I’m not into prog-rock – it carries the whiff of slightly overweight middle-aged men who hand paint small plastic models of orcs and warlocks – and so the back catalogue of Genesis is not very familiar to me. I’d rather listen to Phil Collins, or even Mike and the Mechanics – at least the songs are over within three minutes. Peter Gabriel’s solo material apparently inspired Talk Talk, one of my favourite bands, so I’m vaguely familiar with it but, overall, not overly keen on it; too experimental, to unconventionally structured, too meandering. And thus I came to So with no real expectations, except that “Sledgehammer” and “Don’t Give Up” are on it, and that adjectives like “accessible” and “immediate” are routinely applied to it, so maybe there’s a bit of 80s pop-rock on there. And, well, I’ll be damned if it isn’t one of the best albums of the 80s and one of my new favourite records!
With that said, I find Peter Gabriel a rather uncharismatic and uncompelling figure. Consider, for example, the boring background to the creation of So. Apparently, Peter and a few minions retired to a small recording studio on his estate to write some songs, a process which encompassed the wacky routine of wearing hardhats to indicate that it was “time to work.” It’s not exactly Alice in Chains, with Layne Staley smacked up and having to be resuscitated so that he could record his vocals, is it? It’s not even the Police, with drummer and lead singer knocking seven bells of shit out of each other after laying down the vocals to “Roxanne.” And, as it happens, Stewart Copeland turns up here as the drummer on “Red Rain” – but I strongly doubt that any fists were thrown, any television sets launched out of windows, any Rolls Royces driven into swimming pools, during the making of So. It’s a bunch of middle-aged adults in a recording studio, professional musicians doing their jobs and making serious music.
This, to me, is absolutely typical of prog rock in general and Genesis in particular. As far as I’m concerned, Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford were already 46 years old when they were born. Peter Gabriel was 32 when he wrote So, but his gentle, gravelly vocals and deadpan, world-weary mien in interviews make him seem about 54. In a roundabout way, though, maybe this is one of the album’s great strengths; the tone is persistently warm, kindly, good-natured, mature. If Peter is our guide, then he’s one that we trust, a protective presence, a solid father figure whose view of life and the world seems worth heeding, despite (or perhaps precisely because of) his manifest lack of rockstar pizzazz.
So begins with a trio of 80s pop-rock classics; “Red Rain”, “Sledgehammer”, and “Don’t Give Up.” Would it be overegging the Oedipal pudding to point out that, while the first could conceivably be about menstruation, the second is clearly a phallic metaphor, before the third resolves these conflicting feminine and masculine energies in a troubled, but still idyllic, vision of the nuclear family? Probably yes, it would be overegging the pudding, but the truth is, I was forced into this fanciful interpretation by some opaque lyrics. The intense and dramatic “Red Rain” is, I suppose I can accept, about an apocalyptic fever dream. It’s the middle of the 80s, everyone is paranoid about escalating superpower tensions and a possible nuclear apocalypse, and if Prince can write songs about the garish and toxic precipitation that will surely fall on judgement day, then why can’t Peter?
But “Sledgehammer” is surely gobbyldegook; the only halfway plausible interpretation is that the modes of transport Peter refers to – a steam train, an aeroplane, a big dipper, as well as the sledgehammer of the chorus – are in fact metaphors for his Johnson, and that he’s offering himself as a booty call to some unknown lady, possibly Sinead O’Connor. “Who cares?”, it’s tempting to ask, given that “Sledgehammer” is such great fun – confident, playful synth-funk with, of course, a splendid music video. Peter is allowed to sing about being your honeybee, because the song isn’t meant to be taken too seriously anyway, as brilliant as it is. Still, I cannot deny being a little bit troubled by how, as I forge deeper into the 80s, meaningless, free association-style lyrics seem to be becoming increasingly acceptable and common.
And then, as if to prove me wrong, So delivers “Don’t Give Up”, the lyrics of which are an absolutely crystal clear denunciation of the baleful impact of deindustrialisation and the “outsourcing” of manufacturing on the Western working classes. The song’s sad, warm, gentle sound makes a mockery of synth music’s reputation for icy detachment. Peter sings the melancholy and defeated choruses, narrating the unhappy experiences of newly unemployed blue-collar men with no obvious social function, while Kate Bush plays his supportive wife and mother to his children, urging him not to end it all. Interestingly, in the 1980s, such a song would surely have been considered a left-wing, anti-establishment indictment of neo-liberal cost-cutting; but in 2024, when the disaffected white working classes have deserted the parties of “the left” and are voting predominantly for right-wing populists like Donald Trump, the song could be taken as a motion of solidarity with a most unfashionable demographic.
So’s undramatic thematization of life as quiet struggle continues on “Mercy Street”, another subdued, funereal, dream-like synth song about the American poet Anne Sexton, who killed herself at the age of 46 after repeated unsuccessful attempts to cure her depression. When you know what it’s about, the song is unexpectedly devastating; Anne haunted by the ghostly memories of her childhood, and of her apparently unsuccessful therapy. If “Don’t Give Up” narrates the struggle of men in the wake of the ravages of deindustrialisation, then “Mercy Street” is an uncomfortable insight into the troubles of, particularly, intelligent women in post-war America. Overall, these two songs are the compassionate heart of an album almost wholly bereft of spite or meanness, narrated all the while by Peter’s kindly, if slightly knackered-sounding vocals.
I say “almost” because there is one song on So with a bit more bite: “Big Time”, a swaggering, sneering, funky satire of the aspirational yuppie culture of the 1980s, built around one of the most remarkable and effective bass lines I’ve ever heard. There’s no shortage of songs in the annals of rock music that deal with fleeing small-town obscurity for the dizzying merry-go-round of the urban sprawl, but what’s interesting is that, whereas some songs celebrate this escape from stultifying rural bigotry (“Small Town Boy” by Bronski Beat, George Michael’s “Flawless”), others reify the pastoral ideal as a site of unspoiled purity, the city as a Gomorrah of decadence and self-destruction (“Life in the Fast Lane” by the Eagles, “Starstruck” by the Kinks). “Big Time” is maybe on the latter side of this dichotomy, given the derisively sarcastic tone with which Peter illuminates the perspective of status-seeking social climbers. Perhaps the song really reflects Peter’s own ambivalences about his unlikely ascent from rural Surrey to international stardom.
So rounds off this cavalcade of 80s synth-pop brilliance with two very different love songs. “That Voice Again” is possibly about an affair; the verses sound uncertain, tentative, anxious, and entail Peter complaining about the torment wrought by his punitive superego, while the choruses are the very embodiment of glitzy, glimmering, magnificent 80s synth-pop. Peter yearns for intimacy but, whenever he tries to get it, he hears the internalised, killjoy voice of his parents and social convention, taking the fun out of everything. “In Your Eyes”, meanwhile, is much less conflicted. It’s the album’s closer, and its pacing is remarkably similar to “That Voice Again”; lowkey, sultry choruses which narrate Peter’s solitary despair, and choruses which explode, with sexual passion overwhelming anguish, and a heavy dollop of somewhat unsettling co-dependency.
In the end, So is great, and I don’t know why I only got round to listening to it at age 40. There are no weak songs, the production is magnificent, the vocal style is distinctive, the lyrics are sharp, and even when they’re guff (i.e. on “Sledgehammer”), no one cares because it’s quite funny. Admittedly, towards the end of the album, Peter feels compelled to remind us of his prog-rock credentials by inserting two weird, experimental, quasi-instrumental pieces; “We Do What We’re Told”, which sounds like something from Kid A, and “This is the Picture”, which is straight up Talking Heads; eerie, minimalistic electronic music and fragmented, inchoate lyrics. Sadly, the latter is perhaps the only song on the album that could be considered disposable.
And yet, in the grand scheme of things, these mood pieces contribute to So’s flow, providing a kind of dreamy, disoriented bridge between the radio hits of the album’s first half and the emotional crescendo of “In Your Eyes.” Yes, the overall background to the album and artist is a little insipid when compared with, say, the histrionics of an Axl Rose or a Prince – a factor which is important to making rock music compelling, regardless of what any “just focus on the music” purists may claim. But no matter. This is surely one of the best albums of the 80s.
10/10
Highlights: “Red Rain”, “Sledgehammer”, “Big Time”