Peter Gabriel on 44th Anniversary of 3rd Album: 'A&R Guys Were Trying to Encourage Me to Sound Like the Doobie Brothers'

Peter Gabriel responded to a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Thursday (May 30) marking the 44th anniversary of his self-titled third solo album by giving fans some insight into the struggle he encountered while making the LP.

"The album was full of, what at the time were 'strange' sounds," he wrote. "I remember when I met Ahmet Ertegun [founder of Atlantic Records] and he'd first heard that record, which Atlantic later dropped, he'd asked if I'd been hospitalised myself and obviously thought that I'd gone from being some sort of pop artist to some strange backwater."

"In the end Polygram took the record up in America and it did quite well, with some success for 'Games Without Frontiers,' but at the time I remember the A&R guys were trying to encourage me to sound like the Doobie Brothers," Gabriel added.

He then offered his followers some behind-the-scenes insight into what goes on between artists and record company A&R staffers charged with guiding artists' careers.

"One of the main jobs of the A&R Department of a record company is to try and make records that they're going to sell. So they look at what's selling at the moment and they try and get all of their artists to sound like that. At the same time, to be fair, I've worked with some really good A&R people who've made some very good musical points and have a lot of interesting input, but I'm very fortunate to have grown up in a time, in the post-Sixties, when artists were allowed to get on making their own mistakes, doing what they needed to do. You could listen to your record company, but you didn't have to."

Likely much to the dismay of record company executives, Gabriel titled his first four solo albums - released in 1977, 1978, 1980 and 1982 simply Peter Gabriel, leaving the public to attach numbers to them or nickname them based on the cover art. Thus, his 1977 solo debut became known as "Car," the 1978 album was known as "Scratch," 1980's effort was called "Melt," while his 1982 album is known as "Security."

As Gabriel noted in his post, "Games Without Frontiers" had success, becoming a No. 4 hit in the U.K. The song, which features Kate Bush on backing vocals, also reached the top 10 in Canada, but in the U.S., the single stalled at No. 48.

The album also included "Biko," the anthem written in honor of Steve Biko, an anti-apartheid activist who died after being beaten by security forces while in police custody.

Tags

Peter Gabriel, The Doobie Brothers