomach place your body here let your skin begin to blend itself with mine." Holy fuck! But somehow this album continues to comfort me. I have absolutely no idea why.