“It’s only artifice when you say it’s something it isn’t”: Peter Gabriel’s passion for video

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In 1987 Peter Gabriel cleaned up at the MTV Music Video Awards, securing nine wins out of 10 nominations for his Sledgehammer promo. In 2014, as he released his Back to Front concert movie, he told Prog about his continuing commitment to pushing the boundaries of onscreen presentation.

For those who bathed in the glorious sounds and visions of Peter Gabriel’s 02 Arena shows of last autumn, and for those who missed them, the new Back To Front film is a treat to behold. Directed by BAFTA- winning Hamish Hamilton, it has the 25th(ish) anniversary recreation of the So album at its core, served as part of a self-styled three-course meal that’s a real feast for Gabriel fans.

Before we do anything, we must talk about you on a Segway in a park, in your brilliant cameo in the recent The Life Of Rock With Brian Pern mockumentary. That looked like fun.

The series made me laugh a lot, and it didn’t really feel malicious, even though there are a lot of laughs at my expense. My family, for the most part, thought it was very funny. There were some lovely cameos – I particularly liked Reeves and Mortimer, and Paul Whitehouse. It’s possibly in danger of doing [for me] what Ab Fab did for Lynne Franks. I think they’re talking about another one now, and I imagine there would be more old musos involved.

With the Back To Front DVD, were there any moments from the huge scale of the live show that you were nervous wouldn’t convert particularly well for home viewing?

I think you try and work within the rules of the medium you’re in. I enjoyed working with Hamish Hamilton a lot before – he’s good at grabbing the moment, in all its different aspects. There were only a couple of things where we were struggling. One was Sledgehammer, and then he had the idea of trying to integrate some ‘Sledgehammer through the years,’ which I enjoyed a lot.

That was a reminder of what you did with the So DNA disc in the 25th-anniversary box set, showing how its songs evolved from early demos to their ultimate realisation.

I like that. With my favourite artists, I’ve always wanted to hear their process as much as the end product. I would still like that today with some people I enjoy a lot. How and why people make decisions is part of what makes them interesting.

Are you happy with how the show comes across on DVD?

Yeah – and I never mind faking it a bit. I had a filthy cold on the night we were filming, so there’s bits of vocals that have been grabbed from German shows. I’m always happy to talk about that stuff. You do the best you can on the night, and then you assemble whatever you can to make it work for repeated viewing, because it’s tougher sometimes outside of the live situation. It’s only artifice when you’re pretending it’s something that it isn’t.

You didn’t opt to go 3D this time.

Not on this one. For many years, I’ve been a fan of 3D. I think we’re not far away from having 3D without glasses because there is still some effort involved. That might be a good moment to look at it again, assuming I’m still up and at it.

But you’ve always enjoyed being on the cutting edge of new audio-visual technology.

Yes. As my dad was an inventor, the latest toy is always something I’ll look out for. The advantage is that you get to pioneer stuff and play with it before other people. The disadvantage is that it doesn’t all work. I do tend to do that.

This time we couldn’t get the picture to sync up with the sound with these cameras – they had to be laid in manually in an old-fashioned way, frame by frame, so that was tough for the editors.

With the portrayal of So, you obviously wanted to show the history of the album.

Yeah, and we haven’t changed at all in 30 years!

Well, Tony Levin hasn’t.

No, Tony is extraordinary. Whatever he’s taking, we need. But yeah, you want to try to get as much of what was there in Round 1, and let it live and breathe as Round 2, and I felt fairly comfortable with that in the end.

Some songs from So have been live staples since the album came out. Are there any you hadn’t performed in the interim?

I had done We Do What We’re Told before we did that album, but not much after, because at the time we couldn’t get it to sound good. There was the discipline of playing everything in the order in which it was intended, but it wasn’t just that we’d scored the record and were reproducing it note for note – there are some slight variations. A song like That Voice Again we did in a slightly different way.

Are there any other echoes from the So era?

I brought back the moving lights thing, which we’d done 25 years ago. That’s just camera booms with lights stuck on the end. I enjoyed that again because it always felt quite moody, and I don’t think anybody else has really done it in the intervening period. So that felt familiar. But the rest of it, I have a slightly different team now and obviously there’s a very different set of technology. It’s a lot easier to do different things now.