Peter Gabriel released his brand new album, i/o, last Friday, Dec 1. It's his first studio album of all-new material for 21 years, following the release of Up in 2002.
i/o has been released to almost universal acclaim. "The world has changed since 2002, mostly for the worst, but it’s a better place with i/o in it," wrote Prog's Jeremy Allen in our review from issue 145. "He can still write songs that turn the head and stir the heart, even if it takes him a little longer these days."
Prog sat down with Gabriel for a chat as his latest album excitedly rockets towards the top of the charts, eyeing that all important No. 1 spot.
It’s 12 years since New Blood and 21 years since Up, but when did you actually start on this album and how did it progress? Was it an intense process? Easy? Painful?
I’m always generating new ideas, always taking part in the process of generating new material, so there’s never really a beginning or an end date. The tough stuff is finishing things off and getting lyrics to a place that I’m happy with. I also wanted a life outside of being a professional musician.
I remember visiting the painter Howard Hodgkin‘s studio. He had a large number of paintings on easels concealed by white cloth and he pointed out one that was 30 years old and another 15, all of them at different points in their evolution. I think I handle my songs a little like that. Playing For Time took 12 years to finish. Most of it was there within a month, but the end section appeared a lot later. Road To Joy had one section from an old song which then inspired the rest, etc, etc. Having grown up on a farm, you don’t harvest until the crops are ready.
What music, books, films, science/technology inspired you while you were working on it?
Panopticom was about flipping big brother on its head and making the world much more visible to everyone, using satellite and surveillance technology. It was also inspired by the extraordinary work of three groups, Witness, Forensic Architecture and the Bellingcat book, all organisations using open-source material to see what’s really going on. I’ve spent many years now with people working in Human Rights. Witness was set up 30 years ago and it is astonishing to me still that people can suffer extraordinarily and then have their whole experience, denied, buried and forgotten. So, the idea for the Panopticom, an ever-expanding data globe that will allow ordinary people to make permanent records of their own experiences and observe those in power is about using existing surveillance systems to benefit everybody.
In The Court I’m talking about the justice system which clearly works much better for those in countries without a lot of corruption and able to pay good lawyers. There’s a brilliant organisation called NAMATI whose mission is to provide people around the world access to justice. They do a brilliant job assembling teams around the world to help with different issues, so their work is also an inspiration.
Live And Let Live is about tolerance and forgiveness. It wasn’t a subject I expected to choose for a lyric, but the more I thought about it the more I thought that it was an important idea that hadn’t really been dealt with in a song. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who was a real mentor to me, always spoke about the importance of listening to the other side and had led the Truth and Reconciliation Committee in South Africa. There is also a wonderful account from Nelson Mandela, when he was about to become president of South Africa after 27 years in jail, of standing next to some of those who had kept him in jail for all that time, and been responsible for the death of many of his colleagues. He describes how the old fear and hatred welled-up inside of him, but he had a flash of insight and realised that unless he could find a way to work with his enemy, to see them as human beings, and ultimately to forgive them, he would remain trapped as a prisoner for the rest of his days. It was clear to him that the only way out was forgiveness.
Obviously, there are some age-appropriate themes, getting older, loss, family so that all acts as fertiliser.
What are the overarching lyrical/conceptual theme(s) on this album?
As I get older, I probably don't get any smarter, but I have learned a few things, trying to listen and observe and it makes a lot of sense to me that we are not these independent islands that we like to think we are, that we are all part of a whole. I think I’m really trying to talk about the interconnectedness of everything.
I believe our survival may be dependent on the progress we may make generating new ways of dealing with the climate crisis and whether we can reconnect to the natural world that gave birth to us.
What’s the significance of the moon with regards to the album (ie, the lunar release schedule, the fact that the title could be read as a reference to Io, the moon of Jupiter, etc)?
I used to have Full Moon Club on my website around the Up album, with monthly updates so in some ways it’s just an extension of that. I’ve always liked to do things differently and I just thought it would be a way to encourage people to look up in the sky and think about how we fit into things, and how the sun and moon have so much influence on our lives. It’s also a different way of doing things that I thought would be more fun. We would then assemble the tracks into an album at the end of the year.
i/o is input / output, you see it on the back of a lot of electrical equipment, but it is also the moon of Jupiter. It's been around for a long time as a title for this project but I always knew I was going to write a song called i/o, too.
When you look back on your solo albums, do you see a series of individual chapters or a whole body of work? And where does i/o fit into it?
If I look back at all the records, I see a song writer and a sound-smith working on his craft. i/o - it’s just a part of everything.
