The Prog Prince
Daryl Easlea: Without Frontiers - The Life and Music of Peter Gabriel
The Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2015
Caravan! Van der Graaf Generator! Yes! Genesis! To Englishmen of a certain age, just reading some of these old names will take them back to an era when progressive rock haunted the turntable, songs stretched out endlessly (three minutes would barely be enough for a proper guitar solo), and lyrics—well, they took themselves more seriously than be-bop-a-lula ever could: “For from the north overcast ranks advance / Fear of the storm accusing with rage and scorn.” That was Genesis, by the way, from their song “Can-Utility and the Coastliners” (1972), a characteristic ramble from their prog-rock heyday, a time when Peter Gabriel, not Phil Collins, was the front man. By that point Genesis had come a long way from its origins a few years before as a group put together by some friends at Charterhouse, a very old-school old school (established 1611).
In class-conscious Britain, these origins underlined a sense Genesis was a cut above other bands. This was reinforced by calculated eccentricity and wordy, myth-making songs that hinted, not always successfully, at erudition. The group’s stage show, as it evolved, plugged into a very English love of dress-up and the bizarre: “Things changed,” writes Daryl Easlea in “Without Frontiers,” “the night when Gabriel wore his wife Jill’s red Ossie Clark dress and a fox’s head onstage at Dublin Stadium.” Noting that the red dress was by Ossie Clark is a characteristic Easlea touch. There is little in the way of minutiae that escapes his devoted gaze.
In this painstaking biography, the author follows Mr. Gabriel’s idiosyncratic career, from first gigs to early Genesis albums, such as “Trespass” (1970) and “Nursery Cryme” (1971), to the high prog excess of “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” (1974), his swansong with the band. Then we learn how, “tired of the monolith he helped create,” Mr. Gabriel broke away from Genesis in 1975 and went on to record a series of solo albums at a characteristically irregular pace, some of which, such as “So” (1986), sold very well indeed.
After Genesis, there were also film scores, pioneering efforts to showcase “world music,” impressively early involvement in the digital distribution of music and, of course, Mr. Gabriel’s evolution from “mere artist” to the creator of “work of increasing political significance”—a trajectory of a type normally observed with a sigh, if not always fairly so. Mr. Gabriel’s work in support of human rights merits a few cheers, his role in the establishment of “the Elders” rather less so: The global village, he decided, needs “village elders.” And so a ragbag of the distinguished ( Nelson Mandela and Jimmy Carter among them) were assembled into a posse ready to offer a soft-left solution to the planet’s crises. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr. Gabriel came up with this profoundly presumptuous concept while chatting with Richard Branson.
Mr. Easlea sees the Elders as a thoroughly splendid idea, but then he is not a man inclined to criticize “one of the most talented, enigmatic artists that Great Britain has ever produced.” Mr. Easlea didn’t interview Mr. Gabriel, but even if he had, he probably would not have probed too far. In this book “the intelligent avatar of prog-soul” is not so much investigated as venerated. Mr. Easlea certainly doesn’t seem the type to risk muddying his icon.
There was never much danger, though, of that. A man of the English upper middle class (blue blood would have been so much more dangerous), Peter Gabriel has not always been an angel (who has?). But, as rock stars go, he appears to have led a remarkably sedate existence. Jim Morrison he isn’t. Most people get out of this book alive. Cups of tea are poured. There is a reference to sherry. Anyone hoping for a more traditionally rock ’n’ roll read will be disappointed. But in the end it’s hard to dislike a labor of love written by a fan still pleased after all these years to note that an early Genesis album “truly struck a chord” in Belgium.
Those—and perhaps only those—who understand why will want to buy this book