Sunday, December 04, 2005
peter gabriel
a long long time ago....there was this band called "Genesis"....
and in my university days..there was this set up in the main common room where there were rows of nice seats where you can sit back, pick up a headphone and listen to your favorite music ...just go up front and ask the student manning the counter for your favorite album and sit back and be transported to the magical realm of aural sensation...and purposely missed that hated organic chemistry lecture...
and that's how i discovered genesis...the OLD version... the version with Peter Gabriel as the singer...and how i love their old albums...trespass...nursery cryme...foxtrot (with the mind numbing supper's ready)...genesis live...selling england by the pound ....and lamb lies on the broadway....
and then peter gabriel split!!!...damnation...what a calamity...i stopped listening to genesis POST peter gabriel...i simply hated the new genesis with phil collins at the helm...phil collin's wimpy songs are nothing more than silly pop songs and that was a real pity because he could be very very good if he wanted to.... he had an astonishing album with a jazzy band called Brand X and the first album of this band had a couple of really outstanding songs...but after that he went mad and just produced sappy songs with the new genesis and his solo albums...making tons of money and have millions of teen fans who knows nothing about GOOD music....
but Peter Gabriel as a solo artist went different way....he gets more and more interesting and goes on to produce better and better music... and with his interest in world music and collaboration with some fine african mucisians and the great (late) Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan he has produced some of the best english music i ever listen too...and his trademark raspy voice is simply a gift from god...
i don't pretend to be and don't qualify as a serious fan if that means knowing about and owning everything by him... but apart from OVO I've listened to every single solo album of his....i remember driving all over Tasmania listening to his first albulm (untitled) and playing "solsbury hills" and "here comes the flood" over and over again... and i still remember listening to "exposure" from the second (untitled) album and "Biko" and "games without frontier" from the third (untitled) as an angry young man then...still angry but not so young anymore.... and listening to the melancholic "mercy street" a song inspired by the poetry of ann sexton from "So" his 5th solo album on radio thinking about all those unfinished assignments in virology in the wee hours in cold winter nights in Kent UK....and you get gloom and melancholia by the tons in his latest solo album ironically titled "UP"....and i'm still listening to this album now....and keep on replaying this album if i drive anywhere long distance as i did a couple of days back to Perlis...
...and a confession...i did NOT buy this album... I was so impatient to get it that as soon as it was out i spent nights downloading the songs from napster ...yes that was before the bastards from metallica complained which eventually got napster taken off the net as a FREE downloads...but did that stop free exchange of music and everything else ? of course not ...the only thing it did was depriving us of the great napster (bless you shawn fanning wherever you are)....
and oh yes... several months back i bought a DVD of his "growing up" concert (held in Italy of mainly his recent songs from "up" album) in my favorite pirated DVD shop at Lido in Beijing....and it was fantastic...awesome!...he had no hair now and put on a bit of weight but what the hell... his voice and music is as great as ever...& unlike some old buggers (i'm referring to mick jagger & rod stewart particularly) who refused to admit their age Peter Gabriel is mature enough (bless him) to kind of age respectably....
and yes, he has also produced a couple of sountracks to two outstanding and equally sad movies ...martin scorsece's "passion of christ" and the sad phillip noyce's 'rabbit proof fence' which i thinks are very appropriate for Peter Gabriel to do...
if you want to read comments on how some people are touched by mr gabriel's songs here is one good link
i hope mr gabriel will continue to come up with new albums and as Niel Young says in one of his great songs "long may you run"....
but that's for another time....about neil young i mean...
and in my university days..there was this set up in the main common room where there were rows of nice seats where you can sit back, pick up a headphone and listen to your favorite music ...just go up front and ask the student manning the counter for your favorite album and sit back and be transported to the magical realm of aural sensation...and purposely missed that hated organic chemistry lecture...
and that's how i discovered genesis...the OLD version... the version with Peter Gabriel as the singer...and how i love their old albums...trespass...nursery cryme...foxtrot (with the mind numbing supper's ready)...genesis live...selling england by the pound ....and lamb lies on the broadway....
and then peter gabriel split!!!...damnation...what a calamity...i stopped listening to genesis POST peter gabriel...i simply hated the new genesis with phil collins at the helm...phil collin's wimpy songs are nothing more than silly pop songs and that was a real pity because he could be very very good if he wanted to.... he had an astonishing album with a jazzy band called Brand X and the first album of this band had a couple of really outstanding songs...but after that he went mad and just produced sappy songs with the new genesis and his solo albums...making tons of money and have millions of teen fans who knows nothing about GOOD music....
but Peter Gabriel as a solo artist went different way....he gets more and more interesting and goes on to produce better and better music... and with his interest in world music and collaboration with some fine african mucisians and the great (late) Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan he has produced some of the best english music i ever listen too...and his trademark raspy voice is simply a gift from god...
i don't pretend to be and don't qualify as a serious fan if that means knowing about and owning everything by him... but apart from OVO I've listened to every single solo album of his....i remember driving all over Tasmania listening to his first albulm (untitled) and playing "solsbury hills" and "here comes the flood" over and over again... and i still remember listening to "exposure" from the second (untitled) album and "Biko" and "games without frontier" from the third (untitled) as an angry young man then...still angry but not so young anymore.... and listening to the melancholic "mercy street" a song inspired by the poetry of ann sexton from "So" his 5th solo album on radio thinking about all those unfinished assignments in virology in the wee hours in cold winter nights in Kent UK....and you get gloom and melancholia by the tons in his latest solo album ironically titled "UP"....and i'm still listening to this album now....and keep on replaying this album if i drive anywhere long distance as i did a couple of days back to Perlis...
...and a confession...i did NOT buy this album... I was so impatient to get it that as soon as it was out i spent nights downloading the songs from napster ...yes that was before the bastards from metallica complained which eventually got napster taken off the net as a FREE downloads...but did that stop free exchange of music and everything else ? of course not ...the only thing it did was depriving us of the great napster (bless you shawn fanning wherever you are)....
and oh yes... several months back i bought a DVD of his "growing up" concert (held in Italy of mainly his recent songs from "up" album) in my favorite pirated DVD shop at Lido in Beijing....and it was fantastic...awesome!...he had no hair now and put on a bit of weight but what the hell... his voice and music is as great as ever...& unlike some old buggers (i'm referring to mick jagger & rod stewart particularly) who refused to admit their age Peter Gabriel is mature enough (bless him) to kind of age respectably....
and yes, he has also produced a couple of sountracks to two outstanding and equally sad movies ...martin scorsece's "passion of christ" and the sad phillip noyce's 'rabbit proof fence' which i thinks are very appropriate for Peter Gabriel to do...
if you want to read comments on how some people are touched by mr gabriel's songs here is one good link
i hope mr gabriel will continue to come up with new albums and as Niel Young says in one of his great songs "long may you run"....
but that's for another time....about neil young i mean...
