Pardon the freakout screen capture of Gabriel in the above clip of “Shock the Monkey” from his fourth album, but by the early 1980s, he somehow managed to combine just about all of the elements that would drive rock and pop music for the next decade: African polyrhythms, drum machines, gated drums, the Fairlight CMI synthesizer, sampling, it was all there on Gabriel’s third and fourth albums, at about the same time as MTV was concurrently launching.
It was around that time that England’s South Bank Show began shooting an episode which documented Gabriel’s lengthy efforts to first plan and then record his fourth album, Security. For anyone interested in home music recording, watching these early attempts at what Gabriel calls “electronic skiffle” is certainly fun, especially when you realize how far technology has advanced since then: the Fairlight that Gabriel demonstrates in the video below cost something like $35,000 back then; today the PC by your desk has much more computing power, and with the right software and soundcard, can do anything it could. (including replicating all of its preset sounds.)
The whole episode of the South Bank Show is online at YouTube, and in case it gets disappeared down the memory hole, there’s also a version online here in AVI format. But to whet your appetite, here’s a clip of Gabriel demonstrating the Fairlight, from a French rebroadcast of the show that’s been online at YouTube for ages, so hopefully it won’t vanish by tomorrow. It’s all in English once you get past the brief intro:
And that was his old bandmate Phil Collins playing those famously gated drums on “Intruder” (from the “melting face” album)!
I’m actually delighted that Gabriel left Genesis. It allowed him to stretch his pop legs a bit while it allowed Genesis to prove that they didn’t need him for brilliant prog (“Trick of the Tail” and “Wind & Wuthering”) before they, too, went into the pop realm (their greatest album IMO being “Duke”). The lead singer is NOT the band – as proven by Marillion, Spock’s Beard, Yes, and many others. I love the evolution and career arcs of both Gabriel and Genesis; no reason to sneer at one to prove your love for the other.
I’d also give some “Invented the ’80s” credit to Devo!
“I’d also give some ‘Invented the ’80s’ credit to Devo!”
Fair enough — I remember watching their appearance around ’79 on one of the Saturday Night Live DVDs, and was reminded how incongruous they looked, amidst the cast in full ’70s regalia, and half the audience still not figuring out that the ’60s were over.
The link to ‘gated drums’ is informative if only for the last few lines. The point is well taken that tech can only help so much if you have no talent.
Gabriel’s live recording of the Secret World Tour featuring Manu Katche and Tony Levin is abundantly instructive.
I tried shocking a monkey back in the 80s. It was no use. My skin didn’t clear up and the monkey stopped talking to me. The gods looked down and laughed…
The first line on the note, written in arabic, is pronounced – wait for it – shock the monkey. I used to play stupid tranliteration tricks with my interpreter in Kuwait. ‘Mr John, what you have written is meaningless, it means nothing in arabic.’ Why yes, ya Hafez, you are exactly right. But don’t listen to what you are saying in arabic, listen in english. ‘Ah Mr John you are corrupting the language.’ But of course, ya Hafez, we corrupt our own language, why would you think we’d do any less with anyone else’s?
And I was/am an aficionado of Gabriel/Genesis. For a young kid like myself at the time their stuff was breathtaking. When they parted ways and moved on, so did I.