Author: smngrx01

By the time of 2011’s The Hunter, Mastodon had completed their transformation from underground malcontents into psychedelically inclined prog metal voyagers. Metal Hammer travelled to their hometown of Atlanta to get the lowdown on the album and accidentally imbibe some mind-expanding pharmaceuticals.

In the spring of 1837 an engineer from the Western And Atlantic Company chose a spot amongst the forest of Magnolias, Dogwoods and Southern Pines to plant his stake. This was where the proposed giant railway from the American Mid-West to Georgia would terminate. The company, showing a decisive lack of imagination, said the locale would be called Terminus.

A merchant by the mighty name of John Thrasher set about building homes and a general store for the workers who were employed to build Terminus. To be frank they thought the name of their new home sucked balls and as a tribute to their boss dubbed it Thrashersville, the name it kept until becoming Atlanta in 1847. Thrasher, the original pioneer of Atlanta, knew this tiny settle-ment would grow to become a great city at some point in the future. “If you build it”, he reasoned, “they will come.”

In the winter of 1999, cult sludge unit Today Is The Day toured Europe supporting Neurosis and Voivod. On returning, TITD drummer Brann Dailor and guitarist Bill Kelliher quit the group but were enthused by the intensity of the tour and determined not to lose any of the momentum they had built up. They relocated to Atlanta with the express intention of finding new musicians to jam with. Bill’s wife already worked at the city’s Centre For Disease Control and, being the biggest city in the South East, Atlanta had a reputation as being very musician friendly.

The pair, perhaps drawn magnetically, headed straight to Thrashersville – or to be precise Five Points, the exact place where the engineer had driven the stake into the forest floor, some 163 years earlier. It was a frontier town of a different sort now and a bohemian and roughneck hang-out for tattooed speed freaks, pot-smoking rastas, mohicanned punks and dropouts of every stripe. Within a week Bill was cooking tacos in a dive bar called Elmyr and Brann was working in an alternative shopping arcade called Junkman’s Daughter, where he immediately met the woman he would end up marrying.

Before the end of the week the pair went to their first local gig, High On Fire playing a house party supported by local metalheads Four Hour Fogger. They arrived too late to see the support band but ended up hanging out with them all the same. Brent Hinds and Troy Sanders from the band said to Brann, “Hey, aren’t you that crazy drummer from Today Is The Day?” and they all got talking. Brann was already aware that the burly ginger guy with the Iron Maiden backpatch had a reputation as one of the best – if not the best – metal guitarists in Atlanta. By the end of the night they’d arranged to have their first practice together. If we form a band, they reasoned, people will rock.

In the summer of 2011, sitting in Elmyr, Brann says with little understatement: “Yeah, things came together for Mastodon really very quickly…”

You only need to look around you when you arrive in Atlanta to see pieces of Mastodon’s history written large around you. The city is home to the world’s largest ‘fish tank’, Georgia Aquarium. It houses four examples of the largest fish in the world – leviathans of the deep known as whale sharks that can grow up to 44m long. Just outside Atlanta is a 1,700 foot tall mass of granite that imposes itself onto the skyline, known to the world as Stone Mountain but nicknamed Blood Mountain by the band.

The city itself is elemental. In 2008, the largest of 45 tornados formed in one devastating day, cut a six-mile scar across the city, sucking windows and furniture out of the multi-storey Omni Coliseum – former home of local roller hockey team, the Atlanta Fire Ants. Like any major city built in the American sunbelt, it has had its fair share of devastating fires over the years but is also subject to harsh ice storms in winter as well.

But more than anything, Atlanta is a city built in the middle of trees. If you take a plane journey to Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport you could be forgiven for thinking your jet was touching down on the Forest Moon Of Endor. And it is from these trees that the band drew some of their inspiration for their new album, The Hunter.

Mastodon have, in the past, had their albums associated with the four traditional elements. Remission symbolised fire; Leviathan water; Blood Mountain earth and Crack The Skye air. Initially when you ask them that now that they’re out of this stage, what the fifth element is, they all contradict each other and kind of fudge the question. Brent, guitarist, vocalist and manic dynamo at the core of the group says: “Get out of your element. Get out of your box. Find yourself a new element.”

Serenely dude-like bassist and centre- stage vocalist Troy Sanders denies that there even is one. “I guess the overall theme of the album is the fact that there isn’t one.”

Ice cool riff-master Bill adds: “People expect us to have a theme; they’re going to be like, ‘Oh, you ran out of elements, there’s only four elements.’ But this is not true because we could have started on the periodic table of elements if we had wanted, but we just chose not to.”

Intensely focused drummer and singer, Brann, who is perhaps the closest the group have to a de facto leader and is certainly the member who makes the most aesthetic choices regarding the group, tells a different story.

“I guess wood is the theme,” he says then jokes, “If wood can be described as an element that is – I’m sure in China wood is an element. Wood and trees were what I had at the back of my head after Crack The Skye, so I went out and bought a couple of books on tree legends and the secret lives of trees and that’s what I was mulling over. What people believe about trees is pretty strange. I mean obviously trees are alive but some people believe they have a consciousness.”

Despite initially disagreeing, after three days spent chipping away at him, Brent, a former carpenter, concedes this much: “Has wood played a big part in my life? Jesus yes! Of course! I’m a wood sculptor, I’m a carpenter, I carve tikis in my spare time. I’m obsessed with the forest. I’m obsessed with wood. The forest and nature has made a really big impression on what I write and what I gather. I think it’s beautiful and I want to share the way I feel about it.”

Sitting in Elmyr – the bar where Brent spends so much of his time that he ended up filming a hilarious TV commercial for them – the band talk us through The Hunter. The first single proper is Curl Of The Burl, a twanging, filthy Southern boogie stomp that references prime ZZ Top and is a good example of this arboreal obsession.

“A burl is like a cancer in wood, a knot that forms during a period of stress and this growth causes whorls to occur round a compression in the ‘design’ of the wood,” says Brann. “If you cut a tree open when you’re making furniture, you might get a giant burl which means there will be a higher concentration of curls. Furniture makers pay top dollar for interesting burls. So I had this idea about a group of people out in the Pacific North West who are addicted to methamphetamine who go out into the woods with a chainsaw to find the perfect burl to bring back into the town to try and sell to a furniture maker.”

So far, so Mastodon… but none of this explains the opening lines to the track: ‘I killed a man because he kicked my goat.’ Brent laughs darkly and says cryptically: “You fuck with my goat you’re going to get what’s coming to you. And you really shouldn’t be on my property anyway.”

The theme is symbolised by the amazing cover art of a three-jawed minotaur by wood carver and sculptor AJ Fosik. But if anyone is hoping for a grand narrative like on previous albums, they will be sorely disappointed. This is the first traditional album Mastodon have done so it’s free from concept.

“I came up with this crazy long plot but when it came down to it Brent was like, ‘I don’t want to do that again!’” says Brann. “From that freedom came a flurry of ideas. I ended up being more inspired to write than I had been before so it ended up being a good thing to be honest.”

For the first time since Leviathan in 2004, Mastodon have rocked out some proper, face-melting, bowel-prolapsing, hardcore-influenced, sludge- blasted, horns-up, heavy fucking metal this time out. There is the punkish, raw-throated Blasteroid that has the memorable line, ‘Now I wanna drink some fucking blood’. There is the fretboard-splintering Motörhead-meets-Slayer thrasher Spectrelight and the galloping speed metal of All The Heavy Lifting.

Bill, one of the more traditionally metal-obsessed members of the group, says: “I’m always about the face-melting riffs! I guess the heavier, faster ones are usually mine but Brent came up with all the songs for Crack The Skye. That was a special album and about us stepping back for a minute and slowing down. So all of the stuff I’d been writing got put into the riff bag for later; to get married with stuff by the other guys for this album.”

He pauses, then adds: “I love all the stuff that we do slow or fast but I’m a big fan of the Ramones and Slayer. I’ve always wanted to take that style of The Ramones to a live show and be just like, ‘One, two, three, four…’ I love Slayer albums where it’s the same and just boom, boom, boom in your face. I do enjoy playing songs like The Czar and The Last Baron, because it’s a challenge to play a 15-minute song from start to finish without fucking up.”

Perhaps the weirdest (and certainly one of the best) songs on the new album is Creature Lives. Booming Moog synthesizers (played by Brent as a tribute to cult outsider musician R Stevie Moore) herald a cosmic sounding ode to a hapless creature who gets pushed into a swamp by a howling mob. It is by turns hilarious, melancholy, psychedelic and rousing as if back in the day prog keyboard maestro Keith Emerson, who used to play by sticking daggers into his organ, had joined acid-fried Oklahoma City weird beards The Flaming Lips.

“It’s currently my favourite song on the album,” agrees Troy. “The first thing we said when we were creating Creature Lives was, ‘Wow, this has got a Flaming Lips, Pink Floyd kind of vibe’ and we hope that when we play it live it will have the same effect – everyone with their arms in the air, singing along. I’m always pulling for the underdog and that song is about a hideous monster from the swamps, looking for acceptance and questioning who he is but realising he’s just fine the way he is… Me and Brann wrote it for Brent who loves The Creature From The Black Lagoon.”

Being freed from writing a concept album has obviously been a creative shot in the arm – on this matter the band are in total agreement. But Brent puts it the most succinctly when he says: “Of course it’s different from the first four albums. Who wants to wake up every fucking morning like it’s Groundhog Day?”

He is, of course, right. If there’s one thing you really can’t accuse Mastodon of, it’s treading water.

When trying to come up with a suitably heavy name back in 2000, Brent was looking at the Bantha skull – Boba Fett’s insignia from The Empire Strikes Back – tattooed on Star Wars freak Bill’s arm and, said, ‘What is that thing? That elephant thing, is it called a Mastodon?’ Immediately they knew they had the right name.

Things didn’t look as promising for the group during their first practice the same year, however. Brent, who is by his own admission an alcoholic and who was a habitual heroin addict back then as well and turned up too wasted to play. The other three had to wait for him to come back down to Earth and dry out before anything could happen.

Brann is candid about his first impressions. “I didn’t like it. I was not excited. It wasn’t good. I wanted to do something fast and wild and he was like, ‘I wanna do stuff like this – BRRRRRRMMMM! [mimes hitting one doomy note] He was just playing one note over and over again. I was like, ‘Dude, I don’t know what that is.’ I mean, I liked him, he was funny and cool but at that instant, I just didn’t think he could play guitar at all. I was like ‘What the fuck is everyone talking about?’ This guy is supposed to be the best guitar player in Atlanta. But he came by the next day and picked up an acoustic guitar and started riffing this crazy shit.

“Then I was like, ‘Awesome! Let’s go straight to the rehearsal room now and start playing!’ People started saying to me that he had a lot of baggage and that I didn’t want to be in a band with him. But I didn’t care. You’re not going to be in a crazy band or a metal band that doesn’t have people with baggage. I have my own baggage, man. It’s part of the dynamo that powers a good group. As long as none of it gets out of control… as long as no one dies from it.”

After putting out the Slickleg 7” on Reptilian, the band signed to Relapse in 2001 and issued the raw and furious Lifesblood EP (All these essential tracks were later compiled on The Call Of The Mastodon, in 2006.) Their first album proper Remission in 2002 contains the brutal fan favourites March Of The Fire Ants and Crusher/Destroyer but it was Leviathan in 2004 that really smashed down the doors for the band. From the opening riff of Blood And Thunder and Brent’s blood curdling scream: ‘I think that someone’s trying to kill me…’ to the sublime aqueous instrumental Joseph Merrick, it was a copper-bottomed classic and arguably remains the best metal album of the 00s.

Brann devised the loose concept for Leviathan while reading Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick on tour. “Brann was reading the book and said, ‘Wow, there are so many parallels we can relate to in our struggle every day to make it. This man is sacrificing everything at home to get in a boat and go out to sea chasing after his obsession, the white whale. And we’re leaving behind everything that makes us happy to jump in our white van to chase our obsession, our holy grail,’” says Bill. “And we thought, ‘Ah, we’re onto something here…’”

After the success of Leviathan the band signed to Warners imprint Reprise and turned their newfound method to creating their major label breakthrough Blood Mountain, which showcased a growing musical sophistication and a step away from more traditional metal into the realms of prog. Again, they took the mundane idea of the boredom of being on the road and turned it into a fantastical quest to scale a dangerous, monster-inhabited peak.

This transformation was partially successful but the process was completed on the masterful Crack The Skye album in 2009, their most successful to date. All traces of hardcore and sludge metal had disappeared and this was partially down to Brent’s health. The singer had spent three days in a coma after getting beaten up by SOAD’s Shavo Odadjian and rapper William Burke backstage at an MTV event. His crime? Drunkenly swinging a wet shirt round his head.

The near-death experience led to a necessary slowing of pace and a heightened sense of introspection. While the story was the most complex yet – it ostensibly concerns a quadriplegic who learns astral travel but then becomes reborn as Rasputin; involving the occult, Tsarist Russia and Professor Stephen Hawking’s Unified Theory of Space Time – it had an even deeper level. Skye Dailor was Brann’s sister who committed suicide at the age of 14 after being viciously and violently bullied at school – something that was understandably a pivotal and catastrophic occurrence in the young man’s life. The fantastical tale can be seen as a metaphor for attempting to escape the abysmal pain of losing a loved one – as well as a reflection on how close to the void Brent himself had sailed.

If previous Mastodon albums have been about death, then so is The Hunter. Mastodon are concerned with death. They don’t deal what happens to our physical bodies after we have passed on like Carcass originally did or indulge in the Grand Guignol operatic horror like Cannibal Corpse or shout back defiantly in the face of oblivion like Slayer. Instead, they treat death as the constant companion. Something that one day – hopefully no time soon – will happen to them and to all their friends; as it will happen to you and everyone you know. But while Mastodon sing about death, in truth they are celebrating life. An approach to death that is slightly more uncommon amongst most metal bands perhaps.

“It’s something that affects all of us,” says Brann. “We wanted to address it and we did, especially with Crack The Skye, when that came out and I went more public with my personal situation. [There were several coded references to Skye’s death on their debut album Remission as well.] Death happens to everyone and if it hasn’t happened yet it’s going to happen. So what better way to deal with it?

“I’m lucky enough to have a platform to honour the people who inspired a lot of the music that we write. I think it’s a good thing for our families in general. It lets them know that we care. For example, The Hunter is very important to Brent and his family. It is named after his brother who died at the end of last year. It was important for it to be a beautiful song. We had to try and turn that terrible situation into a beautiful song. We’ve had countless kids come up to us, saying, ‘Yeah I lost this person and this music helped me.’ And why wouldn’t it, because it helped us in exactly the same situation. I think that artists owe it to themselves and their fans to put as much of themselves into their art as possible. To help themselves and to help other people through their experiences.”

When we arrive at Brent Hind’s house, it’s already dark. There is a beat- up old Ford truck in the drive with a postcard of the Virgin Mary on the dashboard. There is a large deer’s skull with antlers over the garage door. We learn later that his brother – Brad Hinds, the hunter who inspired the album title – bagged it.

The noise from locusts is deafening, like the throb of bass in a techno club. When we knock, his girlfriend peers cautiously at us from behind the curtains before letting us in. “It’s kind of a rough neighbourhood,” she explains.

Once inside, the house is exactly how you’d want it to be: a baroque, gothic grotto of Creature From The Black Lagoon memorabilia, Shriner fez hats, skulls, candles, stuffed animals, charts of medical oddities, piles of obscure albums and books and giant, leering, wood-carved tikis. Above the door is a framed photograph of Brad Hinds, cradling a deer he’s just shot.

While we’re waiting for Brent to turn up, we meet his pets, one of whom is an epileptic cat. Apparently Brent, ever the curious soul, took some of the cat’s medicine a few weeks ago and passed out cold. When Brent and Tom Cheshire, his best friend and co-conspirator in West End Motel arrive, there is a whirlwind of activity. They start cracking beers and talking at a million miles an hour, curiously.

When I finally get to speak to Brent he is halfway to getting drunk and long since disembarked. We go out onto his dimly lit porch to do the interview and he asks if I’m alright. I foolishly say I have a headache and need an aspirin. He says, “Oh we got something better than that…”

I swallow the pill he hands me and he tells me it is a ridiculously strong painkiller that spins me off into some semi-psychedelic, landscape where nearly all words have become unpronounceable. The hour-long conversation that follows is by turns unpleasant, ball-busting, jocular, threatening, whip-crack smart, hilarious and acid-fried nonsensical. But enlightening all the same.

Even out of his gourd, Brent’s obviously closer to being some kind of genius than he is a tattooed hill billy freak – an image he has partially projected himself. Frustratingly I also get the impression he’s the sort of person who’ll do stuff badly so he doesn’t get asked to do it again. Like interviews for example. You can tell at all times he’d sooner be playing guitar – especially when he informs you.

About 30 minutes in as I’m sinking beneath opiated waves of analgesia and he’s whizzing in high orbit round the planet obstreperousness, he’s arguing black is white to a man who has been beaten insensible with a chemical cosh. At one point I make the mistake of telling him I don’t play guitar and he convinces me that I’m lying: “Trust me, you do play guitar”.

All I can do is whimper that he is right and pray he doesn’t demand a demonstration. We talk briefly about his brother and he says: “He died of a heart attack while hunting on December 4, 2010 and I guess that’s pretty much all there is to it. He had killed this deer and he had dragged it up to the truck. I guess he overexerted himself. And they found him dead in that truck.”

I ask him other questions which he answers briefly in a detached, almost bored manner but I notice something weird, both of his cheeks are moist. Now I’m not saying he’s crying – and God knows if I was in his position I would be crying unabashedly – there are plenty of reasons why a man’s eyes might water like fuck on a humid night like this when the potions are flowing. But the situation jerks me back to reality. I’m round this guy’s house on a Saturday night when all of his mates are next door partying, out of my mind on painkillers asking him about his dead brother, while he’s also out of his mind. It just won’t do.

As soon as the tape is turned off the mood lightens and he hugs me, offering to BBQ me food. But it’s 2am and time to leave. The band’s PR wants us to get up early the next day so we can all visit Atlanta’s internationally famous World Of Coke, celebrating the popular fizzy drink. Ironically, I can tell Brent and his buddies can’t wait to spend an entirely less wholesome rest of the evening once we’ve left.

When I catch up with him a few days later, he’s the same guy, it’s just that the obstreperous, ball-breaking nature has gone. If it was the combative Dr Jekyll we were with then; now it’s the urbane Mr Hinds. He’s a sweetheart and funny as fuck to boot. He laughs when we ask if he identifies with The Creature From The Black Lagoon who he has tattooed about his body. “Well, yeah of course I identify with him because I live in a swamp, I breathe through gills and I’m bright green. What sort of question is this?!”

He tells a very instructive story about another film film. “When I was eight years old The Exorcist came on TV for the first time and oh my God it was the most terrifying place that cinema has ever taken me. I was watching it with my grandmother and she told me, ‘That girl has been possessed by the devil.’ She took a drag on her cigarette, looked me in the eye and with smoke coming out of her mouth and nose said: ‘This could really happen to you…’ He pauses dramatically, “While I was eight, dude.”

He tells us more about his brother: “Really the time was right to name the album after my brother now. It would have been the wrong time two years down the line. No matter how painful it was in December, now it’s more of a celebration. No one in the world knew my brother. Now everyone in the world is going to know that I had a brother who died hunting. What’s wrong with that?”

There is of course nothing wrong with it. It’s as beautiful a sentiment and as fitting a tribute as it is brilliant an album.

On our last night in Atlanta, Troy and Brann are back home with their families. Bill has to buy his wife a birthday present and drops us off at Elmyr so we can eat awesome Mexican food and hang out and party with Brent and Tom. At about midnight, I make my excuses and leave a bunch of them raging with controls set for the heart of a beautifully hazy night. At 11.30am the next day Hammer photographer Mick Hutson crawls into the hotel lobby with eyes vibrating like tennis balls in a washing machine. He looks at me with a pitiful look and says:

“About an hour ago when I was leaving them, I said I had a headache and needed an aspirin. They said, ‘Oh we’ve got something better than that…’”

Southern hospitality, Mastodon style.

Originally published in Metal Hammer 223, September 2011

A wizard, a true star – as well as being title of Todd Rundgren’s classic album from 1973, it’s also a fitting description of the multi-talented musician/producer who has been a potent force in popular music since emerging with psychedelic garage rockers The Nazz in 1968. Since then he’s carved out a unique space for himself as both a musician in his own right and a producer for the likes of Meat Loaf, Cheap Trick and XTC, crossing paths with many huge names in the world of rock’n’roll along the way. In 2009, Classic Rock sat down with Rundgren to hear stories of spiky exchanges with John Lennon, experiences with a drunk Ringo Starr, the weird, formative years of Sparks and the insanity of the New York Dolls.

I met John Lennon in a place called the Rainbow in Los Angeles during his carousing days with Harry Nilsson. He was sitting in a booth and someone introduced me to him. I said hi but had no conversation; I wasn’t loaded enough. That was the only face-to-face experience I had with him. But there was this infamous exchange we had through a British music paper [Melody Maker]. Someone interviewed me when I was in England, and I’m not exactly sure how John’s name came up but the context was to do with his credibility as a revolutionary. John’s antics were fairly well-publicised at the time. He was going out every night and getting drunk, and there was one particular incident where he got into an altercation with a waitress and apparently was wearing a Kotex [tampon] on his head and acting somewhat boorish.

My opinion at the time was that if you’re going to encourage people to change the world you have to have a certain amount of personal credibility, and if you start going backwards and abusing women when ostensibly you are supposed to be a feminist, it’s time to either be just what you are or drop the revolutionary shtick and clean up your act. So this started a whole faux conflict between us. His take on it – as his take was on just about everything in those days because he and Yoko were involved in this primal scream therapy which had gotten into his music – was that he attributed my commentary down to some issues I might be having with my father. Anything that happened at that time John attributed down to some infantile issues.

Apparently after he was assassinated the police found of copy of one of my albums in the hotel Mark Chapman was staying at. I never had any contact with him and I don’t believe that there’s any evidence that the little spat me and John had any effect on Mark Chapman at all. I’m not even sure he knew about it.

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Ringo Starr

Ringo was the most approachable of all of The Beatles. I have met each of the band in turn. If you grew up on A Hard Day’s Night and Help! and watched The Beatles’ antics, to actually meet them in person was often a let-down. For instance, Paul McCartney was an unusually dour person and John was totally drunk and inanimate. George I met very briefly when I was producing a Badfinger album.

You expected cleverness and a happy-go-lucky demeanour because of the image they projected up until the point they broke up. The only one who seemed to have recovered from any of the effects of that was Ringo. He did the music for fun. He didn’t feel that there was some burden to it, he just liked to play. Any opportunity to sing was fine but I never saw him having any pretence that he was building some giant musical legacy.

My experience with him spans quite a few years. The first time we worked together was for a Jerry Lewis telethon in the late 70s in Las Vegas. Ringo was still something of a drinker at the time. I didn’t really notice; he seemed to be in pleasant spirits. Jerry brought in this fiddle player named Doug Kershaw and made us play behind him, and he started playing Jambalaya and wouldn’t stop. I got up on one of the drum risers and started directing and we just started playing the song faster and faster until the fiddle player couldn’t keep up any more. That’s the way we made him stop.

Years and years later when Ringo started doing his All Starr shows, he asked me to join him. By that time he was all cleaned up and very well-organised. Ironically he was heading up a group of musicians of whom half were in Alcoholics Anonymous and the other half were completely smashed. I managed to straddle a middle ground; I could drink casually and enjoy it and not get into any shenanigans. But at the time, there was Ringo who was in AA, and Zak, his son, who was the other drummer and definitely not in AA. So there was a whole dynamic going on there.

My nemesis was Burton Cummings [The Guess Who]. He was a bad drinker. When he got drunk he would start getting ugly with people, and then the next day he would apologise to everyone and then in 12 hours he was back in the same state again. He was a good example of what not to do. Joe Walsh was also pretty toxic at the time. The thing is that Ringo does not discriminate, he doesn’t tell musicians they have to be on the programme. It just so happens that on every tour I’ve been on there’s always somebody who doesn’t know where to draw the line.

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Sparks

At the time I worked with them they were this weird band from LA who were called Halfnelson. While they must have had some commercial influences on their first album, it was one of the strangest projects I’ve been involved in.

Essentially the core of the band was two pairs of brothers – the Maels and Mankeys – and another guy [Harvey Feinstein on drums]. There seemed to be a lack of focus in the group when I was working with them. They wanted to produce this strange music. The Mael brothers had this highly developed image thing going but it seemed the rest of the band was more committed to playing. The stuff they had been writing up until then was way out of the mainstream, and they wanted to become a little more commercial. It was obvious that Ron [Mael, keyboard player] was doing this kind of Chaplinesque thing; he was like a silent movie, and he never said anything.

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Grand Funk Railroad

The Grand Funk Railroad album [1973’s We’re An American Band, produced by Rundgren] was one of the easiest things I ever did. It simply required my normal sensibility, particularly because the band was operating with such low expectations. They’d had some great success but they were not well-regarded critically. They had a huge live following but were excessively jammy, and if you compared them to real jam bands like Cream they really didn’t hold up. To compound things their manager insisted on producing their records, and he was terrible at it. So by the time I worked with them their expectations for the record were so low I couldn’t fail.

I got involved through photographer Lynn Goldsmith, who was part of the new management team and a good friend of mine. She got the idea of putting us together. And by then the band had spent so much time under the thumb of Terry Knight that they were a little unsophisticated about a lot of things outside their world and they went along with it. By the time I got to them they had already been encouraged to produce stuff that was more in the mainstream.

We’re An American Band surprised a lot of people, and the title track has been covered by countless bands since, most famously Bon Jovi. I haven’t heard their version yet, but that’s because I really don’t pay that much attention to Bon Jovi.

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In a sense what they did was anti-musical, and at the time I recognised that this was the necessary cyclic thing in music. When rock music gets too flaky or fancy there’s always a movement to break it down. I always thought the reason that certain music critics liked bands like the New York Dolls is because they are doing something that is comprehensible to them.

The New York Dolls weren’t presented to me, they were just part of the milieu I was involved in at the time. I was still living in New York in an apartment that was walking distance from Max’s Kansas City which is where everything was happening; there was no CBGB yet. There were a lot of bands that were performing what was referred to as ‘the New York Scene’; it was not called punk rock yet. I knew I was going to be leaving New York to move upstate to Woodstock and entering a new phase, so I wanted to do one of these bands as a farewell to my New York lifestyle. The band that was creating the most excitement and actually got signed first was the New York Dolls.

I was such a fixture on the scene and was having wild success with my production work, it was a logical step for me to work with them. I went to see the band play a couple of times and met up with them, and knew that were certain members with whom the musical responsibility lay and then there were guys who were living the dream. Looking back on it, and having had the recent experience of working with them, that part of it hasn’t changed. It was always Sylvain [Sylvain, guitarist] and David [Johansen, singer] who were shouldering most of the burden, so I mostly kept a focus on them and tried to manage the other guys, keep them from consuming too much during the course of the sessions.

For the most part I went through David. I used him as a translator to get to the rest of the band. The challenge of making the record [1973’s New York Dolls] was that the control room was a freaking circus; everyone wanted to know what was going on with The New York Dolls – the critics’ favourite band. I was pretty sober throughout the entire thing, my only working drug was pot. While these guys would smoke pot they would also do everything else. The sessions involved politics, psychology and crowd control. And at a certain point I had to surrender to the process and accept that the surrounding insanity was going to be a part of the character of the record.

Originally published in Classic Rock magazine issue 139, November 2009

Pete Makowski joined Sounds music weekly aged 15 as a messenger boy, and was soon reviewing albums. When no-one at the paper wanted to review Deep Purple‘s Made In Japan in December 1972, Makowski did the honours. The following week the phone rang in the Sounds office. It was Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore. “Thanks for the review,” said Blackmore. “How would you like to come on tour with us in Europe?” He also wrote for Street Life, New Music News, Kerrang!, Soundcheck, Metal Hammer and This Is Rock, and was a press officer for Black Sabbath, Hawkwind, Motörhead, the New York Dolls and more. Sounds Editor Geoff Barton introduced Makowski to photographer Ross Halfin with the words, “You’ll be bad for each other,” creating a partnership that spanned three decades. Halfin and Makowski worked on dozens of articles for Classic Rock in the 00-10s, bringing back stories that crackled with humour and insight. Pete died in November 2021.

In 2004, Peter Gabriel embarked on his Still Growing Up tour, staging a more intimate version of the previous year’s Growing Up shows. He sat down with Classic Rock to tell us about his plans, and talked at length about his whole career, from Genesis to solo stardom and beyond.

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These days Peter Gabriel is a slaphead out of necessity. Or, as he puts it, due to “the absence of follicles”. But back in 1978, when having a shaven head at best marked you out as part of the boot-boy skinhead culture and at worst identified you as a Nazi sympathiser, Gabriel took a razor to his mop out of choice.

The fact that he would stand on stage clutching a pink teddy bear while singing Me And My Teddy Bear added to the whole incongruous image.

“That was actually the first song I ever performed in front of an audience,” Gabriel says. “The contrast was deliberate. You want to believe that packaging isn’t the main priority for making initial decisions about people, but sadly it is. So by changing the packaging I was hoping to change the perception.”

And did you? “To an extent. I think it worked in America but in England I don’t think I’ve ever outgrown that middle class, ex-progressive rock persona.”

Strange but true. Most people’s first acquaintance with Peter Gabriel dates back to the mid-80s and the Sledgehammer video that brought a touch of class to the rapidly expanding MTV channel and dropped him right into the laps of a new generation. And yet, decades years after he walked away from his original prog-rock persona in Genesis, the ghost still lingers.

It’s not too hard to establish some kind of link between the middle-aged chap walking around upside down on stage singing Downside Up on his latest tour and the same bloke stuck inside a fox’s head wearing a long red dress back in 1972 singing Watcher Of The Skies.

The connection is Peter Gabriel’s sense of the dramatic. It’s what got him hooked on rock music back in the mid-60s when he was a pupil at the stuffy, class-ridden Charterhouse public school where rock’n’roll was considered subversive. (If you want to sample the flavour, try Lindsay Anderson’s 1969 movie, If – Gabriel auditioned for a part, although he didn’t get it.)

Gabriel isn’t normally one to get reflective about his career. Not when there are Bonobo apes to interact with. Not when the internet is transforming the music industry, giving artists the opportunity to take more control of their work. (When he suggested a couple of decades ago that people would soon be accessing music via the telephone he was laughed at.) Not when there’s an award-winning stage designer finding a way of enabling you to walk upside down on stage and an award-winning director to film you doing it.

But sitting in a cosy corner of the Covent Garden Hotel restaurant, Gabriel is allowing himself to wallow in a little nostalgia.

Gabriel’s formative rock’n’roll experiences outside the gates of Charterhouse – frequently illicit, which only added to the thrill – were Otis Redding and The Nice. “I got to see Otis Redding in 1967 at the Ram Jam Club in Brixton. It was a bit of a moment for me,” he recalls proudly.

“I’ve never really been a technical singer as such, or a musician. I’m someone who goes for the feel of something and tries to build pictures. And hearing the voice and the emotion of Otis Redding was just beyond words.

“I saw The Nice several times as well. I always thought The Nice got branded by ELP in some ways. There was a time when Jimi Hendrix wanted to join The Nice, and nowadays people might look back and wonder why, but if you saw The Nice they were exciting both musically and in terms of showmanship, which I think was part of the appeal to Hendrix.

“When we [Genesis] wrote The Knife, that was very much inspired by [Genesis keyboardist] Tony Banks’s and my enthusiasm for The Nice. Terrible name, though. But then words were never Keith Emerson’s strong point,” he adds.

But that was a couple of years down the line. Back inside the Charterhouse gates, simply forming a band was regarded as an act of rebellion against the establishment, regardless of how whimsical the early efforts of Gabriel, Banks and their school mates Michael Rutherford and Anthony Phillips actually were.

Their early band names – The Anon, The Garden Wall – are testament to their diffidence, although musically they were well-organised from the start. Gabriel had suggested they call themselves Gabriel’s Angels, which could have laid him open to Keith Emerson-style criticism, but the others were not impressed.

In fact they were given the name Genesis by Charterhouse old boy Jonathan King, who was the first to spot their potential. He’d had a hit in 1965 with Everyone’s Gone To The Moon and it wasn’t as if they had many other contacts in the music business, so they sent him a tape. King recorded their first album in ’68, From Genesis To Revelation on the Decca label, which almost nobody bought.

But they knew they could do better, and once they’d wriggled out of King’s clutches they took themselves off to a country cottage just outside Dorking where they spent six months eating, sleeping and rehearsing. Apart from taking afternoon walks they never left the place. As Mike Rutherford later observed: “We were far too intense to enjoy ourselves.”

It meant that by the time they started to play gigs they had a carefully prepared show. But at this point Gabriel became aware that he was the only one standing up on stage. “And the others had absolutely no understanding of the stress that it put on me,” he recalls. “Because I was the one who was actually having to sell it at gigs.

“And it was a lot of pressure,” he continues, “because there were audiences that weren’t the least bit interested in what we had to offer. What’s more, we had all these twelve-string guitars that had to be retuned between each number. They’d be sitting there in silence, tuning up, and I’d be trying to speed it up because I could feel the energy from the audience just dissipating. That’s when I started, out of desperation, telling stories.”

Gabriel’s monologues soon became a feature of Genesis gigs as the band built up pockets of support in places like Aylesbury, Godalming and Bath. But progress was painfully slow. Despite package tours with Lindisfarne and Van Der Graaf Generator – Genesis’s label-mates at their new home on Charisma – the band’s Trespass (’70) and Nursery Cryme (’71) albums sold pitifully few copies.

“We were plodders,” Gabriel admits. “I remember, after we’d been going for two or three years, talking with this guy who said he was forming a band called Curved Air. And within about three months they’d shot past us into the charts. We were quite depressed that they could do far more in a shorter space of time than we could.”

But then Genesis had very little in common with their rock’n’roll peers. While other bands would head down to the fish and chip shop or the pub after setting up their gear at a venue, the Genesis chaps would get out their lunch boxes and chow down on their egg-and-cress sandwiches.

Sex and drugs were not a prime motivation for their rock’n’roll, either. “We had read about those things,” Gabriel observes. And as for the drugs: “I had the odd experience with hash cigarettes and walked around with the giggles or threw up. It wasn’t doing it for me. Part of it was that I had a very vivid imagination and I didn’t really want to lose control.”

Genesis were even different from other prog-rock bands. They took a democratic, collective approach to their music, and there were no wanton displays of instrumental flamboyance. “It was much more a composer’s approach rather than a player’s approach,” Gabriel agrees. “Some of the other bands were better players than us but didn’t have the same approach that we did. Tony [Banks] and Steven [Hackett] would have their moments but they were all within the group context.”

Another problem for Gabriel was that while his vocals provided much of the songs’ foreplay, the climaxes were often instrumentally driven, leaving him standing around, useless and frustrated. “The most I could do was to bang a tambourine. Actually, I should have been utilised on a keyboard or some other instrument, but that was all down to politics within the band.”

For all the musical drama Genesis could conjure up, it wasn’t until they developed a visual element that they started getting recognition. Gabriel had tinkered with eyeliner and shaving a wedge out of the hair above his forehead. Then he donned his wife’s (he got married in ’71) Ossie Clark designer dress (“It was a struggle getting into it”) and a fox’s head for a show in Dublin in October 1972.

“Back then Ireland was not the hippest country in Europe,” Gabriel says, with understatement, “and there was a palpable sense of shock as I walked out on stage. I thought the dressing up was fun, but the rest of the band were pretty uncomfortable about it. There was a lot of heavy discussion about whether I should be doing this sort of stuff. But I’m an obstinate bugger, particularly when people don’t want me to do something.”

Just as the others jealously guarded their instrumental domains, Gabriel protected his wardrobe. “When we started the Supper’s Ready tour I didn’t show the band any of the visual things I’d planned. I thought: ‘If these masks come up for band discussion they won’t go with it.’ I knew it would work, but I was going to have to do it furtively.

“I brought them along to the rehearsals on the day of the show. And I think the others realised at that point that they couldn’t stop me because it was too close to the show and it would really rock the boat. Fortunately the audience reacted well and I got away with it, although it was a close-run thing.”

The masks included a geometrically enhanced cardboard box, and a faintly ridiculous flower ensemble with Gabriel’s head framed by petals. With the addition of a white muslin curtain behind the band, lit by ultra-violet lights, the audience now had something to focus on apart from their own shoes.

Through 1973 and 1974 Genesis developed a cult following. They had already become big in Belgium and Italy, and their new musical tales of mystery and imagination on the Foxtrot and Selling England By The Pound albums proved particularly popular in the industrial towns and cities of northern England. They even almost had a Top 20 hit with I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe), but it stalled at No.21. And when they started touring America, their strongest areas were the blue-collar cities of the US Midwest and Canada.

“I think some of them were trying to escape from their backgrounds, and we had a romanticism that cut through to people,” Gabriel explains. “We were much more Harry Potter than The Terminator. The critical thing for me was how much feeling we were able to put out, and I think there was a real emotion getting through at our gigs.”

Emboldened by the band’s success, Gabriel’s stage outfits became more elaborate. On a couple of occasions he was even hoisted into the air on a wire to sing The Musical Box.

He also started getting more possessive over the lyrics, which caused ructions with the others who felt that words were part of the ‘group thing’. Gabriel didn’t help himself by being late with the lyrics. So it was with some reluctance that the rest of the band allowed Gabriel to write the lyrics for their conceptual tour de force The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, even though it was his concept.

“I insisted, although there were two songs in which the others got involved because they didn’t want it to be a hundred per cent. And I think that really was the reason, although they would probably give you other reasons. But I did put a copyright on the little story I wrote on the sleeve, jumbled as it is, because while I was an equal contributor on the musical ideas I knew that I was doing a lot of this work in addition. It was pure ego.”

Ego – or the flattering of it – also had a part to play in the episode that nearly wrecked Genesis during the recording of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. The Exorcist producer William Friedkin had read an earlier surreal story by Gabriel on the sleeve of their Live album, and got in touch about writing a script. Already behind with The Lamb… lyrics, Gabriel asked the group for time off. When they refused, he quit. Matters were resolved only when their management warned Friedkin that he was breaking up the group. Friedkin backed off, and Peter sheepishly returned.

More traumatic was the birth of Gabriel’s first daughter, who after a complicated birth was in intensive care. “We were recording in deep Wales,” he recalls, “and my daughter was between life and death in Paddington. So there was this five-hour drive to visit my wife and daughter. It was absolutely exhausting.

“The rest of the band were sympathetic but they couldn’t understand. The Band had always been The Boss and our duty. Our life was our work, and any kind of life outside this all-consuming entity, whether private or professional, was something the others found pretty threatening.”

His daughter survived, The Lamb… was completed after round-the-clock mixing sessions, tours were booked, and a new show conceived and prepared. But Gabriel’s perspective had changed irrevocably. Four dates into their US tour in late 1974 he told the band he was leaving, although it was another six months before he could extricate himself.

“Our manager was booking tours eighteen months ahead, which is normal business practice, but I was just feeling the whole weight of commitment and thinking, when is life going to happen? Is it all just tours and records? I wanted to stop every now and again and have time with my family. But you couldn’t because it was fucking up the band.

“And the irony was that I had all that really strongly when I said I wanted to leave, because we hadn’t paid off our debt and things were really beginning to take off and now I was fucking it up for them. So the reason I stayed with the band for a European tour was guilt.

“And the thing that was hardest for me was that I had agreed that in order to give the band a chance to build a new identity I wouldn’t say anything for another six months. And I felt like a fraud. I was performing in front of all these people and I couldn’t say anything. But strangely enough I was more confident that they would do all right without me than they were.”

But the press and public didn’t see it that way. When news finally leaked out and Gabriel wrote a “convoluted letter” to the press, Genesis found themselves reading their own obituaries while everyone speculated on Gabriel’s next move.

Except that there was no next move. “It was time out rather than time off,” he explains. “After I left Genesis I wanted to be outside the music business. At first I was just growing vegetables and looking after the baby. I also looked at this commune that I was actually quite serious about joining. They’d put together different elements of spiritual traditions, and they auditioned prospective members with psychological testing and stuff like that. It was quite a weird experiment. Even weirder, it was called Genesis!

“But the more I was without music, the more I realised I still loved it and I wanted to get back. And they said: ‘If you do go back, we can all decide when you should go.’ And I thought, hang on a minute.”

Having rejected Genesis for a second time, Gabriel got back into the swing of writing songs. But who to play with? Apart from his old band, he hadn’t really hung around many musicians, although he had got to know Robert Fripp, the leader of King Crimson, and a London-based American keyboard player called Larry Fast. For Gabriel the prospect of forming a band was daunting.

He ended up going to Canada to work with Bob Ezrin, on the face of it a strange choice. Ezrin had made his name producing Alice Cooper and had recently worked with Lou Reed and Kiss.

“One of the attractions of Bob was that he seemed really good at organising people, and it was nice to feel that some of that pressure was not going to be on my shoulders,” Gabriel explains.

“I was very nervous doing the first sessions with him so I took my little English contingent with me, and he introduced me to these other musicians, one of whom was Tony Levin, who has been my bass player ever since.

“Bob helped enormously. He’s very talented. We still work together on projects. But at that time he was also a bit of a coke-inspired control freak. And that would manifest itself in various ways. There was one particular occasion when a beautiful guitar solo from Robert [Fripp] was erased and we didn’t quite know why. And that created tension.

“Then there were the sessions for Here Comes The Flood, when I wasn’t sure about the drum part so I wanted it isolated so I could erase it if necessary. But when I listened back the drums had been mixed in with the orchestra, and there was no way I could get rid of it. There were several moments like that. But we found a way through, and I think there are bits of that album [the first Peter Gabriel] that are really good and focused. There’s just a few bits where it goes off the rails.”

By now it was 1977 and, as Gabriel had predicted, Genesis had already risen, phoenix-like, and were more commercially successful than ever. Suddenly it was ‘Peter who?’ Thank goodness, then, for Solsbury Hill which gave Gabriel a Top 20 hit and the exposure he needed to launch his solo career. “That was something Bob Ezrin kept pushing me to finish. He’s very good at motivating people to get on with writing.”

His first tour that year put further distance between him and his former band – no dramatics, no costumes, just a simple but effective light show. “I was definitely trying not to play Genesis songs, although I did do Back In New York City. And there were a couple of covers – Marvin Gaye’s Ain’t That Peculiar and The Kinks’ All Day & All Of The Night – which were outside the prog-rock background I was associated with.”

He had also been thinking about the barrier between the performer and the audience, and “how much more interesting it could be if you tried to break through that”. The newly developed radio microphone gave him the first chance: he’d disappear off stage during the introduction to Waiting For The Big One and reappear at the back of the stalls or the balcony before making his way back to the stage through the audience.

“You couldn’t pre-programme the show if there was a physical interaction with the audience,” he explains. “They could determine how long you were out there. It certainly added a sense of alive-ness to the show. Because I was putting myself in a place that was potentially vulnerable. And things like trust start to come into play.” Later on he would take that a big step – or fall – further.

Having now put clear daylight between himself and Genesis – and had a hit single as well – Gabriel now had to decide which way to go on the next album.

“I was worried about getting drawn back into the pop thing. So the second album was a deliberate attempt to go somewhere else, and I asked Robert Fripp to produce it. He said: ‘That’s a wonderful idea. We’ll do the whole thing in six weeks. No pussyfooting around.’ I thought that sounded exciting and I decided to go for it.

“But what I learnt was that I don’t do good work in a hurry. I may get moments of things, but not a proper body of work. The songs weren’t as good as they could have been, the lyrics weren’t as good as they could have been, the arrangements certainly weren’t as good as they could have been, and the sounds weren’t as good as they could have been.

“It took until the next record to find out what I was as a solo artist, or could be. That was in the framework of feeling more settled with the band, and having the great team of [producer] Steve Lillywhite and [engineer] Hugh Padgham.”

The framework for that third album also included an odd rule: no cymbals. “I’d been thinking about the things I didn’t like on rock records,” Gabriel explains, “and one of the things was cymbals splashing around all over the place. They take up an incredible amount of space in the higher sound frequencies. And if you take them out you give yourself a whole country to explore.

“So I said no cymbals. And that meant that the drummers – mainly Jerry Marotta but also Phil Collins and Morris Pert – couldn’t do what they normally do. Suddenly they had to think differently. And that affected the spine of the piece, the rhythm. And everything else.”

Out of that quest for new and different drum sounds came the gated reverb, an effect that engineer Padgham had tried out on an XTC album shortly before. “He was playing with it in the studio, and I got quite excited and asked him to turn it right up. I remember saying: ‘This is going to revolutionise drum sounds.’ I wanted to do a track that was entirely based around that sound. And that track was Intruder. Phil was playing on that track and he got excited by it too.

“It’s a minor thing, but when people listen to that song and say: ‘You took that Phil Collins [In The Air Tonight] drum sound’, that niggles me.”

That sound gave Gabriel’s third album a potent, if ominous, sound that ran from the opening Intruder through to the closing anthem Biko. Even the poppy Games Without Frontiers had menacing undertones. It was all too much for Atlantic Records in America, who decided to pass on the record. “Apparently after they heard Lead A Normal Life they asked my manager whether I’d been in a mental institution,” Gabriel says. “The head of A&R, John Kalodner, kept wanting me to sound more like The Doobie Brothers, who were very popular at the time.”

The album – his third to, confusingly, be titled simply Peter Gabriel – turned out to be Gabriel’s most successful so far in both the US and the UK, justifying his barbed comment about Atlantic’s “short-sighted and bigoted attitude”.

On stage Gabriel, who had now gone skinhead, continued his walkabouts, sometimes ‘surfing’ the audience on a piece of plywood which was carried along by four strong roadies acting as pall-bearers. When he occasionally fell off, the audience, far from ripping him to shreds in a frenzy, helped him back on to the board. From that developed the idea of deliberately falling backwards into the audience from the lip of the stage.

“I’d done those hippy psychological games, falling backwards and trusting people to catch you, so I thought I’d do that on stage and hope that they caught me. When you go forwards that’s one thing, but when you go backwards it’s another completely. For the most part I got caught. But early on, in San Francisco, they thought: ‘This must be part of the act. We’d better move away’. And that hurt!”

Even when they caught him the audience were not always reverential. “I was debagged on a regular basis. And in Chicago I barely held on to my underpants. I clambered back on stage holding my belly in as best I could. Later on I saw an R.E.M. video where Michael Stipe dives into the audience and I thought: ‘Damn, I should have done the video while I was ahead’.”

Gabriel’s stage-diving antics began on the mysteriously named ‘Tour Of China 1984’ – it was only 1980 at the time. “Well, there was this big thing about who would be the first rock act to play China. I knew I wasn’t going to be the first, but I thought I might as well do the merchandise. And 1984 always struck me as a scary year ever since I read the book.”

The closest Gabriel actually got to China was when the Tianjin Song & Dance Ensemble performed at the first WOMAD Festival in 1981, which he was heavily involved in. That event is now seen as the catalyst for the burgeoning world music scene, but at the time it bankrupted Gabriel and exposed him to a few unpleasant realities. Genesis bailed him out with a benefit show the following year.

“People were saying: ‘Who is this fat cat watching us suffer?’ when in fact the debt was far more money than I had to my name. It was extraordinary to see what happened when it all went bankrupt. I got death threats, and the liquidators actually forged a signature of one of the WOMAD directors so they could get their cut of the Genesis benefit concert.”

The Genesis reunion concert at Milton Keynes the following year paid off the debts, but Gabriel emphasised the one-off nature of the reunion by entering and leaving the stage in a coffin.

His own enthusiasm for world music was evident from the opening track of his fourth Peter Gabriel album (titled ‘Security’ in America), The Rhythm Of The Heat. “I’d been working with this Ghanaian drum band, Ekome, in Bristol, and that’s where the final section of that song came from. Getting that change of rhythm down was incredibly exciting – one of those moments when you think: ‘Nailed it!’ A great feeling.”

The unrelenting intensity of Gabriel’s fourth album – musically even the hook-laden single Shock The Monkey was like a coiled spring – scuppered its chances of being his breakthrough album. “It wasn’t a big seller,” Gabriel confirms. “Some of the hardcore fans think it’s the best record but others thought it was too wacky. Maybe that’s because I was taking a bigger role in the production.”

The complex and sometimes impenetrable videos didn’t help, either. But live the musicians had developed into a cohesive, energetic unit that attacked the songs’ dynamics with a cavalcade of synthesised rhythms and loops. The stage was sparse, the lights white and bright, and ‘the dive’ took on an almost religious significance. David Bowie was so impressed that he took Gabriel along with him on the North American leg of his Serious Moonlight ‘comeback’ tour in 1983.

Gabriel began work on the next album the following year, but got waylaid by soundtrack projects for Birdy, Against All Odds and Gremlins, not to mention domestic strife and temporary separation from his family. But when So finally emerged in May 1986 it was emphatically a case of right record, right time.

“It exceeded all our expectations, in terms of making music as well as commercially,” Gabriel admits. “I had hooked up with Daniel Lanois, who co-produced the album with me, and all the elements were fitting together. But then it’s always easier to look back in hindsight. I mean, even though Sledgehammer felt strong and the groove was great it didn’t feel like a big hit record. People go: ‘You must have known it was the commercial track’, but it wasn’t until we started doing the video that we got a feeling about it.”

The Sledgehammer video was when Gabriel’s complicated ideas were made accessible. “I think it was looking forwards and backwards at the same time,” he muses. “People think it was done with a lot of computer effects, but it fact it was old-fashioned animation techniques. It was a slow, tortuous process. And the day I spent surrounded by stale fish that had been under the bright lights the day before was not a sensual experience I want to repeat.”

But it worked. Sledgehammer was a worldwide hit – No.1 in America – and the So album topped the UK charts and spent three weeks at No.2 in the US. Finally, Gabriel was a star and, having kept the music business at arm’s length for 20 years, suddenly he went high-profile, turning up at awards shows.

“I’d avoided all of that stuff and had a very pure, Stalinist line against the business, but I did embrace the selling of my music at this point, and I didn’t really feel much the worse for it. I didn’t feel that the angle of bending over had exceeded my natural comfort zone,” he adds with a smile.

The This Way Up date schedule included all but one of the So songs, and expanded the light and space concepts from the previous tour. This time Gabriel used mobile lighting cranes, which were at their most effective when they crowded round him while he sang Mercy Street. And the rousing duet with Youssou N’Dour on In Your Eyes was an inspired piece of world music alchemy.

Gabriel was reaching a new audience, drawn in by the videos and his media profile. “It was a pop audience that I hadn’t had before. And I’m afraid some of the cult followers were not very happy to share with the casual viewers,” he recalls.

“And then, just as everything was beginning to wind down, the album got another boost from the Say Anything movie, with John Cusack holding up a radio playing In Your Eyes as a Valentine’s Day offering for his girlfriend. You never quite know when these external events are going to help or hinder you.”

Typically, Gabriel managed to dissipate much of his new-found rock-star status by taking six years for the follow-up, Us. Admittedly there was another soundtrack (Passion) and a compilation (Shaking The Tree) in between, but he acknowledges an almost wilful intent: “I have tended to follow a successful album with a less successful album. I think I’ve protected myself with obscurity whenever I was threatened with success.”

Us may have sold only around half of what So did, but it probably wouldn’t have sold much more even if it had come out four years earlier. Where So was direct and accessible, Us was pristine but introspective. The cult following had their man back again. “I didn’t feel the production caught the energy sometimes, but I felt good about the songs,” Gabriel reflects.

The accompanying Secret World tour was an ambitious leap into the unknown. It was the brainchild of acclaimed designer Robert Lepage, who, Gabriel says, “creates theatre for people who go to the cinema. It was not just about words and performance, it had what I call a high moisture content – a mysterious environment, if you like – and I wanted to see if we could incorporate that into our show”.

Set in the round, the set had two stages with a walkway between. “There was the male square stage and the female round stage, and obviously some random stereotyping in that sense,” Gabriel explains. “But having two places to go, the feeling of playing two stages, was quite different from the usual show where everybody’s pointing the same way and the energy is going in the same direction.”

But despite the show’s complexity there were no dazzling affects to wow the audience. “A lot of acts were in the ‘weapons race’ back then: how many lights you can have, that sort of thing,” Gabriel says. “We went out with about a tenth of the weapons of some of these bands, but we were trying to use them in a more interesting way. I think it’s an important distinction; it’s not all about quantity.”

Some of it was about choreography, though, given Lepage’s theatrical background, and some of the band had to learn to skip in unison. But skip they did as the Secret World tour traversed the globe for most of 1993 and 1994, visiting countries off rock’n’roll’s beaten track like India, Egypt, Chile and Venezuela.

The six-year gap between So and Us paled in comparison to the ten-year wait for Up, which eventually arrived in September 2002. “It’s a bookends record,” according to a now 50-something Gabriel, “looking more at the beginning and end of life than the middle.”

Songs about death (I Grieve) and childhood fears (Darkness) may not be obvious rock’n’roll subject matter, although they are broken up by some thunderous metallic beats and rhythms, as well as the life-affirming More Than This and a caustic satire on reality TV (The Barry Williams Show).

“To begin with, Up got some really bad reviews,” he admits. “Rolling Stone gave me a stinker, which was quite disappointing because I felt I’d worked bloody hard at it and it has some of my best work. It’s taken a while, but recently I’ve had musicians come up to me and say it’s my best record. Which is some consolation.”

And if they didn’t like the record, the critics have been effusive about the latest Still Growing Up tour. Last time, Lepage and Gabriel spread out horizontally, this time they’ve gone upwards. “We decided to try and create levels and variations vertically, so that you end up effectively with a heaven stage and an earth stage and a means of moving things – and people – up and down.”

Which is how Gabriel and his daughter Melanie come to be walking upside down on the underside of heaven, singing Downside-Up (from Gabriel’s OVO Millennium show – about the only thing to emerge from the Millennium Dome with any credit).

“Actually I was dreading that,” Gabriel confesses. “While Robert and I were working on the idea someone had actually fallen. And my daughter was going to be asked to do this, so I wanted to make doubly sure it was safe. The first time she did it live I was very emotional. I was wanting to be protective and supportive but at the same time I just wanted to sit back and enjoy it.”

The Still Growing Up tour does have some gadgets to impress the audience: the Zorg ball, a huge, transparent hamster wheel inside which Gabriel walks while singing Growing Up. His original intention was to walk out over the heads of the audience in a novel departure from his earlier stage diving. “But it was pointed out to me that the combined weight of the ball and my not inconsiderable weight might flatten some smaller members of the audience.” There’s also the jacket of lights that he wears for Sledgehammer, and the bike he rides around the stage while singing Solsbury Hill.

“One of the things I enjoy most is brainstorming with interesting people,” Gabriel says, “and doing a very visual tour gives me the chance to do that. The big production stuff is something I‘ve always enjoyed, right from the early days of Genesis.”

In a wardrobe of his there probably still lurks a red dress and a fox’s head.

This feature was originally published in Classic Rock 69 (August 2004)

Hugh Fielder has been writing about music for 50 years. Actually 61 if you include the essay he wrote about the Rolling Stones in exchange for taking time off school to see them at the Ipswich Gaumont in 1964. He was news editor of Sounds magazine from 1975 to 1992 and editor of Tower Records Top magazine from 1992 to 2001. Since then he has been freelance. He has interviewed the great, the good and the not so good and written books about some of them. His favourite possession is a piece of columnar basalt he brought back from Iceland.

When it was released in 1997, This Strange Engine marked a different kind of Marillion. No longer afforded big-label advances and plush West End studios, they were forced to get creative in a different way. Steve ‘H’ Hogarth, Steve Rothery and Mark Kelly looked back with Prog to mark the recent deluxe reissue.

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It’s very late when Marillion’s Steve ‘H’ Hogarth steals down the stairs in the half-light. Something has woken him from a dream; the memory of something. His father, he thinks. He grabs a sheet of paper and starts writing. “All the words came quickly in the middle of the night,” he says. “I woke up, wrote it all down, went back to bed, then got up in the morning, read it and thought, ‘Holy shit!’ It was all sort of rhyming and had a certain nature. God knows where it came from, but it came more or less fully formed.”

Those two sides of paper would become the title track and a defining moment of the band’s ninth studio album, This Strange Engine. “I think it was an attempt to tell my father that I’d finally realised what he’d sacrificed for me,” H says. “Giving up a life at sea to come back and be there for his family. I had the lyrics framed and gave it to him for his birthday, before it was ever really set to music. I think it made him really proud of the album, bless him. He used to sit there with his headphones on, listening to it.

“So I had those lyrics in place by the time we got to the studio, and I realised that I could hang certain sections of it on to the thing the band were doing. Things developed really quickly after that.”

In 1996 Marillion were caught between a rock and a hard place. Dropped by EMI –even after delivering the sublime Afraid Of Sunlight album – and now in the throes of a three-record deal with the independent Castle Communications label, there were suddenly new things to adapt to. The recording budgey was reduced (Mark Kelly: “We got a £100,000 total advance, down from £250,000 per album with EMI”); there were stricter delivery deadlines; and, for the first time in a long time, the band found themselves unable to pay their way.

“The first three months of ’97, we had no wages,” says Kelly. “[Manager] John Arnison came to us and said, ‘Sorry guys, there’s no cash.’ I assume it’s because we were waiting for the second half of the advance to come in once the album was released. That was the worst year financially that we ever had. We’d got used to being able to pay ourselves a wage.”

“When you work with that kind of label, they have different distributors in each territory,” says Steve Rothery. “Some of those distributors did a great job, and others did not. You see your sales go from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands, and that has an impact on band morale, obviously.

The Estonia turned over and sank. The underside was red but looked pink in the moonlight… this darkly beautiful moment in this extreme tragedy

”Also, the money Castle paid us wasn’t enough to run the band. There came a point where I thought I was going to have to sell my house, because there just wasn’t enough income.

“And then John – who’d gone off to work for Hit & Run Music Publishing [Genesis, Phil Collins] and was covered financially – suggested that we needed to get part-time jobs to stay afloat.”

Arnison wanted the band to do something else for six months of the year. “Ding! Wrong thing for a manager to say,” Rothery adds. “We wanted to do a university tour. He said, ‘Oh no, you can’t do that; nobody does that any more.’”

Kelly says: “And then we fired him not long after that.” And Rothery adds: “Then I booked a university tour.”

In an ever-changing landscape, Marillion had learnt to do something very few of their peers ever managed – adapt and survive. And not just survive; thrive, artistically speaking at least. This Strange Engine was the end of one thing and the start of something new.

It was the end of private cars picking band members up, and of photo sessions in plush West End studios; it was the start of a tightening of belts that would permeate through album artwork and things like tour support. But even in this state of flux, the band were happy and hopeful.

While it would be the first album they’d produce themselves, they still felt they had the songs in place and something to offer. In retrospect, This Strange Engine was something of a curate’s egg – good in parts – and the good and bad parts depend on which member of the band you’re talking to.

The fans asked what we’d need to make it work and we said something like £50,000 – and they raised £60,000

One song that’s endured live and in the memory is Estonia, made even more remarkable because it’s true. Paul Barney is the British survivor of the sinking of the cruise ferry Estonia in the Baltic Sea in 1994, which killed 852 people. H was on a plane flying back to London from Stockholm when he found himself sitting adjacent to Barney – who had been there filming a documentary about his experience – and they fell into conversation.

Barney had been asleep on a bench in the ship’s restaurant and woke up when he fell off the bench because the ship was no longer level. “He climbed up the ceiling, which at that point was vertical,” says H. “Climbed up all the electric wires, like it was a ladder. Somehow he managed to end up on the deck. The ship kept rolling one way and the other. He saw an awful lot of people falling away, going to their deaths.

“He got up to the front of the ship and he could see life rafts in the water some way off. He had to pluck up the courage to jump – it was like jumping off a house. He got to this raft with this tent affixed to the top, managed to get in – and a wave hit it and trapped him upside-down inside. Unbelievable. He managed to swim out, climb onto the upturned base and clung on for five hours.

“And as he and some other survivors were holding on, the Estonia turned over and slowly sank below the waves. The underside of it was red but looked pink in the moonlight. The guy next to Paul said, ‘Wow, isn’t that beautiful?’ And he had to admit it was. This darkly beautiful moment in among this extreme tragedy.”

I steamrolled that song through, to the general derision of Steve, who I think hated it. Probably still does

Downsizing labels, self-producing, firing their manager… but it wasn’t all gloom for the band on the business side. One of the excellent extras on the album’s latest reissue is a live set from the Orbit Room, Grand Rapids in 1997.

“That was a good show – that was a good tour!” says H. “The funny thing about playing the States is that we only do clubs there. There’s a club in Boston called The Paradise. When I joined the band we played it; and we’re still playing it now, 35 years on.”

There would have been no tour at all if it hadn’t been for an enterprising American audience who crowdfunded to get the band across the Atlantic. “They asked us what we’d need to make it work and we said something like £50,000 – and they raised £60,000,” says Kelly.

“We ended up touring there for about six weeks. We were able to play more shows than we would have otherwise, and it was pretty well attended too, because of the publicity that we had around how the tour was funded. It turned on a lightbulb in my head about crowdfunding and how we could keep the band afloat in the future.”

That was still a few years off, and before then the band would learn to reinvent themselves once again.

Mention the tumbling 80 Days and for H it conjures up memories of preparing to play the Town And Country Club (now The Forum) in London, and looking out of the high dressing room window onto the queues of fans below.

“I wanted to write a song for them,” he explains, “to let them know that we don’t take them for granted standing out there in the cold. It was partly about that, and it was partly about touring and how that changes you.”

They were just looking at us agog: ‘Why are these white guys playing this terrible music?’

“It’s just not very Marillion – it’s not a favourite,” says Kelly. “It’s a bit singer- songwriter for me, the strumming guitar and vocal and not much else. And it’s got that really naff Penny Lane horn solo by me that’s best forgotten about!”

What about the samba-infused Hope For The Future? “Ian Mosley was playing this rhythm,” says H with a chuckle, “and I had my Talking Heads hat on. I really steamrolled that song through to the general derision of Steve, who I think hated it. Probably still does.”

“‘Hate’ is a strong word,” says Rothery. “But we tried four different pieces of music with that lyric and the one we finished up with was my least favourite, unfortunately. There was a version we did that was quite James Taylor. That was lovely, but it didn’t excite H…”

One thing they can all agree on is that playing Hope For The Future in front of a South American audience was a mistake. “I remember thinking, ‘They’re going to love this, because it’s got a bit of a samba to it,’” Kelly says. “They were just looking at us agog: ‘Why are these white guys playing this terrible music?’”

He’s all about Pink Floyd and floaty dresses… I’m a bit more Devo, Massive Attack and samba… It’s not necessarily pleasant

“Oh, yes,” says Rothery with a sigh. “We played it in São Paulo and the look on the faces of the crowd was just pure disbelief. ‘Why is this English progressive rock band murdering one of our rhythms?’ It was painful.”

“What you have to remember,” says Hogarth, “is there’s such a broad range of influences in this band. With Rothers it’s all about Pink Floyd and girls in floaty dresses. And with me it’s a bit more Devo, Massive Attack and some samba – so we’re always pulling against each other.

“It’s not necessarily pleasant when you’re writing; but it’s the tension, you know, the creative tension that often creates the interesting things and makes us Marillion.”

Philip Wilding is a novelist, journalist, scriptwriter, biographer and radio producer. As a young journalist he criss-crossed most of the United States with bands like Motley Crue, Kiss and Poison (think the Almost Famous movie but with more hairspray). More latterly, he’s sat down to chat with bands like the slightly more erudite Manic Street Preachers, Afghan Whigs, Rush and Marillion.