PETER GABRIEL 3 [AKA: MELT]

For me, this album is the highlight of Peter Gabriel's solo career. Other albums of his may sport better tunes ("Solsbury Hill", "Here Comes the Flood", "The Rhythm of the Heat" and "San Jacinto" are possible contenders) but none contain as fine as sequence as the first five tracks of PG3. Moreover, "Not one of us" and "Biko" are not to be despised either!

PG 3 opens with the kind of drum pattern that would give Phil Collins his first mega-hit when he started using it for his own purposes on "In the Air Tonight". While it's hard (or even impossible) to say which of the two is the better SONG, "In the Air Tonight" or "Intruder" (you could argue Phil Collins came up with a more attractive melody), it's obvious that Peter G. (ominously muttering: 'I am the Intruder') provides us, on this very album, with a series of portraits of (usually obnoxious) individuals desperately trying to assert their individuality. There actually seems to be a long line of such creatures, with its origin in the protagonists of "The Knife", "The Musical Box", "Can Utitility", "Back in New York City", "Moribund the Burgermeister" and "On the Air". On PG3 all those weirdoes are joined by the resolutely irresponsible anti-heroes of "No Self-Control" and "I Don't Remember", and by the assassin of "Family Snapshot".

As other reviewers have pointed out, all these new characters express their emotions through music which sounds truly inspired and which also seemed more-or-less "avant-garde" when PG3 came out. Only after the fifth track does the album start to lag a little. "And through the Wire" and "Games without Frontiers" never sounded convincing to me. The latter, however, clearly reveals that Gabriel was developing a political conscience - as do "Not One of Us" (one of the album's most powerful tunes, thanks to Jerry Marotta's drumming) and the album's final track.

In "Biko" I find the choruses deeply moving - both the African choir sampled, and PG's own refrain which runs 'The man is dead, the man is dead'. Surely it was a masterstroke to combine the song's stately rhythm with sampled bagpipes: the best possible dirge any artist could have devised. PG's lyrics occasionally sound pedestrian, though. 'When I try and sleep at night, / I can only dream in red. / The outside world is black and white / with only one colour dead'. Hmm... Couldn't our man have found more striking words? When I think of Dylan's 'The Lonely Death of Hattie Carroll", for example, I don't find PG's type of protest song particularly eloquent... But others obviously disagree: Robert Wyatt, for example, was sufficiently moved to release a cover version of his own.

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