I wrote Peter Gabriel off for decades, and the album he is perhaps most-known for, “So,” was deep in my blindspots. As someone who grew up loving punk, alternative, metal and anything you could reasonably call “weird,” "world music" was a concept I associated with aging Tommy Bahama-clad boomer dads, and with conformity in general. With few exceptions, Phil Collins does nothing for me, and I’ve never really liked anything by Genesis. So recently, I was very surprised to discover that So is actually a work of indelible genius, and has become one of my favorite records of all time.
So is an experimental record wearing a pop coat, and now that I’ve heard it I hear it everywhere — in Animal Collective, Geese, FKA Twigs, and many other decidedly cool artists. At the center of the album is a set of bold production choices stitched together by some of the best musicians of the era, so I felt compelled to write about what I learned and why I had such a joyous experience with this record.
The Post-Genesis Arc
Understanding So requires a bit of table-setting, and a look at the other music Peter Gabriel made surrounding it, beginning first with Genesis.
Peter Gabriel’s era in Genesis is marked by proggier songwriting and lots more pomp than the Collins era that would follow. The early indicators of his fascinating solo work were on display in Genesis, as any quick YouTube search will show you.
And when Gabriel left Genesis in 1975, they were rising rapidly and on their way to the top 40. His four self-titled solo albums, nicknamed Car, Scratch, Melt, and Security, are a steady march away from conventional rock songcraft and toward texture, rhythm, and dread. He’d just had a child and was feeling a pull to print more of his authentic character onto his music, and he didn’t see the opportunity to do so in Genesis.
The pivot in the self-titled bunch is the third, 1980's Melt. Listen to the first track on that record for 30 seconds and you’ll begin to see why I’m writing about Peter Gabriel. For that record, he laid down a rule akin to one of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies: the drummers were forbidden from using cymbals.
His reasoning, as he later told biographer Mark Blake, was pure provocation: "Artists given complete freedom die a horrible death. 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."
And that single restriction is what forced the discovery of the most copied drum sound of the decade, the gated reverb snare.
By 1982's Security, Gabriel had gone on to become more of a sound designer than a musician. His songwriting started with rhythm vs melody: "I think the rhythm is like the spine of the piece," he told the South Bank Show, and stocked his Fairlight with samples of smashing glass, dragged concrete, and his own breath down a drainpipe.
"The Rhythm of the Heat" was literally built from a looped, malfunctioning swanee-whistle sample. This is a major-label rock star in 1982 making musique concrète and selling it as pop.
Peter Gabriel’s musical influence is akin to Paul Atreides’ influence in Dune. It’s hard to find corners of the pop artform that are not in some way due to Peter Gabriel's maniacal focus. Let’s break it down to a synthesis of the gated drum sound, sampling, and influences from African music.
The gated drum
This is the sound the world fell in love with, and it has a lot to do with Peter Gabriel.
The setting was Townhouse Studios, London, 1980, with Gabriel recording "Intruder" for Melt. The room had one of the first SSL 4000 B consoles, a then-radical mixing desk with a compressor and noise gate on every channel, plus a "reverse talkback" (Listen Mic) circuit: a heavily compressed mic hanging in the live room so the engineer could hear musicians talking without them keying a button. The compression was aggressive by design, to make quiet speech intelligible, and this setup is the reason gated drums were accidentally discovered.
Engineer Hugh Padgham had the talkback mic up while Collins was playing. As Padgham has recounted many times, the sound that came back through the monitors was enormous, a crushed, explosive room blast. Then, as he told MusicRadar, "When I pushed the button for the compressor on the console, there was a noise gate already in the chain. Phil stopped playing and the sound suddenly went to nothing [as the gate kicked in]. It was like, 'Oh my god, that's amazing.'"
Phil Collins, at Gabriel's request, got the songwriting credit for the drum pattern. Collins then took it to "In the Air Tonight," and the gated reverb sound took over the 1980s. Happy accidents in the studio are behind many of the breakthrough innovations in music, and this one would not exist were it not for Peter Gabriel.
If you don’t know exactly what this sounds like, listen to “In the Air Tonight” and it will be instantly recognizable when the snare comes in. The reason gated snares became “uncool” in the ears of listeners like me is simply because it was copied ad infinitum, like most groundbreaking discoveries.
It is littered across So, and if you listen to it with a fresh ear you, like me, will realize it’s one of the coolest things in music.
The Fairlight, sampling as composition
Gabriel was also a revolutionary of sampling. Per the Fairlight CMI's documented history, he was "the first owner of a Fairlight Series I in the UK,” the Australian-built machine that essentially invented digital sampling. He got so excited about the possibilities that he co-founded a company, Syco Systems, with his cousin Stephen Paine to distribute it (at a wallet-melting £12,000 a unit). He introduced Kate Bush to it. Gabriel was, functionally, the conduit through which the Fairlight reached a chunk of British pop.
What matters for So is how the console was used. Gabriel didn't treat the Fairlight as a fake-orchestra preset machine. He treated it as a way to capture the real world and play it on a keyboard. There's a photo from 1980 of Gabriel in his yard, gleefully smashing a crate of glass with a sledgehammer while a mic captures it for sampling; Fairlight co-designer Peter Vogel, who'd flown the machine to Gabriel's house in Bath, remembered him "like a kid with a new toy."
That instinct to use sound as raw material (and the studio as compositional arena) is the through-line from Melt to Security to So, and it's why the song "Sledgehammer" isn't just a soul pastiche. It's a soul pastiche assembled from samples, a Linn machine, a Prophet-5, and a real horn section, glued by an engineer's sensibility.
Lanois at Ashcombe: warmth over the weirdness
For So, Gabriel considered Bill Laswell and Nile Rodgers but kept Daniel Lanois, his collaborator from the Birdy soundtrack. This was the masterstroke for So’s one-of-a-kind production. Lanois came out of the Brian Eno ambient school, and his gift was making experimental textures sound warm and human rather than cold and clinical.
They worked mostly at Ashcombe House, Gabriel's converted-cow-barn home studio near Bath nicknamed "Shabby Road". Sessions ran about a year, which Lanois noted, ruefully, was the fastest Gabriel had ever made a record: "we finished So almost a year to the day and that is the shortest time Peter had ever spent on an album."
The two of them plus guitarist David Rhodes wore construction hard hats to "go to work," and built tracks to a drum-machine click before adding live players.
Lanois's patience with Gabriel's notorious lyric procrastination became its own legend: at one point he disconnected the phones, and on another occasion he reportedly nailed the studio door shut to force Gabriel to finish writing. Gabriel, dismantling a glass sliding door to escape, was reportedly not amused.
The under-told hero here is engineer Kevin Killen, who joined in May 1985 (replacing Dave Bascombe) expecting a six-week job and stayed until the following March. Killen's recollections in Sound on Sound are an engineer's goldmine: the sessions ran two linked Studer A80 24-track machines (an A and a B), which kept drifting out of sync because, as Killen explained, "the assumption was that both Studers had the same sync card; even though the stock one had an FM sync card and the modified one had a DC card”… so they were slowly drifting apart. With 'Sledgehammer' there were six different reels because they did so many takes."
His fix was to dump everything to a Mitsubishi 32-track digital machine, which they rented in New York and flew to England because that was cheaper than renting one in London. Gabriel chose his lead-vocal mic, a Neumann U47, in a blindfold shoot-out, and sang in the control room rather than an isolation booth.
One of my favorite bits of So fairydust is the bass tone in the song “Don’t Give Up.” Tony Levin is the bassist on this track, and you’ll notice immediately that the bass has very unique processing. Levin had just had his first child, who was present for many of the recordings, which meant he had a bag of diapers with him. To control the boom of his bass guitar on don’t give up, Tony slid one of his child’s diapers under the string, creating the singular muted effect.
My point: piece by piece, So stitched together some of my very favorite production techniques, and many for nearly the first time, including gated drums, extensive sampling of found sounds, and the beauty of ambient sound.
Lanois's production philosophy, in his own words (to Rick Beato), is pure Eno lineage: "the sounds, the special effects, come back from the special effects box and then get printed onto the multi-track and then I get to process that again… It becomes a musical part… like a flower arrangement." His approach to Tony Levin's bass was less subtle, facing a brand-new SSL, "every channel had a little dynamic section… I just turned every knob up to 10," compressing, expanding, and gating the bass into the foundation of the record's sound.
World music, and its problems
Gabriel brought many African rhythms and structures into the spotlight on So, primarily with the addition of French-Ivorian percussionist Manu Katche and Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour. To understand the power of this collaboration listen to the rhythmic intensity on “In Your Eyes,” “Don’t Give Up,” and “Red Rain.” Underneath a somewhat conventional 4/4 beat on all 3, complex polyrhythm contort the straightforward progression in something more alien and interesting. The same is true of the triumphant and symphonic vocals at the end of “In Your Eyes.” These songs would not evoke nearly as much triumph without clear African influence.
Naturally, this has garnered lots of critique and accusations of appropriation. However, I would argue that the world elements on So are foundational, not decorative. As the New York Times' Jon Pareles put it, Gabriel "doesn't just add on African drums or Indian violin to ordinary songs; they are part of the foundation."
More importantly, look at the surrounding behavior. He co-founded WOMAD in 1982 to platform non-Western artists as headliners. "Our dream was not to sprinkle world music around a rock festival, but to prove that these great artists could be headliners in their own right." When the first festival was a financial catastrophe (a rail strike, low turnout, debts as high as £200,000, and, in his words, "a lot of nasty phone calls and a death threat"), he was bailed out by the one-off "Six of the Best" Genesis reunion on October 2, 1982, at the Milton Keynes Bowl in front of roughly 47,000 fans. He founded Real World Records in 1989 to give global artists studios, distribution, and press. He brought Youssou N'Dour and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to Western audiences and toured with them as equals.
Gabriel continues to champion humanitarian causes to this day and has evidently walked the walk, which for me is enough to surrender to the impact “world music” has had on pop, largely led by Peter Gabriel.
Listening to So
Let’s talk about the songs.
"Red Rain" opens the album exactly as Gabriel wanted, to "crash open at the front." The very first sound you hear is a hi-hat, played by the Police's Stewart Copeland, who is a genius.
The cascading drum build is drummer Jerry Marotta's eight takes edited together bar by bar. Lanois built its storm-like atmosphere with the Eno print-and-reprocess method: "as it evolves it starts sounding like rain, all these colliding sonics that become atmospheric."
"Sledgehammer" is the soul homage. Gabriel saw Otis Redding live in London as a teenager and it made him want to be a musician. Jackson and the Memphis Horns, the actual brass section from those old Stax/Atlantic records, play the part Gabriel insisted be cut by real players, not synth, "to capture some of the intricacies of brass playing that could not be achieved with a synthesiser."
The lyrics are a string of cheerfully filthy sexual metaphors, which Gabriel framed as faithful to "the playful sexual innuendo" of 60s soul. The snare got a signature AMS-plus-ambience-plus-plate treatment at Ashcombe and was further enhanced at New York's Power Station, where staff engineer Bruce Lampcov recalled using the studio's four-story stairwell as a live echo chamber. You can hear it in the boom and crack of the snare. The bass ran through a Boss OC-2 octave pedal to make it weird.
And if this song feels like the most mainstream of the bunch, simply watch the groundbreaking stop motion animation music video that accompanied it, which is maybe the best music video of all time.
"Don't Give Up" is the gut-punch. Gabriel wrote it after seeing Dorothea Lange's Dust Bowl photographs in the book "In This Proud Land," explicitly connecting Depression-era American despair to mass unemployment under Thatcher: "The chief thing dragging them down is unemployment, which is presently tearing the social fabric of Thatcher's England apart," he told Spin in 1986.
"Without a climate of self-esteem, it's impossible to function." He wanted an American country voice and asked Dolly Parton; she declined (reportedly her team barely knew who he was). Kate Bush stepped in, and Gabriel has said he's glad Dolly passed "because what Kate did on it is brilliant." (This is also the song with the diaper on the bass, so cool.)
"Mercy Street" is dedicated to confessional poet Anne Sexton, drawn from her play and the poem "45 Mercy Street." The hypnotic, grainy percussion is a Brazilian forró track Gabriel recorded with percussionist Djalma Corrêa in Rio that was accidentally played back about 10% slow in the studio, a happy accident he and Lanois kept because they thought it "highlighted the cymbal and guitars."
Gabriel's spectral octave-lower "shadow vocal" could reportedly only be captured first thing in the morning, when his voice was deepest. Bassist Larry Klein, who played on it, said the song "just about brought me to tears." Notably, the track has no guitars at all, just synths and percussion.
"Big Time" satirizes 80s yuppie greed (Gabriel's own admission: "this drive for success is a basic part of human nature and my nature"). It's built on a percussive bass figure created when Marotta drummed on Levin's bass strings with sticks while Levin fretted the notes. That experiment is the literal origin of Levin's "Funk Fingers,” drumsticks strapped to his fingers, invented with tech Andy Moore so he could reproduce the part live after Gabriel suggested, "Why don't you attach two drum sticks to your fingers?"
Copeland's drums on the track were largely sampled into an AMS and flown in to stay locked to the Linn machine.
"We Do What We're Told (Milgram's 37)" is the album's clearest link to the old weirdness, a sparse, dark piece based on Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments, originally written back in the "Melt" era, its drums described as "a heartbeat heard from the womb."
"In Your Eyes" features the aforementioned Senegalese star Youssou N'Dour singing in Wolof; Gabriel has called N'Dour's voice "liquid gold." And here's the mastering nugget that justifies an entire SEO keyword: Gabriel wanted "In Your Eyes" to close the album, but its prominent bassline forced it earlier in the running order on vinyl. This is real lacquer-cutting physics — deep, loud, centered low end demands wider groove excursions, and you generally cannot cut high-energy bass near the inner diameter of a side, where groove velocity is lowest and tracing distortion rises. The bass had to live where there was room for the stylus to move. CD had no such constraint, so on digital formats the track finally got to close, as Gabriel intended. (Lanois, uncredited, played a "second line" support part on a cheap electric 12-string under the chorus — "high frequency, harmonic, high-speed component underneath a relatively low slow phrasing from the vocal.")
The title means nothing, on purpose
After four self-titled albums, Geffen demanded a real title for marketing. Gabriel, contrarian to the end, picked "So" precisely because it's an "anti-title:” "It can be more a piece of graphic, if you like, as opposed to something with meaning and intention. And that's what I've done ever since," he told Rolling Stone.
He was reportedly annoyed the word leaked onto the record labels at all. The cover, a crisp Trevor Key portrait with the Klein-blue box, by Factory Records designer Peter Saville, was a deliberate move to give the newly accessible Gabriel a "face." Even the act of naming the thing
Why I used to think Peter Gabriel sucked
So why did this record get coded as dad music? Partly the MTV ubiquity. "Sledgehammer" earned a record 10 nominations and won nine awards at the 1987 VMAs (still the most for a single video), and Time has called it "the all-time most played music video on MTV." That kind of saturation flattens a song into wallpaper. (The video itself, as I mentioned, is anything but safe: a week of frame-by-frame stop-motion by Aardman Animations' Nick Park and the Brothers Quay, with Gabriel lying under glass for 16 hours straight). Partly the production gloss itself, which reads as "80s commercial" until you notice what's actually in it. And partly the simple fact that Gabriel made the experimental go down so smoothly that a casual listener never tastes the medicine. Much like Nirvana, “So” influenced countless terrible records, but only because it was so terribly influential.
That's the trick of "So," and the reason I had to eat my words. It's a record that hid the avant-garde in plain sight, on the radio, between Whitney and Huey Lewis. It went to No. 1 in the UK and No. 2 in the US (kept off the top, fittingly, while it knocked Genesis's "Invisible Touch" off No. 1 on the singles chart with "Sledgehammer"). The skeptic hears the surface. Pay attention to the production and you hear a guy who left the biggest band of his life specifically so he could keep getting weirder.
So is available to purchase right now at Very Friendly.
Recommendations
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If you're a skeptic like I was: listen on headphones or a real system, start to finish, not in the background. Focus on the rhythm beds and the textures. Start with "Mercy Street" and "Red Rain," not the hits. The album's experimental DNA is loudest there.
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If you're an engineer or producer: study this record as a master class in hiding the weird inside the accessible. Specifically: the gated-drum lineage (SSL Listen Mic → compression → gate, not a reverb box), the print-and-reprocess effects chain Lanois inherited from Eno, the "turn every knob to 10" SSL bass treatment, and the rhythm-first compositional approach built on a drum-machine benchmark with live parts flown in to lock.
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On vinyl: the original 1986 pressings are Charisma PG 5 (UK) and Geffen GHS 24088 (US), mastered at the Townhouse, London. Both plentiful and cheap on the used market. For audiophile sound, the 2012 25th-anniversary half-speed remaster (180-gram, re-sequenced to Gabriel's intended order with "In Your Eyes" closing) is the one to seek; it also came in a deluxe box with the "Live in Athens 1987" film (executive-produced by Martin Scorsese) and a "So DNA" disc of work-in-progress versions. We have it in stock at Very Friendly.
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Threshold that would change my advice: if all you want is the hits, the standard reissue is fine. If you care about the bass on "In Your Eyes" and the percussion grain on "Mercy Street," spring for the half-speed master. That's where the format actually matters.