Peter Gabriel, the man who disappeared … and then came back

I’m a big Peter Gabriel fan – in fact, I’m not sure there’s an artist I’ve ever been quite so obsessed with. From the dusky grandeur of his voice to his rhythmic explorations of world music, I dig him. 

So why was it that I felt so neutral over the promise of his releasing his new album i/o this year – his first proper solo album in a staggering 21 years? I imagined i/o would never live up to that wait. 

Gabriel has been releasing tracks from i/o all year long on social media and, weirdly, I had barely listened to them. It was very un-fanboy-ish. I wanted an album, not a drip-feed of social media content, and I figured I’d just wait for the far-off day that it actually came out and experience it as one big gulp. 

And yeah, I guess I felt a little miffed over him taking two decades to put out a new album of original material – fanboys are proprietary, after all.

In my younger days, I fell in love with his breakthrough smash So, and then dove into the wonders of his solo discography. I listened to So, Security and his several self-titled albums so many times I knew every drum crack, every soaring keyboard line. 

I dug Gabriel so much that I once proposed writing an entire 33 1/3 book about him (yeah, that didn’t happen) and I got interviewed on Radio New Zealand about my nerdy fandom a couple years back. But I also wrote a couple years back in Peter Gabriel, the man who disappeared about his mysterious, sometimes irritating silence on the pop music scene.

He certainly wasn’t a reclusive hermit and did produce a variety of other projects, but still, the last “real” solo album he did was Up, released in September 2002 … 21+ years ago. 

I mark my life by my Gabriel fandom. I picked up So in high school. I bought Us in 1992 as a college student. I got Up just a year or so before my son, who’s now in university, was born. I bought a copy of i/o on its release day (determinedly old-school with a CD, to slot in amongst my other Gabriel albums) and somehow, I’m in my early 50s listening to new music by the same man I’ve dug well over half my life. 

When Gabriel did the cliche of re-recording his old songs and cover tunes with a full orchestra a few years back, I quavered in my devotion. I found the cover albums lifeless and bland and worried i/o would end up equally exhausted-sounding. 

So after all that, I put i/o on, popped on my Bose headphones and settled in for the first new Peter Gabriel album since I was in my early 30s. 

Is it actually any good? 

Fortunately, I have to say, now that it’s finally here, i/o is a dense, rewarding listen, slotting comfortably in the sparse discography of post-So Gabriel. It’s less melancholy than those dreary orchestral albums were, although it’s still the contemplative music of a man who’s now 73 – there’s no ‘Sledgehammer Part 2’ here. 

Yet his voice is in remarkably good form, rich and full, still able to easily hit those high notes he could early in his career almost 50 (!) years ago. It threads the line between light and dark, yet a thread of optimism pulses throughout. That perfectionist Gabriel has even released it in multiple mixes so I’ll spend a while getting to to know it all. 

I will give i/o plenty of my time in the coming weeks – already I love the grand sweep of “Playing For Time,” the slightly spooky thundery “Pantopticom,” the gloriously upbeat title track, the bouncy good cheer of “Olive Tree.” 

And in the end i/o is shaping up as an album about time, its startlingly quick pace as you get older. Since Gabriel’s last album a lot of my other obsessions and music loves have left. Bowie, Leonard Cohen, Prince, Sinead, The Fall’s Mark E. Smith, The Pogues’ Shane MacGowan just this week. I have to wonder if Gabriel didn’t mean for i/o to take nearly two decades to come out. But time gets away from you, doesn’t it? 

I give Gabriel time. A lot of time. But I’m already basking in that old long dormant fandom, digging the rise and fall of the sounds that make up i/o. I’m listening. It’s good to hear that voice again.