The Red Couch - Peter Gabriel

Peter Gabriel, born 1950

Former front man and lead singer of Genesis who revolutionised music videos with Sledgehammer and set a milestones in the new media with the CD-ROM Eve. Peter Gabriel has made his nest in Box Mill, South West England. The Mill is bordered on one side by a railway line and on the other by a small river. The sounds of the water and the trains inspire him.

He has pioneered the integration of ethnic music into modern popular music. He is the founder of the Witness-project which records and denounces human rights violations. Surprisingly he is quite down-to-earth and with none of the typical pop star attitude.

I am Peter Gabriel, we are sitting, I am sitting outside my studio. This is the By Brook, which is the river that passes by us and travels down through Bristol to the sea.

Personal history

I was born in 1950 on a farm just near Woking in Surrey. My dad is an electrical engineer and inventor, my mother she has many passions, she is a very good organiser, but loves music, horses, travel. So I have bits of both of them in me. I went to school nearby. It was a private school. At the secondary school I started playing music which was drums, that was the big thing for me. That got me into a band which became Genesis which I was with for about eight years and then I left and did stuff on my own. I’ve been working a lot with world music and we started a world music festival. On one tour I was invited for a Human Rights Now -tour and that got me involved in human rights activism. There have been quite a few other diversions but that's sort of led me to this part of the world where I have my home for making music.

Why are you an artist?

I think for me my work is a form of therapy. You know as a teenager a lot of people want to be rock musicians so they can get girls and get famous. I'm sure that was part of my motivation then, but now I think it's something else. The feeling I have for music and particularly when I am with other musicians and when we do recording weeks here where we get musicians from all over the world and we play together, there's a fantastic feeling that I don't get anywhere else.

So I think for me it's a release, it's a kind of therapy. I feel I can express myself. But as a young man, I think it was a way of making my own identity and getting some passion out of it.

Because the school I was in was a repressed institution, very formal traditional English school. So when I used to go downstairs and turn up the music really loud or bash away at my drums, it was a form of passion.