Today's Peter Gabriel Revelation

It occurred to me, as we cycled through his second album (Scratch) in the car again, that of the four early, pre-So studio releases, the second one is the only one that has no song on it that's survived from the early days. My definition of survival here is simple: any song that he's likely to play in a concert appearance over the past decade, or that shows up as a "greatest hits" offering these days, has survived. When you look at the first four albums, you see each of the other three has at least couple songs in that category:

1/Car: "Solsbury Hill" and "Here Comes the Flood"
3/Melt: "Games Without Frontiers" and "Biko" (and possibly "No Self Control", "Family Snapshot" and "I Don't Remember")
4/Security: "San Jacinto" and "Shock the Monkey"

The closest the second album comes is "D.I.Y.", which he was performing in concert right up until around the time So came out. And it tellingly shows up on the Miss CD of his Hit and Miss collection from a few years back.

When I pointed this out to Vicki and posed the question, "Do you think this means that, for whatever reason, this is just Peter's least favourite of his studio albums?" she offered up the observation that it didn't really seem to contain any concert-like songs on it. I can see her point, but really you could say that about most, if not all, of his CDs! And yet he manages to find ways to make them work brilliantly live, and I'm sure when he was touring in the years immediately after the second album, he undoubtedly performed every song on it at various points. To which Vicki countered that it didn't seem like the songs had quite the same depth of meaning to them as most of his material, and therefore maybe they weren't saying as much, making it less likely that he'd play them as time went on and his catalogue grew. Certainly compared to a "Solsbury Hill", "Biko" or "Games Without Frontiers", I can't argue with that! So maybe that's it. Peter's definitely into getting messages out there for people to think - and, I'm sure he hopes, do something - about. And of course there weren't any A.M. hits on that album, whereas each of the other early ones had at least some small degree of radio play before "Shock the Monkey" put him on the map.

These are the sorts of things I think about while carpooling to and from work with Vicki in the winter months. Funny, huh!