PETER GABRIEL: - Old men take a little longer to get 'up'

Peter Gabriel OVO press conference – Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milano 14th June 2000.

Text transcribed by Roger Salem from DAT audio recording.
All pics by Roger Salem

You have always been strongly associated with multimedia, ever since your Genesis days. Your passion for this seems to emerge again in the Millennium Dome project?

PG: Hi everybody, first. I love playing around with video things at the same time as music. I have always been a big fan of film. And I think when film gets it right with music and image it's fantastic so I think there are many ways now with interactivity to play. It means like being a little child where you can make things happen when you are building little castles and buildings and with this show here someone gave us this enormous play pen, like a big sand pit. So it was very hard to resist when we had this enormous 'building' and someone else was paying for us to have fun.

OVO was not the record that people were expecting as they were waiting for the follow-up to US which is UP. Other then asking you when UP will be released, could you tell us what is behind this long wait between albums. UP was announced now three years ago and it has been eight years since US. Do you feel that you run the risk of loosing some kind of spontaneity in your quest for perfectionism and don’t you suffer in the process from this?

PG: Well I am fifty this year and old men take a little longer to get 'up'. But I love to work slowly because any time I see a new and interesting diversion I follow it. Also I like to do other projects a little because I think if all our life is tour and a record, a tour and a record, then all you can write about is a tour and a record. So I have a lot of material now which I tried to finish when I stopped being a travelling salesman.

What do you think about the Internet technology and music downloads, and the Napster controversy in particular?

PG: Well, on the principle of that 'if you can't beat them you join them' we have now already started a distribution set-up for the internet for music. It is called OD2. But we think that it is a bigger issue then just music because if you accept that all your music is for free then the same must apply for films, for books, for software and I think at that point there will be too much economic interest that will try and defend copyright. For the richer artists like myself it becomes fantastic, thank you very much, it is free advertising. But for the smaller artist, the young artist, or some emerging groups it is more than 60% of their income, records. And for many, if they loose that income they loose a chance to being professional musicians. So we hope with OD2 we can protect the rights of artists and other song writers.

What does the Millennium Dome have in common with your older Theme Park project?

PG: Well it's a little different because the dream of the Theme Park was always to trust the artist and the scientist to realise their dreams. And although we had a great opportunity with our show, OVO, I think in the lot of the areas of the dome artists where not given enough freedom. But at the same time it was a good experience and it gave them another opportunity to learn a little about working multimedia with something which may eventually be useful for an experience park.

Are you happy with what you accomplished at the Dome and was there anything else you would have done instead that you couldn't convince the others to do?

PG: I'm pretty happy with the show, with the cast, the musicians and the other people who worked very hard on that. And I think we have perhaps 80% of our ideas that were realised. But yes, there was a good building project that Norman Fraser had, the 'Millennium Tower'. I would have made that an alternative health centre, but not just alternative but anything to do with health. So you change the idea because there is culture of curative rather preventative medicine and I think in order to start a new millennium you could maybe just shift over to a preventative medicine. So it would have made a hospital a very different place, which would include a health club, a kids and grown-ups play area, psycho-therapy preventative medicine. I mean just change the culture about medicine, I think that would be useful. It would include all the best traditional and alternative medicine. This could have been an inspiration for the rest of the sanitary system but no one wanted that!

The Real World label carries italian groups such as Tenores de Bitti and Spaccanapoli and there seems to be a project of a Palermo group in the pipeline?

PG: Tenores de Bitti and Spaccanapoli, yes, but the other I'm not sure... that's news to me! Spaccanapoli, we got quite excited about. The singer too, I love her voice and I think they are an unusual group. Yeah, a lot of life an fire coming from Alpha sud.* There is also currently a project with Nuclearte in Scilly.

[ * Spaccanapoli are from Pomigliano d'Arco near Naples. By this comment Peter is making a joke: the Alfa-Sud factory was a project of the late Sixties/early Seventies came to be described as a 'Cathedral in the Desert' the plant set up in Pomiglinano with government contributions was a total failure and closed down years ago. ]

How are WOMAD (World of Music Arts and Dance) and Real World doing financially today and are you still involved in the day to day organisation? When will you go on tour as Peter Gabriel?

PG: Fortunately they are doing both much better. WOMAD which was started in 1980 for its twentieth birthday made a profit for the first time so that was very good for us. A small profit but enough and Real World Records is doing well. We get a lot of great support from Virgin too so that is healthy. WOMAD especially was a little shaky for a few years but now they seem very solid.

I ought to finish the next record at the end of this year, beginning of next year so hopefully I’ll be doing some touring.

Coming back to the Dome, you wanted to turn the Dome into a model for a new health system, but at the same time Mr Tony Blair, who financed it, was busy destroying the National Health System (NHS)... do you think that with your involvement in this project you have involuntarily become the ambassador for Blair's catastrophic politics in matters of the NHS?

PG: Yeah, Well look, aahmm I think that the Dome has become much more of a political 'football' then it was at the beginning. It was a project from the conservative party initially. But now it has definitely become a hot political 'football'. And I think, yeah, I was not satisfied with everything the labour party has done but I still have hope that they are pumping a lot more money into the health service and to education. But it has not been as radical as many people were hoping. I still think it was a much better option then the alternatives.

A long time has passed since the last time you were on tour. Is there anything you got tired of or bored of with playing live?

PG: No, I still love to play live and enjoy working with a band. It is a lot of fun. But, I think now that there are many other things too that interest me so I want to do it sometimes but not all the time. The problem with touring is that it's almost impossible to do anything else at the same time. Whereas you can when you record, you can still follow some other interests.

How do you see the fast moving pace at which technology is moving since the past ten years? Do you think that your CD-ROMs, Xplora and Eve are becoming quickly obsolete with the advent of the Internet? How are you going to surprise us next with a new break through in technology? Is there still anything out there to work with?

PG: Yes, with the first CDR, the problem with obsolescence, I think you can still play the disc but the speed at which technology changes makes it very difficult to anticipate the power of the memory capacity of the speed of the different computers in the home. We have a very bright guy called Josh Portway working with Real World and he has developed some new technology too which is called 'The Noodle Player' and we are looking at including it on the next disc but it is again a little bit more interactivity with the music. It takes little sections of the music and allows you to manipulate it in different ways. We did something like that on Eve, on the second disc. But this, I think, is much more advanced. We made it on DVD but also on a regular CD. With this CD now you can put it into the computer and see the children’s story. With OVO there is not much interactivity but there is a bit of video... it's like a children's book.

One of the things that is great for me when I do different arrangements. If I take a thing three different directions normally people only hear one direction but with the interactive music possibilities you can make use of all the different experiments.

Tony Levin who will be on your next album, as usual, has recently stated that at least 80 tracks ready for the album and if this is the case what is missing to get the album released?

PG: Yeah, some of them are unfinished and not everything is good! And I normally like to follow-up new ideas but I'm up till now not finished with them. Yes, starting is always easy and fun but finishing is harder.

Pardon me if I sound stupid… but though I have read the story of OVO I still don't get the message behind the story?

PG: I think there are a few ideas. But one of them is that each ideology, each system is like a season and has a spring, summer, autumn and winter. And for some people who are geared to be born some other thing has to die. And so in a way we are trying to illustrate three different ideas through three generations of one family. Which in some ways represent: agricultural economy, industrial and post-industrial.

First we would like to congratulate you for your album and we would like to know more about what influenced you to write the intimate song 'Father, Son' reported to relate to an experience you have had with your father while vacationing with him?

PG: Yeah, well originally this was a song from UP and Mark Fischer with whom I was working with on the show heard it asked me to have it included because we have an important father, son relationship. My dad is now 88 and I think it was two years ago and I realised he was getting old and that I didn't know him as much as I wanted. So we went for a week in a hotel. It was in the English countryside in the Moors and I brought a yoga teacher because it is now forty years that he has done yoga and I thought that it would be a good way for us to get together. He taught a type of yoga which uses two people. You use the power of all the weight of pulling up someone else's body. So there is a lot of physical contact which is very un-English! At one point I did a really big stretch and I just lost it and I burst into tears and we hugged each other for the first time like father and son like we hadn't done for many years. In fact he called me yesterday to say that he was very touched by the song. And I thought as he's heard it now, I played it to him on the piano about a year ago but I think he hadn’t heard any of the words properly! (laughs)

How did you choose the singers which appeared on the album?

PG: We thought a bit about the characters in the story and then I asked some of my favourite singers to join like Elizabeth Fraser, Paul Buchanan, Ritchie Havens, Larla O Lionaird, Alison Godfrey... they are some of my favourite voices.

Is it true that Ray Charles was going to be on the album and where did the Celt influence come from?

PG: Yeah, I did approach Ray Charles for the father part (in the end Richie Havens did it). But I don't think he 'read' the fax... that was a very bad joke! I think he has a fantastic voice but anyway I was very happy as Richie Havens has a very good voice too, a voice which has been lived.

Is there any relationship between one of your older projects of the early eighties, MOZO the Mercurial Stranger and OVO. This being that the two sound quite similar? (question by Roger)

PG: Yes, I guess there may have been some similarities but it was a different sort of story. I still love short titles because they become a piece of graphic. And, my favourite always was OMO which has gone for a detergent... but I think they have now stopped making it so I may try and pull something out of it.

What part do you have in the organisation of summer festivals such as WOMAD? How the WOMAD festivals be compared to other festivals?

PG: Yeah, Thomas Brueman (?) is the artistic director of WOMAD and he has a great team of people and they pretty much run independently. We still meet and talk long term ideas and strategy but I have very little to do with the selection of artists now. It was only really for the first festival that I got very involved in the day to day running of it and that took about eighteen months. You ask about the experience of going to WOMAD. It varies a lot from which country you see it in. But I think when it works best you get an atmosphere in which people can learn about and get exposed to all sorts of different cultures, ideas and music from obviously different places around the world but also for the younger generations it is also quite often a place to discover some dance in some of the festivals.

Some of the songs off OVO can be down loaded on Napster. What is your view on technology in that respect.

PG: I still think that technology brings more then it takes away. But I would be quite happy to see Napster close down like a lot of other musicians (grins). You will in no way be able to stop piracy altogether and I think a lot of people will use that as a service to check out music they are interested in and then you hope that some of them will buy some of it. When you go passed the fruit market you can either sneak an apple in your pocket or you can pay for it. It is the same decision.