LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Peter Gabriel: Musician Peter Gabriel
built 658 days ago
[I]t is primarily as one of the world's most original and creative musicians that Peter Gabriel remains best known. When he began to assemble the material for Up, he found that he had 130 songs ideas to chose from. Not all of them were finished. Some were merely fragments awaiting further development or work still in progress. Yet others wound up on OVO, the album based on the Millennium Dome show, or Long Walk Home. But whatever the other reasons for the long wait for Up, clearly writer's block was not one of them.
Source:
Peter Gabriel tells why he left Genesis in "Solsbury Hill," the key track on his 1977 solo debut. Majestically opening with an acoustic guitar, the song finds Gabriel's talents gelling, as the words and music feed off each other, turning into true poetry. It stands out dramatically on this record, not because the music doesn't work, but because it brilliantly illustrates why Gabriel had to fly on his own. Though this is undeniably the work of the same man behind The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, he's turned his artiness inward, making his music coiled, dense, vibrant. There is still some excess, naturally, yet it's the sound of a musician unleashed, finally able to bend the rules as he wishes. That means there are less atmospheric instrumental sections than there were on his last few records with Genesis, as the unhinged bizarreness in the arrangements, compositions, and productions, in tracks such as the opener "Moribund the Burgermeister" vividly illustrate.
Source:
Peter Brian Gabriel (born 13 February 1950, in Chobham,[1] Surrey, England) is an English musician. He first came to fame as the lead vocalist and flautist of the progressive rock group Genesis. After leaving Genesis, Gabriel went on to a successful solo career. More recently he has focused on producing and promoting world music and pioneering digital distribution methods for music. He has ... been involved in various humanitarian efforts.
Source:
Musician Peter Gabriel may be best known for hits such as Solsbury Hill and Sledgehammer, but his songs have often had a political edge, as well. His 1980 track Biko, for example, was an homage to South African anti-apartheid activist Stephen Biko, who died in prison in 1977. Gabriel continues to make music -- he'll sing at the Turin Winter Olympics this month -- but he has been devoting an increasing amount of his time to social causes.
Source:
In those years Peter himself became the boss of a record company, viz. his newly founded RealWorld WORLD MUSIC LABEL. It would not be an exaggeration to say that RealWorld did a whole lot for making known and spreading the idea of world music. Peter provided studio time as well as a means of publishing to unknown musicians. A famous event are the RealWorld Recording Weeks: Every two to three years well-known European musicians and unknown musicians from all over the world meet and work together on improvisations – often with surprising results! The smallish numbers of records printed on the RealWorld label would usually be just sufficient to break even, but there were the odd commercial successes like the Afro Celt Sound System records.
Source:
Gabriel has been interested in world music for many years, with the first musical evidence appearing on his third album. This influence has increased over time, and he is the driving force behind the WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance) movement. He created the Real World Studios and record label to facilitate the creation and distribution of such music by various artists, and he has worked to educate Western culture about the work of such musicians as Yungchen Lhamo, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Youssou N'dour. He has a long-standing interest in human rights, and launched WITNESS [1], a nonprofit which supplies video cameras to human rights activists to expose abuses. In 2006 his work with Witness and his long standing support of peace and human rights causes was recognized by the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates with the Man of Peace award.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Musician Peter Gabriel