Peter Gabriel Looks Forward, Not Back at First London Show in a Decade: Concert Review

Mark Sutherland
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“It’s getting increasingly difficult to tell the real from the fake these days,” Peter Gabriel said with a smile as he strolled nonchalantly onto the stage at London’s O2 Arena. “It might surprise you to learn that you’re looking at an avatar. But unlike the wonderful ABBA show just down the road, my avatar is 20 years older, 20 pounds heavier and completely bald. Meanwhile, I’m ripped and lying on a beach…”

For some musicians of a certain age, the past is not a foreign country: They’re happy to do things exactly the same way today as they did back then. Not Peter Gabriel. He has always maintained a primary interest in evolution — human, musical and technological — and at 73, that has not changed.

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All three were on prominent display at Monday night’s installment of his “I/O” tour, which comes to North America later this year. So, while Gabriel’s self-deprecating sense of humor led him to point out that some of the setlist dated back to when both he and longtime bassist Tony Levin each had full heads of hair, he was also bold enough to include no fewer than 11 new songs, five of which have yet to be released.

Gabriel’s laurels remain unpacked and unrested upon.

All of which made the ex-Genesis frontman’s first proper tour in a decade a harder sell than it might have been, had he gone for easy nostalgia. The O2 was not quite sold out and Gabriel himself was in determinedly under-stated form, constantly hailing his (excellent) band and only taking center stage when he absolutely had to.

Unlike many of his controversially cranky contemporaries, he also remained affable and good-humored throughout, talking about AI in a measured, professionally curious way, even while noting the technology could yet make him and many others in the room obsolete.

Gabriel’s own intelligence, however, is anything but artificial. No computer program could ever simulate the outlandish make-up and costumes that marked his early solo career and even earlier stint with Genesis. Not that Gabriel would want it to: these days, his road crew – clad in orange, Guantanamo Bay-style boilersuits – dress more eye-catchingly than he does. Gone too are his once irrepressible theatrical flourishes, which now just about extended as far as him taking off his hat and then putting it back on again.

Thankfully, the production did some rather heavier lifting for him, particularly on the new songs. At different points, various objects – a huge clock, a moon, a Sauron-style all-seeing eye – hovered above him; early on the group sat around a makeshift campfire; while the namechecks for the visual artists providing imagery for the ever-shifting big screens backed up the claim that this is his biggest ever live production.

Nonetheless, the staging added to the impression that this two-set, 22-song show was something to sit back and admire, rather than throw yourself into. Certainly, that’s how the crowd received it, only clambering to their feet occasionally, when both familiarity and tempo demanded it.

Most of those moments came on material from his once-ubiquitous 1986 album, “So.” If it’s difficult to imagine the 2023-vintage Peter Gabriel as an MTV sensation and genuine pop star, the irresistibly funky likes of “Big Time” and “Sledgehammer” – somewhat thrown away as the last song of the first set – at least made it sound like something that might feasibly have happened once.

Although you would not bet on it happening again any time soon. The fresh material – from long-awaited next album “i/o,” which, when it’s eventually released, will become his first album of original material in over 20 years – has been drip-fed via a new-song-every-full-moon schedule that might find favor with lycanthropes but is unlikely to catch on with the real wolves of the music industry.

The likes of “Panopticom” and “Four Kinds of Horses” were certainly tasteful, elegantly played and progressively experimental but, if that sounds like a polite way of saying they were a bit dull, well, at least “i/o” boasted a raucously rousing chorus and “Playing for Time” – a song old enough to have been debuted in unfinished form last time he toured – had the soaring, orchestral feel of an epic soundtrack.

It was the second set that really upped the ante. Latest single “Road to Joy” tapped back into “Sledgehammer”’s sparse, sprightly funk, “Red Rain” brought the musical drama and “Don’t Give Up” added some emotional heft, Ayanna Witter-Johnson standing in for Kate Bush with a supremely soulful vocal.

By the time the main set ended with “Solsbury Hill,” Gabriel was positively skipping around the stage in a bout of Dad-dancing to rival the – presumably ironic – boyband-style synchronized routine he and his bandmates had busted out earlier in the show.

By then, the crowd was also fully committed, hollering for an encore. They were rewarded with the two longest songs of the evening: a joyous stomp through “In Your Eyes,” followed by a powerful performance of 1980 anti-apartheid anthem, “Biko,” that saw the white, middle-aged crowd raise its fists in solidarity as a huge image of activist Steve Biko towered over them.

“As always, what happens next is up you,” Gabriel smiled, before leaving the stage with the air of a man happy to still be keeping it real in a world of fakes after all these years.

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