Like Led Zeppelin, Gabriel’s first four solo albums had no names and are alternatively known by number or the cover image, so this is Peter Gabriel 1 or “Car”. Here we are with another album that I used to own, although looking at the track listing brought none of the music to mind apart from Solsbury Hill and Here Comes The Flood, but I had a feeling that most of them would come back to me once I heard the opening.
This was not so much with Moribund The Burgomeister, the track the closest to Gabriel’s work with Genesis about a mediaeval authority figure baffled by a plague (St. Vitus’s Dance) overtaking his people, but the ending repeat of "I WILL find out" was familiar. Modern Love is one of the more obviously commercial tracks on the album, pretty much a straightforward bit of pop-rock, Excuse Me starts with a bit of jokey barber-shop quartet before turning into a trad jazz/Randy Newman piece – Gabriel tends to come across as taking himself very seriously, even when dressed in his ridiculous Genesis stage costumes, but as this track shows he’s got a puckish sense of humour sometimes.
The prog still shows through more than later albums. Humdrum has a pre-chorus that’s a random bit of flamenco, while Slowburn not only has a burst of backing vocal that sounds like Queen, it has some Mercury-esque piano at the end too. The Randy Newman influence becomes apparent in the lazy blues/jazz piano of Waiting For The Big One, and then there’s the orchestra/funk fusion Down The Dolce Vita that’s a big, somewhat camp, sound. You’re never quite sure what to expect from the next song.
I’ve skipped over the famous single, Solsbury Hill, and this is a 7/4 time folky tune, while Waiting For The Flood is a slower, again bombastic number – there's a more stripped back version of this that’s listed as a Robert Fripp track (Fripp providing guitars on a lot of the songs on this album) that I think is better, but maybe because that’s the one I heard first. Maybe my favourite of all of Gabriel’s songs? Although Biko is powerful too (which I think is on #3 or #4).
In the end, I did remember pretty much all of the songs from one part of them - it's a very odd batch of songs, but pretty good overall.
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