Peter Gabriel

Genesis

Peter Brian Gabriel was born in Chobham, Surrey, in 1950 and went to Charterhouse School in Godalming from September 1963. There he played drums in early groups and then joined Garden Wall with Tony Banks. In 1967 he co-founded Genesis. For the first eight years he was the lead vocalist and principal lyricist, also playing flute, accordion and percussion, and he became known for costumes and onstage storytelling.

He left in 1975 after the tour for The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, and Phil Collins took over the lead vocals. Genesis entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March 2010, and Gabriel followed as a solo artist in 2014.

The first solo albums

He spent 1975 and 1976 away from the industry, in what has been called a learning period. In the summer of 1976 he performed Here Comes the Flood on Thames Television's Good Afternoon, before any album was out. Peter Gabriel arrived on 25 February 1977, produced by Bob Ezrin. It reached number 7 in the UK and number 38 in the US, and it included Solsbury Hill.

A second album of the same name followed in 1978, produced by Robert Fripp. The third, released on 30 May 1980 and produced by Steve Lillywhite, went to number one in the UK and was Gabriel's first to do so. Peter Gabriel 3 carried Games Without Frontiers, an early use of a drum machine on a solo album, and Biko, a song for the murdered South African activist Steve Biko. The fourth, in 1982, gave him his first American top 40 hit with Shock the Monkey. That year he also co-founded WOMAD, and he later set up Real World Studios in Box, Wiltshire, and Real World Records.

So

So came out on 19 May 1986, co-produced with Daniel Lanois after a year of recording in Somerset, New York and Rio de Janeiro. It went to number one in the UK and number two in the US. Sledgehammer reached number one in America, and at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards its video won a record nine awards. The album moved him from cult artist to international star.

In Your Eyes was its second US single and found a second life when Cameron Crowe used it in Say Anything... in 1989. Gabriel then worked on the music for The Last Temptation of Christ, released as Passion, and put out the compilation Shaking the Tree in 1990. Us followed on 27 September 1992 and reached number two in both the UK and the US. The live album Secret World Live came in 1994.

Later years

OVO appeared in 2000, and Up in 2002. In 2010 he released Scratch My Back, an album of songs by other writers, and the following year New Blood re-recorded his own songs with an orchestra. Amnesty International tours in 1986 and 1988 put his activism on stage, and in 2007 the idea of The Elders developed from talks with Nelson Mandela and Richard Branson. He co-created OD2, an early download service.

The Growing Up Tour of 2002 and 2003 was documented in Growing Up on Tour: A Family Portrait in 2003, and in 2012 the Back to Front tour played So in full with several of its original session musicians. Rated PG and Flotsam and Jetsam appeared in 2019. Daryl Easlea's biography Without Frontiers tells the story at length, and Real World, which Gabriel still runs, released Geoffrey Oryema's Exile in 1990.

I/O came out on 1 December 2023, with I/O The Tour to follow. His awards include seven Grammys, three Brit Awards, the Polar Music Prize and an Ivor Novello Lifetime Achievement award. A follow-up called O\I is listed for 27 November 2026, with songs released on lunar cycles.