Peter Gabriel: So Classic Albums

# I'm on my way, I'm making it. #

I knew it was good. I think we all knew it was good.

But it was only when we started getting hits,

which is a rare thing in my life, that you start thinking,

"Oh, maybe we're going to sell something here".

Peter Gabriel was the classic definition

of a cult artist, before So.

He was well known, he was well respected,

but he was not in that league where we talk about the Beatles,

the Stones, Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac.

But So changed that in an enormous way.

MUSIC: "Slegehammer" by Peter Gabriel

# I want to be a sledgehammer!

# This will be my testimony. #

I guess it was May '85.

Came over from New York. We got picked up at Heathrow

by David Stallbaumer, who was Peter's assistant.

Driving down the motorway, he had asked me, how long did Peter and Dan

indicate I was going to be at Ashcombe House for?

I said, "Anywhere from two weeks to six weeks".

He kind of mused for a moment, and then he looked over to me

and said, "You're going to be here until next March,"

That was ten months later, and he was spot on.

It took us a year to finish So, almost to the day,

and I wasn't aware of this, but I was told after the fact

-that that's the fastest record that Peter ever made.

-HE LAUGHS

# You better call the sledgehammer

# This will be my testimony. #

I knew that he was a person who thought about music

in a different way. How can music enter the culture in a different way,

other than just records, product, songs? You buy them, take them home.

But how else could you experience music?

Could all of those things meld at one moment in time

to make a record that could, not necessarily fit into the masses,

but actually find a way for the mass to come to him?

I shook hands with Peter, I said, "Listen,

"I think this could be really great for you, and let's not let up

"until we're satisfied that it could touch a lot of hearts".

MUSIC: "Don't Give Up" by Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush

# Don't give up

# You still have us

# Don't give up

# We don't need much of anything. #

I think the songs were just like amazing and great songs,

a great producer. Just, you know, magical.

MUSIC: "That Voice Again" by Peter Gabriel

# I want to be with you I want to be clear

# Each time I try It's the voice I hear. #

Imagine if somebody drops off a big lump of granite on your front lawn,

and it's your job to make a sculpture,

a nice skinny sculpture, out of it by spring.

That was kind of our job.

I think that one of the reasons I've been able to have a career

over all this time,

is that I've followed my heart, and my nose, you know?

You sniff around, and you find something interesting,

and you chase it.

And that is what makes life interesting.

MUSIC: "Red Rain" by Peter Gabriel

I had had a dream that was a bit like the parting of the Red Sea,

with these two walls, and these glass bottles

that would fill up with blood,

that would enable them to walk to the other side,

screw onto the other wall, and empty the blood out.

That was, I guess, a little version of life and death.

There is a sense of danger, loss,

this notion of "red rain".

It's not specifically blood, but it's hard not to think of that

as an image of blood, of people drowning, people helpless.

# Red rain is coming down

# Red rain

# Red rain is pouring down

# Pouring down all over me. #

I'd always wanted it to crash open at the front.

And for it to feel really driven.

# Oh! Red rain coming down

# Red rain. #

I spent a lot of time, and Dan too, on trying to get the sequence right.

And what we used to do was put the beginnings and endings

of all the songs on little cassettes,

so you can try all the different permutations.

# Red rain is coming down all over me. #

I think with Red Rain, fairly early on,

that was going to be an opener.

We put a lot of work into those drums.

This was before digital technology.

Jerry Marotta must have played the drums like,

I think, about eight takes.

The idea was always to try to do something different,

be a little unconventional, or a lot unconventional.

I love that about Peter.

He's a really a master of low end.

He can really shape the bottom of a song the way no one else can.

And then it was my job, after Jerry left, to go through everything,

and make sure that I had included Jerry's best playing, bar at a time.

It's getting in there and trying things,

and trying things in a little different way. Being unusual.

But I think it was worth it.

You hear all the idiosyncratic details of Jerry's performance.

It's got a lot of power.

Got a very deep, philosophical thing.

And, performance-wise,

it wasn't like the pop songs.

It was much darker.

# I am standing up at the water's edge, in my dream.

# I cannot make a single sound as you scream. #

As the ex-drummer that I am,

I have to get the drums right, before anything else can happen.

Remember, one of his big influences as a kid was Otis Redding,

and he was a drummer, before he was a singer.

The past records, as Jerry Marotta will remind us all of,

were not allowed to have any cymbals.

No cymbals, and no hi-hat.

Because Peter didn't want a whole bunch of "pshhhh"

splashing around, noisy things, to take up any room in the mix.

One of the worst things you can ever do to an artist

is give them complete freedom.

Cos they just sit there, thinking,

"What the hell am I going to do?"

But I think creative people are devious,

and if you tell them what they can't do, they'll find a way round it.

So I thought, "OK, I know I'm devious, too,

"so I'll create my own set of rules, of things that I can or can't do.

"And that'll force me to think of alternatives". So, no cymbals.

I love hi-hat, and I said to Peter,

"Let's make this record a nice hi-hat record, why not?"

He's fascinating, Dan, cos he's a mixture of,

I think, quite a rough and tough dad on the one hand,

and a very soft and tender mum.

He can be both things.

And he decided to follow my instinct,

and so we allowed cymbals and hi-hats into the project.

That was quite a change for him.

One of the things that I asked Stewart Copeland to do,

cos he's a virtuoso hi-hat player, was focus in on the hi-hat.

DRUM MACHINE PLAYS

So this is where we started, with the hi-hat on the drum program.

It does a job, it motors along, but doesn't have any personality.

So, here's Stewart.

HI-HATS PLAY

Of what we put on the record, I'd say Red Rain

probably took the most out of me.

It was a very flat...

And it was my job to make it so that it evolved,

sonically and emotionally.

# Red rain is coming down

# Red rain

# Red rain is falling down

# Falling down all over me. #

I wanted his emotions to come to the forefront.

To wear no mask and no veil, and to have no mirrored

contact lenses, and no trickery.

And just take everything off, and let the songs be heard.

And I think that was a good call.

I think it was sort of a nice segue into the next chapter, for Peter.

So, consequently, I think these songs are more revealing,

they're more naked, they're taking risks

and listeners feel that, when a man takes a risk.

I've always been slow, so I worked out early on,

that it was going to be a lot cheaper

if tried to buy the equipment,

and set up a little studio, rather than rent a studio.

I was looking, basically, for a place that I could afford,

so we rented this old farmhouse.

And we started putting some equipment in there.

But it was away from everything.

The cows would come and lick the windows occasionally,

and I loved it.

I first got an invitation to work with Peter Gabriel

when I was living in Hamilton, in Ontario, in Canada.

That's near Toronto.

And there was an invitation to come in and help him

with a soundtrack for a film called Birdy.

I jumped on the plane the next day, and we carried on with that work,

and Peter gave me access to his entire library.

He says, "Whatever you find in here, do what you like with it.

"What I expect in the end is some nice surprises".

I knew I didn't have time to generate a whole new score,

so I wanted to use part of the score,

using existing material, and remixes,

and extrapolate mood from some of the ready-made material.

And I did provide him a lot of surprises, sonic surprises,

and he invited me to stay on to work on his new singing record,

which was to become So.

You saw the two together. They still had hair.

HE LAUGHS

And the two together, they were one.

When I first met Daniel, I remember now, at the studio, I looked at him,

and he was the perfect complement to Peter.

He understood Peter.

I walked down the lane with my bag.

Peter came out of Ashcombe House.

Something jumped on me.

I felt that I had known him before.

I just felt something genetically connected with him,

if not by birth.

And, I knew right at that moment, that I should work with him.

Ashcombe was made of two main buildings, the house,

the beautiful garden, and then the cow barn.

I think it had been used as a functioning cow barn.

I don't know how long back.

Cows were still around in the fields.

It felt and behaved like a proper studio,

but it was all done very inexpensively.

Peter walked in and said, "Great, let's get started.

"We're going to start making a record."

And that was the initial birth process for So.

We were both surrounded by a brand new studio,

with a bunch of equipment neither of us knew really how to operate.

They turned the barn into a studio. It was perfect for Peter.

It was great, cos it was kinda like that thing where

we're in, at home, we're in our own environment, you know?

So, that was it. He'd go in the back to work on lyrics,

and pop the tracks, and sing out loud,

while I worked in the smaller room in the front, tidying things up,

and getting the room ready for the next level of work.

We had a good work ethic,

and we treated it like a construction site.

In fact, we even had the construction site hard hats.

We just had a policy where we put on the hard hat before starting work.

I listened to his solo records, and I liked them.

I thought that he had been very adventurous and brave

with his sonics, and with his songs.

All four records before that were titled Peter Gabriel.

I used to remember all the different albums, not from titles,

but from the pictures, from the artwork.

Then you had a big vinyl artwork.

There was a whole ritual to getting an album. Opening it, smelling it.

And I also thought that,

when you had good artwork, why did you have to have

all this text all over the top of it,

making it look like a piece of advertising?

You go from the first record,

with Here Comes the Flood, Solsbury Hill.

The second album, which is more eccentric and darker,

produced by Robert Fripp.

Games Without Frontiers.

# Whistling tunes, We hide in the dunes by the seaside

# Whistling tunes, We're kissing baboons in the jungle

# It's a knockout

# If looks could kill, they probably will

# In games without frontiers

# War without tears. #

That's when you have Biko.

You get this sense that he's working his way forward.

By calling each record "Peter Gabriel", the point was,

"These are not separate, discrete statements.

"This is part of my continuing body of work".

It was sort of culty, and occasional flashes.

so Games Without Frontiers, Shock The Monkey, Solsbury Hill,

had sort of broken through to a wider audience.

# Watched by empty silhouette

# Who show their face but not at me

# No-one taught them etiquette

# I will show another me

# Today I don't need a replacement

# I'll show them what the smile on my face meant

# My heart going boom-boom-boom

# "Son," he said

# "Grab your things, I've come to take you home". #

And then, I sort of retreat

back into the bushes

with my normal crowd.

So, there's occasional moments in the daylight.

Those songs had been said already,

and we're entering a new body of work.

# You could have a steam train

# If you just lay down your tracks. #

Sledgehammer, actually,

that crashed the door down for such a wide audience,

that everything else that was on the record that was important,

that was convincing, that was committed,

that all came through as well.

# A sledgehammer

# This can be testimony

# Hey! The sledgehammer. #

I remember that Sledgehammer, we did very last.

In fact, we were packing up.

Peter, in typical Peter fashion, said,

"I have this idea, for the next album, of a piece.

"Would you mind just doing a run through of it?"

One of the many things I love about Peter is,

in his mind, he's only a couple of months away

from doing his next album,

even when he's finishing an album, and the rest of us know

we're going to have to wait years, maybe even for this one to come out.

So we just reassembled the stuff,

and did a quick version or two of Sledgehammer,

and then we went home thinking, "No-one will ever hear that track".

Everyone thinks, "Oh, Sledgehammer,

"you must have been trying to write a hit".

It wasn't like that.

I loved R&B, soul music.

So, in a way, this was a little bit of homage to that.

I had made these jazz records, jazz fusion,

which was totally not Peter's bag, but I had also recorded a song

as a tribute to the island where I was born.

In that piece of music, there was a drummer,

which was Manu Katche.

I got a phone call in my room so of course I answered the phone,

and someone on the phone says, "Hello, is this Manu here?

"It's Peter Gabriel". I said, "Yeah, OK."

I thought it was my friend, doing a joke.

Peter was calling him. He was not returning Peter's calls.

Five minutes later, the phone rings again.

"Hello?" "Manu, this is Peter Gabriel".

I said, "Camille, OK, stop it!"

Peter called me in New York, and said, "I don't know what's

going on with this drummer. He's not returning the calls".

So, I remember, I called him with Peter on the line,

and I said to Manu, "Manu, what's going on?"

And he said, "I would love to have you on my next project".

So I said to George, "Are you sure this guy can shuffle?

"We have to have a man who understands the shuffle.

"It's not enough to just go 'boo-boo-de-boo-boo-de' anymore.

"We want the 'do-do-do-ch-do-do-do-do',

"some kind of motion to it.

"Will Manu be able to do that?"

And he said, "Well, he's the best in Paris. Trust me, I think you'll love him".

Somebody like Manu coming to the table was so unlike anything

that had yet happened in the entire recording process.

Because, he's a straight session guy.

There's a big garden in front me,

and we just go out for a little bit of time, then having your tea

in the kitchen, then coming back. Has nothing to do like you being

in a professional studio, where you have to sign in when you get in,

and sign out when you leave the place.

And then there are two or three studios

when people are working on different projects.

So the feeling was very, very different,

plus it's in the countryside, in the middle of the countryside,

which means there's nothing around of, like, in a city.

Sat down, listened to the track once, maybe twice,

with Peter in the control room. Not even in the room with him.

Just said, "OK, play what you think, play what you think".

Manu did one take.

And I go back into the studio. We listened to it,

and I see Peter moving, and really having this great

and nice smile on his face.

And I said, "You like it?" He said, "Yeah".

And Peter said, "Great, let's do it again".

And Manu's response was,

"Why? I've already done it."

Peter always likes another take, or a third take or a tenth take,

just to cover himself.

There's an American producer, I think it's Jerry Wexler.

No, it wasn't, Arif Mardin.

And one of his quotes was,

"Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous. Now, do it again."

He was used to just doing things hundreds and hundreds,

and hundreds of times.

And Manu's point was, "I've all ready interpreted this as best I can."

And as soon as I heard that track,

I had the idea of what I wanted to play, instantly.

Remember, the groove on the bass was, like, phenomenal.

Manu was following where the music seemed to be taking us.

And Manu was very good at just following that direction,

but doing it with his own style, so it always sounds like him.

And that's what I try to do on bass.

# Come, feel the power

# Build, build, help the power

# Come on, come on, help me

# Come on, come on, help me, do

# Give it, give it, give it

# All day and night. #

Sledgehammer is part of that

classical rhythm and blues soul that people understand instantly,

so, once again,

I would love to think

it's because when we recorded it,

we recorded it with heart and soul.

DRUMS PLAY

The drums have that thing I was talking about,

a lovely kind of swing to them.

And then, if we put in Tony's bass...

BASS PLAYS

And I chose fretless bass.

PLAYS BASS

I put an octave on it, and a little unusual to use a pick.

And I thought we came up with a good sound.

PLAYS BASSLINE

When I heard the track, it was about 50 or 60% completed,

but there were no lyrics on it whatsoever,

so the bed track was then drums, bass, guitars.

It had some keyboards on it, but it didn't have all the keyboards on it.

No vocals, whatsoever.

No background vocals, no lead vocal.

Dan kept mentioning, "It would be great to have horns on this,"

cos it had a soul feel.

So, we went to the Power Station, in New York,

and had a couple of fellas come up from Memphis.

I was going up to play with some strange people,

and I didn't know how it worked. But I'm good with folks.

I'm good with strangers, so I figured I could make it work, and I did.

Wayne Jackson,

with the Memphis Horns,

was playing at the gig in Brixton when I saw Otis, in 1967.

So, it was a great thing for me to be able to work with them,

and work with him,

and hear a lot of the stories first-hand about Otis.

The song had a sense of humour to it,

and they felt the horns would highlight that humour.

HORNS PLAY

There they are.

I liked the song, and I love the track. It felt good.

That's all. R&B feels good. And this felt good, too.

And I could see why he wanted something original sounding,

to lean his music more towards soul than, than pop.

And I gave him that.

When they came back, after being here for a week,

and I heard them for the first time, it was just a big smile on my face,

cos it helped pull the whole track together.

We were all very happy.

Daniel and Peter just jumped up

and ran around the studio, just jumping up.

Just like fairies. "Yay!"

They were so happy with the way it was coming off.

The thing about Sledgehammer is that it had that video,

and the video had such a charm, such a sense of humour,

which was something that people didn't realise about him.

# You could have a steam train

# If you just lay down your tracks

# You could have an aeroplane flying

# If you bring your blue sky back

# All you do is call me. #

I'd taken a risk, and spent quite a lot of money on this video,

which was really unusual at the time.

People hadn't really done something like that.

# Going up and down All around the bends. #

I was introduced to this wonderful director, Stephen R Johnson,

and he introduced me to the Quay Brothers,

and I introduced him to Aardman Animation,

all of whom worked together.

In those days, you more or less had to do it all in camera.

In other words, what you shot was what you got.

You couldn't layer stuff in.

So, basically, you were shooting everything,

frame by frame, in camera.

So, Peter Gabriel sitting in a chair.

We made a rig, we have bumper cars,

and they are simply model cars, which are animated frame by frame,

and he would be directed to enunciate the part of the word

he's meant to be singing.

You would direct his eyes to look right or look left,

on a frame by frame basis.

You were using Peter Gabriel effectively as an animated model.

# The amusement never ends. #

Two weeks of sort of creative work, and a very slow and painful

process, filming in old-style animation so, as clouds moved

across my face they had, actually had to be painted, frame by frame.

And then Nick Park was asked to animate these chickens.

They'd already been out of the fridge for quite a while,

while they had wire put in them.

Then they were underneath the studio lights,

and Nick is to be seen wearing protective clothing,

rubber gloves and a mask, and stuff like that,

because he was rightly anxious about salmonella.

After the Sledgehammer video was popular in America, I noticed,

and had to laugh, that there were more women in the audience.

Exactly, there were women in the audience,

which, for the musicians, was a wonderful thing.

HE LAUGHS

So that was a change that changed for good,

and we all kind of smiled about it on stage, and took it for what it was.

That was one change, after So.

Song about a man and a woman

faced with a problem of losing a job.

It's called Don't Give Up.

APPLAUSE

BASS PLAYS

Don't Give Up started out as a rhythm box pattern

that Peter had been fiddling around with on his Linn drum.

Then little tuned tom-toms, and I always liked something about it.

And so this entire song was built around that little tom-tom pattern.

And I'd pitched the um, toms quite deliberately

and then I asked Tony if he could build on that.

And when Tony Levin came in he mimicked the phrasing

of the tom-tom pattern the best he could

and he invented this beautiful part that floats on top.

And I thought that'd be a good bass part if I put notes to it.

So I started.

Then I added harmony.

Little beat box part here.

SLOW BEATS AND GUITAR

It's quite Jamaican, isn't it?

Then we can put some keys in for the chords.

# In this proud land we grew up strong

# We were wanted all along. #

We talked about Don't Give Up being a duet, and he was hoping

to find um...somebody who could sing a country song.

I'd seen these extraordinary black and white pictures

of the American depression by Dorothea Lange

and they were haunting, so that was sort of the trigger point,

but then there was quite a lot of unemployment going on

and so I thought I would try and roll that in.

And in a way, the Don't Give Up message,

felt like a sort of an emotional focal point for the lyric.

And originally, because the American Depression sort of starting point,

I'd actually thought of Dolly Parton, who I'm a big fan of.

And he wanted to try and get Dolly Parton which I thought was inspired.

And she wasn't interested.

And I believe that when they called Dolly's manager,

I don't think that any of them knew who Peter Gabriel was.

It's interesting that he did write it with Dolly Parton in mind

because I can't imagine that voice in that setting.

From the point at which he mentioned Dolly Parton he also mentioned Kate.

When Kate Bush walked in, it was a completely different energy.

Again, what was a piece in development

turned into, you know, such a complete song almost instantaneously.

So something that we'd just been working on and working on

and working on for months

and not really getting to any kind of finality, instantly changed.

Course we were all happy to be in her presence, you know,

she was royalty pretty much.

She was literally standing right beside me here.

We were all working on headphones.

We had the speakers turned down so we were working on headphones

and you could just hear the emotion just dripping out of her performance

and literally every hair on my body was just standing up.

# Don't give up cos you have friends

# Don't give up you're not beaten yet. #

It needs to be really underplayed

and um...intimate.

Don't Give Up is actually a really nice way to come out of Red Rain

and Sledgehammer into something very soothing, and very pointed

and it's interesting that he gives that key line to Kate Bush.

He doesn't sing it himself.

He gives it to this beautiful female voice that has a lover's quality,

maternal quality.

I think, and it's my impression again, that it's a homage

to these songs, these duets that used to happen

in the world of rhythm and blues,

when Otis Redding sang with Aretha Franklin.

He was paying a tribute, you know, with respect

to the music that he loved.

# Cos I believe there's a place

# There's a place where we belong. #

She was essentially brought in as an actor really,

to play a role and to represent that part of the song...

and um...

I can't imagine it being any better than it is.

She was like an angel and did it fantastically.

# When times get rough

# You can fall back on us

# Don't give up

# Please don't give up. #

So this is the wonderful Richard Tee on piano

which is much more of a soul gospel piano

which he does really well.

And then Peter...

Where is Peter?

# Out of here I can't take anymore

# Going to stand on that bridge. #

Falsetto coming up.

# Keep my eyes down below. #

Beautiful, eh?

# Whatever may come

# And whatever may go

# That river's flowing

# That river's flowing. #

There's a big difference on the record in the sound

in the second half of the piece and I looked around the studio

for some dampening material, some foam rubber or something

and my eyes fell on my bass case full of diapers.

Again, my two-month-old daughter was with me

and somehow I thought there might not be diapers in England,

I don't know what I was thinking,

but I had packed everything full of diapers, every free space.

So I put a diaper under the bass strings which dampened

the heck out of them

and later, Peter and Dan called that the Super Wonder Nappy Bass sound.

# Moved on to another town

# Tried hard to settle down

# For every job

# So many men

# So many men no-one needs. #

I am obsessive about getting the right um...feel,

the right performance.

And Tony's absolutely brilliant with, you know,

one of the most amazing musicians I've ever worked with.

But occasionally, he'll do something that doesn't feel...

doesn't fit the picture and I've got something else in my head.

I was working at a studio called the Wool Hall in Beckington near Bath

and I was over there for quite some time working on this record

and also concurrently, I was just getting ready to start

a new record with Joni Mitchell, who was my wife at the time.

There was quite a vital music scene around Bath

and the surrounding area in Somerset there.

There were a lot of groups doing work. Tears for Fears were up there.

You know, Peter Hamill was a guy who was working nearby.

And so there was a lot of studio-hopping that went on.

You know, within a half hour drive people would just drop in

to someone else's session

and then there was a number of different groups that were working on different things.

And so, Joni and I just became a part of that little scene there

and when Peter called me, which...

I think it just turned out that he had some things that were unfinished

and he probably found out from one of the circuit of people there

that I was in town.

Some of the ideas for Mercy Street came relatively easily.

I mean, with Mercy Street, I found by chance these wonderful books

of a poet called Anne Sexton,

and she became the focus.

I am a big fan of Anne Sexton's poetry,

and was since I was 14, 15 years old.

And so when I listened to the song I knew what he had written it about

and what the centre of the song was about

and it was just incredibly moving to me.

# Looking down on empty streets

# All she can see are the dreams All made solid

# Are the dreams all made real

# All of the buildings All of those cars

# Were once just a dream In somebody's head. #

The first thing that I did was...

STRUMS GUITAR

And then the other part was a fretless bass part but using tenths.

You know, a lot of these songs changed,

like Mercy Street

became the song it became by an accident.

It actually was originally a song called Furo,

that Peter had recorded down in Brazil a couple of years beforehand.

He'd recorded all the percussion elements.

In my percussion research, you know,

the most interesting things were coming out of Africa and Brazil.

So I went down to Brazil and um...

wanted to record with some percussionists there.

One day we were working on one song

and I just had the vari-speed of the machine engaged

so the machine was actually running at its slowest potential speed.

And the next song on the reel was Furo.

It started to play, and Dan and Peter and I looked at one another

and immediately went, "What is that sound?"

because it was running at 10% slower than it should be running.

And there was something about the percussion

and the graininess of the percussion.

We slowed down guitars, and I think we slowed down cymbals as well.

Cos again, that's thinking...

giving them extra weight and power.

# Pulling out the papers

# From the drawers that slide smooth

# Tugging at the darkness Word upon word

# Confessing all the secret things In the warm velvet box. #

We didn't use headphones for Peter's singing.

He had a little blaster at his piano.

I don't like headphones.

They're like condoms for the ears in a way, you know.

You don't feel you're really connected

and the extraordinary thing is,

is that you can get exactly the same musical information

and sing really out of tune with headphones

and be very precise as soon as you are singing to the speakers.

His monitor was really this little blaster

and that's all he ever used and we just found a sweet spot,

clearly the blasters at the back of the mic

so there was some separation

and I tried to keep Peter as close to the mike as possible.

So the vocals are really important in this

and I don't do a lot of vocal harmony work

but here, it felt really important.

It was sort of this sensual dream-like environment

for Anne Sexton's world.

So in the verse, one of the ideas to try and build the mystery

was to put a shadow vocal in,

so an octave below the main vocal there's this low voice.

Should we solo that?

# Confessing all the secret things. #

And with the lead voice as well?

# To the priest, he's the doctor

# He can handle the shocks

# Dreaming of the tenderness The tremble in the hips. #

The one part that we couldn't execute at the time

was the lowest voice, the low octave voice cos that's just in a part

of Peter's range that is beautiful sounding but once he's up and about

during the day and talking, that part usually kind of disappears.

I had trouble doing that low voice.

And apparently um...

Well, I do remember that in the morning,

you have morning voice, you know.

I think a lot of people are familiar with a pre-coffee voice.

So there we were discussing how to go about executing

that low harmony performance and I just suggested that perhaps

he would spend the night at the studio and I would prep the studio

so that he'd come in first thing the next morning

and without talking to anybody just put on the headphones and just start singing.

We started at seven o'clock in the morning

in order to get this voice before it had risen up to its normal level.

And within an hour, we had a low harmony part on the track

and that kind of helps pin the rest of the vocal.

It kind of gives you the base layer from which all the other voices, you know, elevate.

It's actually an effect that I liked a lot.

# Mercy Street

# Wear your insides out

# Dreaming of mercy. #

I've been very lucky musically.

I never have any trouble generating new ideas

but lyrically, getting something that I think is OK

and as I get older, I think I get more critical, that is hard work.

He would not want to finish working on the lyrics

and Dan understandably would want him to finish working on the lyrics.

I'm a master of distraction when I have a deadline.

Peter would take a lot of phone calls when it got to, you know, an intense period of recording

where he really needed to deliver.

He was a master at finding moments to delay.

I think I smashed a telephone and threw it in the bushes a few times

because I didn't allow telephones on the session.

When Peter'd been on the phone for a while and Danny eventually decided we needed to get back to work,

so he took the phone out of Peter's hand and smashed it to pieces

on the console without saying a word.

Just smashed it to bits and carried right on as if nothing had happened!

At a time when the lyrics were going a little slow

and I said to Peter, "Why don't you just go in that cow barn of yours

"and strike up the PA and get on with some lyrics?"

So he went in and there were these huge spikes laying down there

by the sliding door, one of those industrial sliding doors.

I took the spikes and I nailed in him the studio.

Peter had the PA turned up quite loud

and he was playing the track and so Dan took up the six inch nail

with the hammer, and in time with the music, hammered the door shut.

Cos he was so frustrated at the speed or lack of speed.

Um, there was one lyric I just couldn't...

get satisfied with anything I was generating.

Peter didn't hear him while he was doing that.

So lunch was called. Dan and I went up for lunch

and I remember saying to Dan, "Do you think we should let Peter..."

He goes "No, he'll be fine."

Peter is not a violent or aggressive man in any way shape or form.

And he managed to take the door frame right out...

..to open the door so he could get out of the room!

Which was quite a feat, it was a big solid door,

double layers of cinderblocks, concrete.

It was quite impressive!

And at the end of lunch, Peter says to Dan, "Can we have a word outside?"

So they went outside and they exchanged a few words.

And then we went back to work and that was it.

I almost got fired and not many lyrics were written,

but I think he got the idea that, you know, we weren't there...

we weren't about to, you know, wait around for him.

I just said, "Let's get the job done here,

"Let's hit it with the sledgehammer."

It was really late in the process, it was probably October, November,

and then Peter was, like, "Well, we only had eight songs."

There was another song that didn't get finished.

And so we realised that we needed to come up with another song.

And then Peter came out and said, "Well, let's use Excellent Birds."

It was a last minute track coming from an alternative direction,

but I thought it could be a nice... a nice inclusion.

We came together in the studio, and that was here in my studio,

and wrote this together, more or less trading lines I think.

I said, "I'm doing a show about natural history"

He said, "What about birds? Let's do something about birds."

We had 48 hours before the deadline to write the song,

including the lyric, record it, do the video

and there's a point... on the second night

where I'm trying to sing the vocal

and I'm on a stool and I just stopped.

And then after a while there was this...

while the track is playing, snoring coming

and there's no glass in the studio

but they stopped eventually and peered round

and I'd just fallen asleep mid-take, trying to do my vocal.

And we looked a little weather-beaten the following day when we did the video.

# Falling snow

# Excellent snow

# Here it comes

# Watch it fall

# Long words

# Excellent words

# I can hear them now. #

Peter reached out to Lori and asked if he could use the track

and she obviously gave her permission

and that's when we started actually changing it

and trying to shape it so that it would actually fit in with the rest of the songs on the record.

# This is the picture

# This is the picture

# This is the picture

# This is the picture. #

That's another thing that I really admire about Peter's music.

Um, it's forward looking.

And the lyrics are forward and open

and music is...

..so much often about regret.

I mean, if you didn't... You wouldn't have much music if you,

you know, didn't have, you know... lots of regrets.

I mean, I think Willie Nelson was the one who said, you know,

"90% of us end up with the wrong person

"and that's what makes the jukebox spin."

I don't think it was on the original vinyl version.

We didn't have enough space

cos you sort of forget about those days where 22 or 24 minutes

was the maximum you could pack onto a disc

if you wanted to have the bass with any power to it.

Cos the bigger bass you have, the deeper the grooves go

and so you need to push them up the record

cos the circle is getting smaller and smaller, if you imagine, with the needles,

so it's harder and harder to get any bass as you arrive at the end.

Vinyl actually is still my preferred way of listening to music

because of the warmth,

because of the physical interaction you have with the disc

and even just the mere art of flipping it over,

you're engaged with it.

On CD, when it was recently reissued a few years ago,

he put In Your Eyes at the back of the CD,

where, apparently, he had originally intended it to go.

But because of the way vinyl was, they made the other choice.

It's one of the rare incidents where the CD is an improvement,

at least in the running order,

because on the original album, it ended with We Do What We're Told.

And I think by putting it at the end of the CD

he actually made the album more complete

and gave it that sense of optimism, that there is a future,

that we don't have to just do what we're told,

and sometimes you can find your greater strength in the person next to you.

I still don't like this title business

and maybe a way round it is just to have one or two letters,

because then it becomes like a piece of graphic.

So, when I was thinking about So

you know, I thought, "OK, well, we'll just make it two letters

"and we'll choose letters that look quite nice in themselves."

He had an idea about having a trilogy of sorts

with just a two letter title, So being one of them, Us.

But maybe it was, like, a backlash of the complexity

of the making of this record that he wanted a nice, simple title.

The less letters you have, the bigger you can make them.

Ads, or you're out in the market place, you've got bigger billing

than anyone else cos you've only got two letters.

So, um... this was something that I liked

and I've kept on doing ever since.

# Love

# I don't like to see so much pain

# So much wasted. #

I was fascinated in Africa that you could have a love song

that was a religious song and a romantic love song at the same time.

So I was trying to see if I could get that ambiguity in this lyric.

For the track In Your Eyes, Peter says to me,

"OK, we're going to do that, just play what you want to play."

And in my mind I said, "What does that mean?

"I don't know what...

"I mean, I'm just going to play the track but what does that mean,

'Play what you want to play' cos I'd never been used to that?"

I had always been asked to play this or play like someone else.

I was facing him with my drum kit.

He was just standing in front of me, put the headphones on.

I had the headphones, asked to have the track in the headphones

and start dancing like an African but just so you know,

Peter, the way he was at the time, very English, great face,

great smile, trying to dance like African guys.

I thought, "OK, if that guy, very English guy, go for it!"

And that was the cue for me.

I just, like, let it go, I just played like "OK."

Anything. And it worked.

And so once again, this project was very big for me musically

cos I think he opened up my mind.

There's a talking drum here.

FAST DRUM BEATS

You can't miss with this, everything you put up sounds great.

We had...96, I think, Kevin would be able to confirm this,

I think 96 different versions of In Your Eyes all on multi-track.

So there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of different takes

to choose from which were all organized by a gigantic wall chart

which we eventually chopped together bar by bar out of two inch tape.

With Danny and Peter and everybody listening just going,

"OK, bar 1, take 37, we like that.

"We'll take that one." So, that's where that one would go.

And we literally assembled that song

with 3, 6, 12 inch pieces of 2 inch tape,

to actually create the rhythm track.

We could have worked on that song for probably another couple of months

and Youssou's part had gone on before Peter had done his lyric

so Peter had to weave his performance around Youssou's,

which, you know, was a wonderful thing and a great tapestry

to sing against but it still was a complicated arrangement.

Just the way that he delivered on that

was so radically different from anything I think we were expecting.

I think there's a lot of joy in the track for me

and when Youssou's voice sort of milks the last bit of the song,

you know, it's, it's like an ecstatic moment for me.

In Your Eyes became an absolute anthem live,

I mean, it was just... The way in which that song was on the record,

became a whole other world live.

# Your eyes

# Your eyes

# Your eyes

# Your eyes

# Your eyes

# Your eyes. #

It did go through a number of changes.

The thing that was consistent was the "da-da-da-da-da",

the sort of arpeggiated feature of the chorus.

And there was an African groove underlying it.

When we used to tour with Youssou there was always a fantastic moment

you know, like the sun coming out so...

it was nice to sort of tell a story, paint a picture

and then just have this sort of open ecstasy.

# In your eyes, the light

# Warmer world, mine

# Wo-ah-ah-ah

# Wo-ah-ah. #

It was really nice to see the energies of the two of them,

how they looked at each other.

And I could feel that something magic was happening.

I listen to it on these tracks now and I know that these tracks

were built by a young man who did nothing else with his life for a year.

And um...

and I can imagine what it's like to live the life of a monk now!

A lot of things came together, I think, that opened it up

to a much broader audience than I would normally get to.

It was the moment the perfect storm hit and the man and the public

and the record and the tour and everything, you know, came together.

I surrounded myself with wonderful people,

but in the end, I think it's, it's songs that speak.

It so changed the landscape of recording for everybody, you know.

I worked with a lot of guys

and from that point on, it set the standard.

It was such a well-produced album of very well-crafted songs,

of incredible singing and phenomenal lyrics.

It was the quintessential album.

The right moment with the right people in the right place

with the right things to do.

I became fixated on it, let's say, you know,

and to this day, it sounds like it could have been done yesterday.

He made a classic album

simply by making sure he made the best record he could

at the moment and that's what classic albums are.

The best album you could make at that moment

and with the notion that you want it to live longer than you do.

And he succeeded.

# Your eyes

# Your eyes

# Your eyes

# Your eyes

# Your eyes

# Your eyes

# Your eyes

# Your eyes. #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd