Amusements Never End
THE HOT NEWS AND BIZARRE STORIES FROM PLANET MOJO
Peter Gabriel talks about new LP i/o, absence, mind-reading, Genesis, and “raising the middle finger to death.”
“I’m notoriously slow”: Peter Gabriel waits for the next full moon, “as our ancestors used to.”
Nadav Kander
PETER GABRIEL is used to rejection. In fact, he welcomes it. “Sometimes failure is a better teacher than success,” he tells MOJO, talking from a New York hotel suite the day after performing at the KeyBank Center in Buffalo. Besides touring the US, the solo artist, soundtrack composer, human rights activist and ex-Genesis frontman is poised to release i/o, his first set of new material in more than two decades.
The album has been trailered by several singles accompanied by images from contemporar y artists, including Anthony Micallef and Henr y Hudson. “But not ever yone I wanted to work with wanted to work with me,” Gabriel admits. “Sometimes you have to take the road that requires fear and courage. Going out into the art world, I was facing rejection. But it brings out the hustler in me.”
On Gabriel’s wish list was the Chinese documentarian and activist Ai Weiwei. “He didn’t have a clue who I was, and it was really hard work. Firstly, I drove up to Cambridge to see him. Then I met him again in London and he finally signed on.”
Weiwei sent Gabriel three designs which used his trademark motif: a middle finger raised against authority. It suited Road To Joy, a song which, like much of this new work, is about what Gabriel describes as “raising the middle finger to death.” i/o (which stands for ‘input/output’ but is also the name of Jupiter’s third largest moon) has been gestating for some time. Since 2010, Gabriel has released a covers LP, Scratch My Back, and an orchestral reboot of old works, New Blood. But his last new studio album was Up in 2002.