Peter Gabriel (1980)

Peter Gabriel is the third solo studio album by the English rock musician Peter Gabriel, released on 30 May 1980 by Charisma Records. The album, produced by Steve Lillywhite, has been acclaimed as Gabriel's artistic breakthrough as a solo artist. AllMusic wrote that it established him as "one of rock's most ambitious, innovative musicians".

Building on the experimental sound of his previous self-titled studio album, it saw Gabriel embracing post-punk and new wave with an art rock sensibility. Gabriel also explored more overtly political material with the anti-war song "Games Without Frontiers" (which became a No. 4 hit and remains his joint highest-charting single in the UK) and the anti-apartheid protest song "Biko", which remembered the murdered activist Steve Biko.

The album is also often referred to as Melt, owing to its cover photograph by Hipgnosis. Some music streaming services refer to it as Peter Gabriel 3: Melt.

Recording and production

When writing the album, Gabriel developed a "rhythm first" approach when writing and demoing songs for the album on an 8-track system. Synthesizer player Larry Fast introduced him to the PAiA "Programmable Drum Set", which offered full programmability, allowing Gabriel to program his own drum rhythms to build songs around during the writing process. He later bought a Roland CR-78 drum machine as well for use on the album: he felt the CR-78 sounded better but was less programmable than the PAiA drum machine.

Peter Gabriel hired his former bandmate in Genesis drummer Phil Collins for the recording sessions along with another drummer, Jerry Marotta. He gave them one specific demand. "Artists given complete freedom die a horrible death", he explained to Mark Blake. "So, when you tell them what they can't do, they get creative and say, 'Oh yes I can,' which is why I banned cymbals. Phil was cool about it. [Marotta] did object and it took him a while to settle in. It's like being right-handed and having to learn to write with your left."

Collins played on several of the album's tracks. "Intruder" has been cited as the first prominent use of a gated reverb sound. The distinctive sound was identified via experiments by producer Steve Lillywhite, Collins and staff engineer Hugh Padgham, in response to Gabriel's request that Collins and Marotta not use cymbals during the album's sessions.

Lillywhite explained: Gabriel "didn't want to use cymbals and I had been really experimenting with this ambience thing which actually started with [drummer] Kenny Morris with the first [Siouxsie and the] Banshees' album. When you listen, you can hear elements of this gated room sound, big compressed room sound that I did on the Banshees". "Padgham was my engineer when we did the Peter Gabriel album [...] but I had been pushing and experimenting before with, like the Psychedelic Furs", on "Sister Europe", [...] "all done before the Peter Gabriel album". So significant and influential was the sound that it has been claimed by Gabriel, Padgham, Collins, and Lillywhite. It was cited by Public Image Ltd as an influence on the sound of their third studio album The Flowers of Romance (1981), whose engineer, Nick Launay, was in turn employed by Collins to assist with his debut studio album, Face Value (1981). The album was also one of the first to use the Fairlight CMI sampling synthesizer: it provides subtle sampled sounds on the album, such as those audible on "Start".

"I Don't Remember" had been performed on Gabriel's 1978 tour for his second studio album. An earlier studio version was to be the A-side of the first 7" single released in advance of the album by Charisma in Europe and Japan, but a Charisma executive thought Robert Fripp's guitar solos were not radio-friendly. This earlier version wound up as the B-side of the advance "Games Without Frontiers" single instead in those territories. It was included on the B-sides-and-rarities compilation Flotsam And Jetsam, released in 2019. The album version of this song appeared as the A-side of a 12" single in the United States and Canada. Lillywhite contacted Dave Gregory to overdub some guitars on "I Don't Remember" and "Family Snapshot". Gregory retuned his instrument to play open chords on the downbeats during the verses of "I Don't Remember" and played power chords during the choruses. When Gabriel was demonstrating the chord progression for "Family Snapshot", he accidentally played Gregory an earlier version that had been recorded in a different key.

Paul Weller, who was recording with his band the Jam in a nearby studio, contributed guitar to "And Through the Wire". Gabriel had previously said of the Jam, "I like them a lot. They're one of the new groups who have written the best songs. They're really very good." He believed the other two guitarists he was working with at the time, Fripp and David Rhodes, struggled to get the rhythm guitar to his specifications and said that Weller's guitar style was ideal for the track.