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.