 |
the rhythm of
the heat |
Speaking in 1980, Peter Gabriel said, "I have some tunes like I Go Swimming and Milgram's 37...there is a track called Twilight Zone and Come My Way [which] are half recorded and will be on my next album around christmas."
In fact none of these songs ended up on Peter Gabriel. I Go Swimming has emerged only as a live track and an instrumental B-side. Milgram's 37 did not appear on record until So. Twilight Zone and Come My Way have not appeared on record to this day and are likely candidates for a "bottom drawer" anthology should one ever eventuate. Work on Peter Gabriel began in earnest early in 1981 when David Lord helped upgrade the equipment at PG's down-home studio at Ashcombe House in Bath. Lord, who ran the local Crescent Studios, had collaborated several times with Peter. He was engineer on the American leg of the 1980 tour and helped mix the German version of the third album. He also engineered a one off single by Jimmy Pursey in June 1981: Animals Have More Fun. This track and its B-side were co-written and produced by Gabriel.
In melody maker of February 1981, Peter conceptualised what kind of sound would be prevalent on the next album. What he described is essentially what now exists as the fourth Peter Gabriel album: lots of percussion, little use of the regular drum kit and lots of electronics. Continuing the method of building tracks up from rhythms (the most obvious example here being The Rhythm of the Heat), Gabriel wanted to maintain as much as possible the initial sounds in composition, a naked canvas of electronica, using a full band only to emphasise certain elements of the songs, thus lending more power to that full band sound.
In seeking out new musical textures, rhythms and melodies, Peter had become more attracted to the traditional sounds from Africa and South America. Peter's affection for what is now known as 'world music' extends at least as far back as his involvement in creating the song Biko, using the source music (traditional South African funeral music) for the song's prologue and epilogue. In 1982 Peter and others created Womad, the World Of Music Arts and Dance, organised the first Womad festival (16-18 July, 1982) at Shepton Mallet. The festival was an unmitigated artistic success, Q Magazine (in 1998) listing it among Britain's greatest music festivals of the past. Financially, Womad was given the last rites. Peter himself was the subject of death threats from irate debt collectors when the festival went £189,000 in the red. In the wake of the financial wranglings, Tony Stratton-Smith (head of the Charisma label to which both Peter Gabriel and Genesis were signed) arranged for a benefit concert to feature Genesis fronted by their first (and best) frontman.
After the debacle with the American Atlantic label over the third album, Peter wanted to seek out a sympathetic ear in the states. Fortunately, the success of the third album made him a newly marketable commodity and he soon found himself investigating offers with several record labels. While the newly established Geffen label was clearly not the most lucrative deal (below the highest bid of $1,000,000 and even below Atlantic's pathetic buy-back offer of $750,000), the promise of understanding seemed to be the deciding factor behind Peter's signing with them. Ed Rosenblatt, the company's president assured Gabriel that "whatever you want to do we'll put it out". True to their word, it seems the only stipulation Geffen placed on PG was to insist that the album be given a title in America. hence Security: Both the label and PG were to feel comfortable about this arrangement.
After an arduous recording process with the band, Gabriel ended up with over seven hours of material which was eventually whittled down to a manageable size. Gabriel, Lord and Larry Fast worked on the tapes for over three months and then Lord and Gabriel spent another couple of months cleaning up what was left. By the time of the record's release approximately eighteen months' work has gone into its creation. The result of this long gestation was a record with a very specific sound, similar to the third album's, but at the same time quite separate from anything else he has recorded before of since. The obvious test of this is listening to the Shaking the Tree compilation album. Songs from the fourth album stick out like the proverbial canine's appendage. At times the sound itself is quite muddy and while some of this may be attributed to the home studio techniques applied at Ashcombe House it is quite possible that the vintage of synthesisers, among the first samplers in the UK and the world, plays a factor in the record's unique sound picture.
What would strike the casual observer before any of this is the record's relentless intensity. If you thought the third album was intense, the fourth has doubled the dosage. Spencer Bright, in his biography of PG, identified the long gestation period as a major contributor to this intensity. While this may be true, given the financial woes he found himself in by Summer 1982, Peter was probably not in the sunniest of dispositions around this time anyway. The sound was becoming even more aggressive and the songs longer and more conceptual. Of course to the charts all this artistic angst spelled flop. The album popped in and out of the British charts peaking a number six and some critics, particularly Gavin Martin of the NME and Dave McCullough from Sounds magazine were particularly scathing. Reading the reviews it seems that, by lumping PG in with the bloated prog rock of bands such as Yes and Genesis and particularly equating world music and intercultural rhythm and instrumentation with cultural imperialism, both have missed the mark by a long shot. Like many reviewers in the British press, criticism seems to be usually levelled at the person rather than the music and the writer's distaste for Peter Gabriel as a person is all too tangible. Interestingly on the "cultural imperialism" note, the fourth album was very well received in the black press, one reviewer lamenting at the album's poor reception with the "honky poseurs".
The fourth album also adds in new areas of personal writing, Peter becoming more comfortable writing from a more emotional and direct tone. In short Peter Gabriel is a pretty tense and occasionally paranoid affair designed for the stronger of stomach and certainly a less commercial proposal than the record companies would have preferred. However under close inspection the album runs through the entire emotional spectrum from fear to detachment to immense joy. That this can happen within the space of a single song speaks volumes for the talent of the writer and musicians involved.
Gabriel has always been interested in psychology and has often allowed his interest to flow into his art. It's possible to perceive a psychological bent in most of his solo output, however The Rhtythm of the Heat is one case where a specific psychologist has directly influenced both music and lyrics in a Peter Gabriel song.
Peter read and identified with the experiences of Carl Jung. Though initially a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, Jung fell out of favour with Freud over the importance (or otherwise) of Freud's stages of psychosexual behaviour. From 1913, Jung adapted existing Psychoanalysis into what he dubbed Analytical Psychology. An important distinction between Jung's theory of human psychology and Freud's (apart from the absence of psychosexual development) was the recogntion of a second layer of unconscious. Jung asserted that, in addition to waking consciousness and personal unconsciousness (as per Freud's theory), there existed a deeper collective unconscious that underpins human awareness across cultures. Jung wrote extensively on the exploration of his own mind, seeking to plumb the depths of this collective unconscious. To this end, he visited the Sudan in Africa in 1925, searching for answers in the "dark continent".
The Rhythm of the Heat takes its cue from Jung's experience in Africa. Gabriel describes this song as, "the adventures of Carl Jung in the Sudan- great white thinker- inventor of the concept of the shadow, frightened by his own shadow emerging as a result of the rhythm." During his stay in Africa, Jung was suddenly seized with fear at what he might be finding in all this psychological delving. His primary fear was that he would lose all control and succumb to madness in the process. This paranoia came to a head when he was treated to a drumming and dance performance by the locals. As they proceeded to let the rhythm "take control", they seemed to be "posessed": handing their bodies over to the collective unconscious that Jung was becoming so frightened of. The fact that this story neatly augmented Peter's growing interest in world music, perhaps suggested to him that it was an approprate starting place for the new record.
Gabriel thankfully renamed this song from its originally pretensious Jung in Africa and in doing so transformed the song from a retelling of the adventures of a Swiss psychologist to a deeper unravelling of the power and the danger inherent in the evasive collective unconscious. The Rhythm of the Heat typifies the dramatic opening of most Peter Gabriel records, this time adopting tremendous changes in dynamics from a distant industrial clatter to a huge gong-like drone. All textures being created on the fairlight: the instrument of choice on the fourth Peter Gabriel record. Gabriel's voice has a distant quality to it, suggesting that recorded the vocal further away from the microphone than usual. Instrument by instrument the layers build. closely-miked surdo drums dart across the stereo spectrum, and various synthesisers drone or echo the melody, Jerry Marotta's minimalist drumming approach suits the mood of the song perfectly, buiding up to an intense crescendo. David Rhodes' guitar is conspicuous by its absence here, although he contributes to the backing voals. and suddenly the layers of the song disappear and we are left with Gabriel, a bass drum and two keyboards.
Peter then screams "the rhythm has my soul!". Enter the Ekome Dance Company to provide the authentic Ghanaian drumming experience. The song culminates in a lather of wild drumming, providing a soundtrack to madness and loss of self control. Interestingly the primary time signature here changes from a four square rhythm to being based around triplets of crochets, a device rarely used outside world music and jazz circles. And then the first 5.16 minutes of Peter Gabriel is over and the listener is left dazed sweating, as though waking up from a disturbing dream. As good a second hand mystical experience as one is ever likely to get from the world of popular music.
He says it clearly in the intro to this song on the POV video: "this is a song about jealousy". Now with 'cover me when i sleep/cover me when i breathe', it seems like a plausible enough explanation. But the very essense of this song, and the reason it works, is that it's primarily sound. The sound of this song, despite being firmly entrenched in a disco-style guise, is really like no other. The song simply sounds constructed, the only 'natural' sounding element of Shock the Monkey is the drums (of course). And yet beneath the construction is an insistent groove (just try not moving to it) and funky bassline from Levin, one of the first to showcase his skill on the stick.
The Brian Grant directed video for Shock the Monkey was the first to set the tone for futher successes in the video format, and the first to reflect the importance with with Peter holds the format. The video centres around Gabriel and a bald albino (starting to sound familiar?) alter-ego of his singing the song to camera in adjoining rooms. Interspersed with this is footage of Gabriel's room collapsing in on him, being physically accosted by three dwarves (as in people who haven't had their pituitary releasing enough growth hormone and not the hi-ho garden gnome variety), and slightly scary footage of Gabriel running from something (the film here being sped up to make him seem even more panicked).
The lyrics consist mainly of wordplay. Spencer Bright attempted to explain the sexual connotations of the lyrics, but failed dismally. The sex is in the vocal delivery. you can hear Gabriel thrusting his pelvis with each new line (when he's not scrambling around on all fours). And then there's the shrieking falsetto that requires no explanation whatsoever. Shock the Monkey represents Peter's first preconceived push towards chart success and radio airplay. The formula of funk and sex seemed to work in this instance, Shock the Monkey is conspicuous for being the first single to attain a higher chart position in the USA (29) than in the UK (58). Of course the formula was to be applied with phenomenal success next time around.
Dragging concrete. It's a sound we're familiar with, but had it ever occured to us that such a sound could be used as music until this point? Like most of Peter Gabriel, Lay Your Hands makes maximum use of the Fairlight CMI, in this instance the sample is that of dragging concrete. Now it doesn't sound quite so impressive given today's rather heady use of sampled sounds in just about everything, but this was 1982! This was a revelation. Despite the fact that this is a popular song around the Plausible offices, it's conceivable that without the Fairlight textures, Lay Your Hands would not amount to much musically speaking. Much of the song centres around an Esus2 chord maintaining a drone effect throughout the verses (perhaps a precursor to the sound of Passion?), much of the interesting input coming from the said Fairlight and Jerry Marotta's drums.
Peter has often said Lay Your Hands is about trust, healing and sacrifice. In the verses we witness the return of the harshly cynical and overstimulated character familiar from Mother of Violence. Cold observations are catalogued in a monotonous singspiel (or if you will, an english-white-boy-rap), but this darkness is immediately contrasted with the overtly warm bridge, which then reaches a somewhat manic pitch by the chorus.
For years Peter has experimented with ways of making performances more interactive, allowing the ordinarily passive listener to participate in creating an overall experience. Thus in Lay Your Hands, he has often attempted the most dramatic and extreme example of interactivity, taking the song's theme of trust, not to mention the title, quite literally. Gabriel has been an innovator in many aspects of modern music, and none moreso than in his backwards dives into the audience. Yes, it's true. we can now blame Peter Gabriel for crowd surfers. Remember that next time you cop a left size ten Converse sneaker in the face: "Yes, thank you very much Peter Gabriel!" Predictably, the backwards dive and the song associated with it attracted the derision of much of the musical press, equating both with some kind of messianic delusions. Peter patiently argued that he was attempting to serve the moment rather than dominate it and freely acknowledged the dive was contrived. Much of the argument has faded in the intervening years as Peter became more commercially viable (and therefore less of a target for musical press hacks) and genuine messianic delusions became far more commonplace in pop music (eg. Michael Jackson's shameful performance at the 1995 Brit Awards).
Written by Mercutio
while he had too much time
on his hands. Thankfully this has now been rectified.