This is the first album on this list that I bought when it came out. It’s not the first album that I bought, it’s not the first album from this list that I have at some point owned, but it’s the first one that my purchase of it was contemporary with it being released. Probably because I liked the singles that had come from it – Sledgehammer and Don’t Give Up, two very different tempo songs.
It’s the most commercial of Gabriel’s albums to date, with the pseudo-funk of Sledgehammer, and the parody of materialistic Yuppie culture that is Big Time, with their horns and funk-based basslines. Don’t Give Up, meanwhile, is a duet with Kate Bush where the male singer despairs of life “For every job, so many men. So many men no-one needs”, while the female singer comforts him that “When times get rough, you can fall back on us”. At times, it has to be said, her advice sounds a little trite, I’m not sure if that’s the intent. At the time, this really reminded me of Tanis and Laurana in the Dragonlance books / modules, especially the line about “the trees had burned down to the ground”.
As well as Kate Bush, there are cameos from Stewart Copeland of the Police, of Youssou N’Dour, violinist L Shankar, Jim Kerr of Simple Minds and, on the “bonus” track on CD and cassette, Nile Rodgers and Laurie Anderson.
N’Dour appears singing in Wolof on the track In Your Eyes, and I was amused to learn that Gabriel and John Cusack both shared the same despair at forever being linked with the use of that track in the film Say Anything. The best tracks, on returning to this album after many years, are probably the quieter, slightly more World Music ones, especially Mercy Street. Which is somewhat spoiled from its ethereal and slightly Latin American feel by the sudden explosive start to Big Time that comes after it. I think the musical arc of the album would have been better had it gone on to the slightly chant-like We Do What We’re Told (and then, if you have the CD or cassette, the very Laurie Anderson This Is The Picture - “Flying birds. Excellent birds. Watch them fly, there they go”).
My thoughts, then, have changed somewhat but the feeling that I’ve always had, that the album touches on being weird and different but then pulls back before getting too exciting, is the same as it was back then. Oh, and I think that the first album that I bought, at least contemporaneously, was by Gabriel’s erstwhile bandmates, Invisible Touch by Genesis. Which is kind of a similar mix of commercial/experimental.
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