Peter Gabriel (1982 album)

Peter Gabriel is the fourth studio album by the English rock musician Peter Gabriel. In the United States and Canada, the album was released by Geffen Records with the title Security. Some music streaming services refer to it as Peter Gabriel 4: Security. A German-language version, entitled Deutsches Album (German Album), was also released. The album saw Gabriel expanding on the post-punk and world music influences from his 1980 self-titled record, and earned him his first US top 40 single with "Shock the Monkey".
Instead of working with Hipgnosis on the cover art as he did for his previous three albums, Gabriel turned to sculptor Malcolm Poynter. The image is of Gabriel's face, based on an experimental videotape recorded by Poynter and heavily distorted through the use of flexible mirrors, Fresnel lenses, and lighting techniques.
The album was remastered with most of Gabriel's catalogue in 2002.
The album was recorded at Ashcombe House in Somerset, half a mile from where Gabriel was living. Work on the album began in the spring of 1981, with Gabriel handling the writing and pre-production. He also used a Fairlight CMI to sample sounds from various sources, including a junkyard. Like the previous album, he took a rhythm-first approach to songwriting by improvising on piano & keyboards to a drum machine, this time a Linn LM-1. Co-producer David Lord would later join to help structure and arrange Gabriel's ideas into proper songs, and together they created 8-track demos with the Linn as a reference for his backing band.
That summer, he recorded the basic tracks for the album with his band, including Jerry Marotta, Tony Levin, David Rhodes, and John Ellis. These sessions yielded seven hours' worth of material to be overdubbed & edited down over subsequent months. The first two weeks of sessions involved use of the Mobile One, a London-based recording truck which offered 46-track recording facilities before a control room was ready.
After the basic tracks were recorded, Larry Fast joined for three months, working with Gabriel on 'electronic production' aspects including synthesizer overdubs, programming & audio treatments. By spring of 1982, Gabriel was focusing on writing lyrics and recording finished vocals, which he did in the control room at Ashcombe via a Shure SM57 dynamic microphone. As per Lord, they did up to 20 takes for each song, rated each word on a scale of one to ten, and compiled the best parts together - this whole process took hours to accomplish. The album was mixed down at Lord's Crescent Studios onto a Sony PCM-1610 digital 2-track, being an early use of digital recording.
The songs of this album cover a wide variety of subject matter. "The Rhythm of the Heat" is based on Swiss psychologist Carl Jung's experience watching a group of drummers and dancers in Kenya, during which he became overwhelmed and worried that the music and dancing would subsume him. "San Jacinto" reflects on the fear and pain experienced by an Indigenous American man who sees his culture overwhelmed by modern white society, based on a story told to Gabriel by an Apache man. "Shock the Monkey", a meditation on jealousy, uses imagery of a primate to describe personal anxieties. "Lay Your Hands on Me" deals with a theme of healing, through trust, which is further explored on later albums. "The Family and the Fishing Net" compares a modern-day wedding to a voodoo sacrifice. "Wallflower" is about the treatment of political prisoners in Latin America during the 1980s.
Larry Fast, who played synthesizer, mentioned during a presentation on Moog synthesizers that the working title for "The Rhythm of the Heat" was "Jung in Africa", the working title for "Shock the Monkey" was "Black Bush", and the working title for "Lay Your Hands on Me" was "93" – this was the number of the Linn LM-1 pattern used on the track. Additionally, in the South Bank Show documentary on the album, the working title for "I Have the Touch" was shown to be "Hands".
Gabriel discussed several of the songs in an interview with DJ Alan Freeman:
As with his previous three albums, the album is titled Peter Gabriel. In the United States and Canada Geffen Records issued the album under the title Security to differentiate it from his previous releases. The title was changed with Gabriel's reluctant agreement. The new title was displayed in a sticker on top of the LP sleeve's shrink-wrap and on the disc labels. Whilst Gabriel provided the title himself, the album was officially known as Peter Gabriel in other territories. The Security title was maintained on American and Canadian releases of the album until 2010, when it reverted to the original Peter Gabriel title for reissues by Gabriel's own Real World Records label.
In The Boston Phoenix, Howard Hampton wrote that "though I have serious reservations about the album, it is just varied, provocative, and experimental enough to have radio programmers and fans murmuring 'artistic breakthrough.' It even has commercial potential (up to a point – Asia it isn’t)."
In a retrospective review, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic thought that the album "continued where the third Gabriel album left off, sharing some of the same dense production and sense of cohesion, yet lightening the atmosphere and expanding the sonic palette." Erlewine partially attributed the album's "brighter feel" to Gabriel's embrace of African and Latin rhythms, which he thought were effective in complimenting the synthesizers. He asserted that certain songs required greater attention from the listener , including "The Family and the Fishing Net," "Lay Your Hands on Me," and "Wallflower", but felt that some of them failed to deliver a rewarding experience.
Production
Deutsches Album (1982) is Gabriel's German-language adaptation of his fourth album. It was released simultaneously with the English-language edition in Germany.
Like Gabriel's previous German-language album, Ein deutsches album (1980), Deutsches Album differs from its English-language release in several ways. The album has a different running order: "San Jacinto" is swapped with "The Family and the Fishing Net" (here, "Das Fischernetz"). Some of the songs are substantially remixed and are, for instance, 15–30 seconds longer or shorter than their international versions. Track eight gains a final coda not found on the English version, while track seven has an earlier instrumental fade. The background vocals are redone in German. In the third track, a shouted nonsense refrain has been added. All songs were written by Peter Gabriel with "Texte" (lyrics) by Peter Gabriel and Horst Königstein [de].
"The Rhythm of the Heat" appears in the opening scene of "Evan", an episode aired during the first season of Miami Vice. Gabriel, who had seven songs used, had the most songs featured by a solo artist in the series. He is also the only artist to have had a song used in four of the show's five seasons. (None of his songs were used in the second season, though "Take Me Home" by Phil Collins, which features backing vocals by Gabriel, was used in the second-season premiere.) The song was also used in the feature film Natural Born Killers, and in the commercials for the 2001 film Pearl Harbor.
"Shock the Monkey" was featured on the 1987 film Project X (starring Matthew Broderick and Helen Hunt). The song was referenced in the 1988, Season 6, Episode 17 of the American sitcom Cheers. Lillith says she will never be able to hear "Shock the Monkey" again without crying. The song also appeared in the South Park episode "Raisins".
"I Have the Touch" featured in the 1988 film The Chocolate War. An alternate version of the track was featured on the 1996 film Phenomenon, starring John Travolta. A cover version by Heather Nova was featured in The Craft.
"Lay Your Hands on Me" appears in "Crossbreed", a fifth season episode of The Americans. It was the third appearance of a Gabriel song in the series, the first being "Games Without Frontiers" in the season one finale, "The Colonel", and the second being "Here Comes the Flood" in the third episode of season two, "The Walk In."