He became famous with Genesis but simply to call Peter Gabriel a pop star would be to sell him very short indeed. Peter Gabriel has pursued several overlapping careers; neither becoming a parody of his past self nor self-consciously seeking new images, he instead took his creativeness and perfectionism into fresh fields. In 1975 he diversified into film soundtracks and audio-visual ventures, while engaging in tireless charity work and supporting major peace initiatives. He has also become world music’s most illustrious champion since launching WOMAD festival. These, and several other careers, make writing Peter Gabriel’s biography an unusually challenging task, but Daryl Easlea has undertaken countless hours of interviews with key friends, musicians, aides and confidants. Updated and revised for 2018, Without Frontiers gets to the heart of the psychological threads common to so many of Gabriel’s disparate endeavours and in the end a picture emerges: an extraordinary picture of an extraordinary man. Extra features include integrated Spotify playlists, charting the best of Genesis’ output with Peter Gabriel, as well as an interactive digital timeline of his life, filled with pictures and videos of lives performances, interviews and more. ‘The peculiar, white-lipped dynamic between Gabriel and his erstwhile Charterhouse chums in Genesis is vividly evoked’ – Record Collector ‘A truly wonderful biography of one of the most amazing artists of our time. Highly recommended.’ – Douglas Harr, author of ‘Rockin’ the City of Angels’
In Experiencing Peter Gabriel, author Durrell Bowman delves into the sounds and stories of the innovative, versatile, English pop icon. As not only a singer-songwriter and musician, but also a music technologist, world-music champion, and humanitarian, Gabriel has consistently maintained an unabashed individualism and dedication to his artistry. From 1969 to 1975, Gabriel served as the lead singer, flute player, occasional percussionist, and frequent songwriter and lyricist of the progressive rock band Genesis. With the band, Gabriel made six studio albums, a live album, and numerous performances and concert tours. The early version of Genesis made some of the most self-consciously complex pop music ever released. However, on the cusp of Genesis becoming a major act internationally, Gabriel did the unthinkable and left the group. Gabriel’s solo career has encompassed nine studio albums, plus five film/media scores, additional songs, videos, major tours, and other projects. As a solo artist and collaborator, he has worked with first-rate musicians and produced unrivaled tracks such as the U.S. No. 1 hit “Sledgehammer.” Gabriel won six Grammy Awards in the 1990s and 2000s, as well as numerous additional awards and honors for his music and his videos, as well as for his humanitarian work. From his early work with Genesis to his substantial contributions as a solo artist, Gabriel’s music ranges from chart-topping pop songs to experimental explorations often filled with disarmingly personal emotions. Experiencing Peter Gabriel investigates the career of this magnetic performer and uncovers how Gabriel developed a sound so full of raw authenticity that it continues to attract new fans from across the world.
The story of Genesis is the rock legend of how a humble schoolboy band grew into a group of global superstars. At its center stood Mike Rutherford, driving the music from pioneering prog rock to chart-topping hits. Now for the first time, he tells the remarkable inside story of Genesis and his own band, Mike + The Mechanics. Against the rhythm of drink, drugs, and lineup changes, Mike's father, a World War II naval officer, always stood in the background. He would watch Genesis grow, supporting them from the very beginning when they toured Britain in the back of a bread van. Through extreme highs and lows, loyal Captain Rutherford was always there, earplugs at the ready. But when his father suddenly died, Mike was forced to reexamine their relationship and only then began to understand how much their lives had overlapped. The Living Years is a revealing memoir of the relationship between father and son and the story of how music, families, and friendship combine.
This biography traces Gabriel's early years, from his days as a singer in Genesis, to his departure and emergence as a solo artist in the mid 1970s. It also features chapters on his work with Third World musicians and his association with Womad.
Regarding his song "Solsbury Hill" (1977), Peter Gabriel has written: "It's about being prepared to lose what you have for what you might get, or what you are for what you might be. It's about letting go. By letting go, you create the space for something new to happen. It's a personal struggle to learn to jump off the diving board." The fundamental meaning of Gabriel's words is to be willing to accept change within oneself; to let go of long-held beliefs, opinions, or perspectives in order to grow beyond them. This is very difficult for most adults to do without a personal revelation of some kind. So, if we take into consideration that the song was a direct result of a moment of meditation of Gabriel on Solsbury Hill, we can infer that the change within the English musician was sudden and not as a result of a gradual transition. Isn't it reasonable to assume then that something significant happened in Peter Gabriel's life while meditating on Solsbury Hill?
I hope that this book will be widely read, and I especially commend it to four classes of persons: I. For myself I have come across nothing more important than M. Marcel’s writings here and elsewhere on the problem of metaphysics. I say problem advisedly: for we are all of us these days in the end puzzled as to what exactly metaphysics is. The strict Thomist has his answer: so has the positivist: so too the Biblical theologian who is much too ready to find in the decay of ontology an argument for the authenticity of ‘Biblical perspectives’. M. Marcel was trained in the tradition of idealism: and he knew the influence both of Bergsen and of W. E. Hocking. His conversation with himself certainly betrays their influences: but it is of far wider significance. Professor Ayer and Dr. E. L. Mascall have their answer to the question what ontology is: they have their formulae. Marcel probes beneath these answers; for him ontology is much more than a body of doctrine. It is the intellectual expression of the human situation; what is expressed in the syllogisms of, for instance, Père Garrigou-Lagrange, is valid only in so far as it catches and summarises the very being of man and the universe, as that being is lived through and met with by man in his pilgrimage through life. I find as I read M. Marcel that the frontiers are blurred reflection, metaphysics, spirituality. And that is the strength of his seemingly inconsequent method. In a way he is too wise to suppose that the arguments of the philosophia perennis are enough in their abstract form to convince a man; they only carry conviction in relation to a whole experience of life of which they are the expression. The issues between the Thomist, the positivist, the idealist are not issues simply of doctrine but of life; and to see what they are, one must probe, stretching language beyond the frontiers of poetry, somehow to convey the issues as things through which men live. 2. The book should be studied closely by the moralist whether he be philosopher or moral theologian. Where some of the most familiar ethical ideas are concerned, Marcel reminds us of their ‘inside’ when we so often in our discussion think simply of their ‘outside’. What is a promise? We have our answer pat, our formula which permits us to go on with the discussion of our obligations to keep the promises we have made and so on. We don’t wait to probe. I find myself inevitably using that word ‘probe’ again and again in connection with M. Marcel: for what he does is to probe the unsuspected profundities of the familiar. Most professional students of ethics are morally philistine, men who give little time to penetrating the ‘inside’ of the ideas they are handling. And there Marcel pulls them up short. 3. The book should be widely read by the many Christian ‘fellow-travellers’ of today, those who follow, as it were, afar off the Christian way without themselves coming yet to the point of an act of faith in the Crucified. Its very incompleteness will respond to their groping anxiety, and it will enrich their vision of life. And this it can do because it eschews dogmatic exposition seeking rather to shew the inside of the truly Christian way of life. Fidelity, hope, charity, mystery—these are fundamental categories of the Christian way: and of all these Marcel has much to say, which is in every way fresh and yet at the same time rooted in the tradition of Catholic Christianity. The reader of such a work as Albert Camus’ La Peste, with its preoccupation with the problem of an atheistic sanctity, will understand M. Marcel. In a way he challenges the possibility of Camus’ vision; and he does so not on dogmatic grounds but by an analysis of holiness and goodness which shews indirectly their inseparability from acknowledgment of the all-embracing mystery of God. An age which has known evil as ours has and does still know it, is inevitably interested in goodness; and it is with goodness, as something inevitably issuing out of God because a gift from him, that Marcel’s studies deal. 4. And lastly I commend this book because at a time when minuteness and subtlety of mind are too often the prerogatives of the light-heartedly destructive, he reminds us that a true minuteness and a true intellectual subtlety are rooted in humility and purity of heart, and manifest the soil in which they are nourished by graciousness whose charm none can escape and a strength of argument which none can break.
Relive the incredible history of the King of Pop in reverse. Michael Jackson: Rewind charts the life to Michael from his tragic, unexpected passing to his childhood. By the time Michael Jackson passed away in 2009, he had sold an estimated 750 million records worldwide over his career. He had won 26 American Music Awards and 13 Grammy Awards as well as the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and was ranked number three, after The Beatles and Elvis Presley, of best-selling music artists. Five years after his death, the net worth of his estate is more than 600 million dollars. He is, without a doubt, one of the most popular - and controversial - artists of all time. Now, for the first time ever, author Daryl Easlea will explore the life and history of Michael Jackson... in reverse. Starting with his tragic death and rewinding to his early hits with the Jackson 5 and life in Gary, Indiana, this is a complete illustrated history of the King of Pop: his genius, his life, and his demons. Loaded with over 300 images, a timeline of his life, a complete discography, and more, this is the must-have book for any Michael Jackson fan.
When LA musicians Russell and Ron Mael moved to Britain in 1973, they hit the pop world as Sparks and looked like oddballs, even in the context of the glam rock movement that made them welcome. Soon defined by their weird and wonderful 1974 single This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us from the Kimono My House album, Sparks have now released 22 albums over four decades, each record inhabiting a bizarre world of its own. Their songs were peppered with puns and pop culture nods, as well as nostalgia and jokey images, all mixed up in a kaleidoscope of musical references ranging from rock to opera to disco. They remain one of pop music's truly original and uncompromising acts. The Sparks story is now celebrated in this unauthorised book, Daryl Easlea's exploration of their extraordinary drawing on hours of new interviews and research. Talent Is An Asset comes as close as possible to pinning down the quicksilver nature of two gifted musicians who have gone out of their way to remain unpredictable and elusive, forever entrenched behind a dazzling gallery of jokes, impersonations and musical eccentricities.
