Peter Gabriel
Capital One Arena, Washington DC, September 20, 2023
For the history books, I have seen Peter Gabriel exactly two times. The first was September 13, 1993 just outside of Indianapolis, Indiana, and the second was precisely 30 years and one week later, at the Capital One Arena in downtown Washington DC.
I bought tickets for the show months ago, on the theory that it would be a fun date night for my wife and me and it would be nice to reconnect with Peter Gabriel’s music after so long of relative inattention. I'm aware of his recent albums, and I now follow him on Bandcamp, so I see every “dark mix” and “light mix” of each single song on his future
i/o album, but I haven't paid close attention since the truly wonderful
Us record and tour, which I saw in abbreviated form at the WOMAD festival tour in North America that year.
Touring for
i/o seemed like a bit of an adventurous proposition for Gabriel. No one has the proper i/o album, which has supposedly been in the works since 2004; even the most dedicated fans have nine individual tracks, each released in different versions, on the assumption that you have to assemble the record at home, like it came in a flatpack from IKEA. And some of the tracks that he featured in the tour have yet to be released in any format. (As I write, he just released a new track dated September 29, “This is Home,” described as the tenth song from
i/o.)
As the date approached, my wife found herself needing to support her parents in Boston and I was left without a date. And to my chagrin, I couldn’t find anyone to come with me to what was a clearly undersold show. I literally couldn’t give the ticket away and my son described Peter Gabriel’s music in a text as “mid frfr” which broke my Gen X heart.
With the cheap tickets I bought, I found myself in the 400 level seats, with a lighting rig for the Washington Wizards and Capitals suspended directly in my line of sight to the stage. Gabriel walked out promptly at 8:00 pm, and did a bit of wry shtick about being replaced by an avatar, saying that unlike ABBA, his avatar had been aged 20 years with 20 additional pounds. Chuckles at best. Starting with
i/o was going to be a thorny proposition, but cleverly, using a modest bit of stagecraft, he ‘lit a fire’ for a brief opening ‘campfire’ acoustic performance of
Us’s “Washing of the Water” into
Up’s “Growing Up.” Accompanying himself on tender acoustic piano, he was backed as always by some of his multi-decade-long touring mates, like Tony Levin on the electric bass and Chapman Stick, Manu Katché on drums, and David Rhodes on guitar. Some of these are musicians with whom Gabriel has toured and recorded for the better part of a half-century, so the amiability and warmth of their stage presence was palpable. Other musicians were newer faces; Gabriel introduced them all in turn and gave each a fair degree of the spotlight.
Following the campfire moments, the band moved ambitiously into the
i/o material, with each song accompanied by multimedia video projected on the screens above and in front of the band, which were raised and lowered and adjusted on the basis of the specific songs being performed. (Gabriel, as per his wont, took time to acknowledge each individual artist whose work was presented to accompany the songs.) Later, it occurred to me that the reliance on the multimedia and the video screens to accompany the songs may have driven the choice to perform at Capital One Arena, with its sophisticated audiovisual and a structure capable of managing the requirements of the show; notwithstanding the fact that Gabriel’s current fan base might not justify such a large venue. The show was clearly undersold, and the smattering of tickets in the upper sections gave a bit of a sad sensibility to the performance.
As the show took form, the strengths and vulnerabilities of the
i/o-focused set became clear. “Panopticom” has the drama and urgency of classic Gabriel like “No Self Control” or “The Rhythm of the Heat,” accompanied by a video sequence of closed-circuit television cameras and facial identification. It was genuinely thrilling. But again, I had an atrocious view of the stage with the lighting rig directly between me and the band members. “Four Kinds of Horses” and “i/o” followed, each with Gabriel offering somewhat ponderous commentary akin to a college intro to cosmology or philosophy course. Where we are in the universe, how life began on our planet, how we take in and process information like machines, that sort of thing. The title track in particular is a bit forced; it’s hard to make a ringing chorus out of input/output terminology. But
Us highlight “Digging in the Dirt,” with its memorable video imagery of germination and decomposition, was gripping and dramatic. And then, back to the material from
i/o with Gabriel on piano for “Playing for Time,” a stately elegiac piece backed with handsome horn solos by Josh Shpak, who had duties on trumpet and French horn.
It was … a studious beginning to what promised to be a three-hour show, and walked away from my seat in hopes of getting a better vantage point if I switched sections. And then I was handed a comp ticket to the 100 level seats by a staffer in the Capital One Arena decks, clearly in an attempt to generate more crowd energy closer to the band and performers.
Needless to say, things improved with a better view of the performers, and I was able to appreciate some of the subtler charms of the new material from
i/o. “This is Home” is rippling and consoling, a reminder that Gabriel does heartfelt balladry with sophistication and aplomb. But the pacing of the show was puzzling, with this somber number followed immediately by the bombast of “Sledgehammer,” Peter Gabriel’s one and only American #1 hit. (Data point: Boomers are atrocious in terms of concert etiquette when it comes to whipping out their cellphones for crappy video of a song from their young adulthood.)
That was the end of the first set, and it was a clear indication of the direction things were going. The pacing meant that a rousing crowd-pleaser was followed by a more sedate number or two, and it reminded me how Peter Gabriel — a man of no particular gifts as a dancer or stage performer — found his period of genius as a student of the use of multimedia and video to complement the subtleties of his music, and was a global pop star for a brief but memorable few years on that basis. In the second half of the set, “Love Can Heal” was all softly ripping cellos and viola by Ayanna Witter-John and Marina Moore, who also played roles as backing singers. (Witter-Johnson would have her showcase moment later in the show.)
The ebullient “Road to Joy” reminded me a lot of
Us’s “Kiss That Frog,” which of course reminds me in turn of his chart-popping pop-soul from
So. (If you want to go back to my teenaged son’s dismissal of Peter Gabriel as “mid frfr,” “Kiss That Frog” would be a fair target for criticism.) And it was immediately followed by “Don’t Give Up,” where Witter-Johnson would take the formidable vocal role previously overseen by Kate Bush (on record) and Sinéad O’Connor and Paula Cole (in concert and
Secret World Live CD/DVD). Here, Gabriel turned to the minimal amount of stagecraft in the show, climbing a small stairway where Witter-Johnson, singing beautifully, took the consoling duet vocal to Gabriel’s ever-relevant lyrics of alienation. At one point, these were specifically British contexts of joblessness and working class degradation; in concert the images that came to my mind were those of climate refugees whose trees have burned down to the ground, where there are no jobs left and no hometown to return to. In any case, a tremendous performance by Witter-Johnson and a reminder of the power of Gabriel’s words and melodies.
The crowd reacted powerfully to “Don’t Give Up,” but then sat down immediately to the unfamiliar melodies of “The Court,” a dense and puzzling work about judgement and the vindictive nature of justice. And that was kind of the recurring pattern of the remainder of the show: enthusiastic responses to the songs from
So and Gabriel’s hitmaking era interspersed with polite applause for the new material. I get it; I’m not begrudging the crowd the variable responses, since almost no one except Bandcamp subscribers has had a chance to listen carefully to the
i/o material, and notwithstanding “Panopticom” and maybe “Road to Joy” or “Olive Tree,” it’s all relatively muted. So, “Red Rain” got a huge response, followed by “And Still.” The crotch-shaking “Big Time,” similarly, followed by “Live and Let Live.” I imagine the crowd getting its calisthenic exercises standing up for the hits and then immediately sitting back down again. (I also imagine Peter Gabriel, at his age and current physical condition, getting his calisthenics the same way.)
And then, the big finish: “Solsbury Hill,” which the streaming era and the endless movie and TV placements have made retrospectively Gabriel’s biggest song (it peaked at #68 in America and #13 in the UK in 1977). That was the closing song of the major set, and one of only two songs from prior to
So in the entire setlist. The encores were split into two one-song mini-sets, each stretched out with extended instrumental breaks and in-song credits. For the lengthy mix of “In Your Eyes,” Gabriel shouted out his thanks and appreciation to the entire tour production crew, and showed many of their faces on the big screens. And for the secular hymn, the show-closing “Biko,” he gave a shoutout to human rights and environmental campaigners around the world who risk their lives in the face of hostile government and corporate forces, carrying the banner from the anti-apartheid struggles to the battles of the current day.
Personally I felt a bit distanced from the show as a whole, despite my decades-long admiration for Peter Gabriel and his music. Respecting the fact that Gabriel was committed to tour the songs from
i/o despite the crowd’s unfamiliarity, I would personally have preferred fewer additional songs from
So, more from
Us and
Up, and a broader selection from the earlier PG albums. But friends who saw the whole show from the close seats raved at the aesthetic continuity and narrative of the set, and didn’t have the same quibbles I felt. Regardless, I was happy to have attended the show, wished my wife had been able to attend, and would happily see Gabriel again. Maybe in someplace a tad smaller and more intimate.
Complete setlist:
https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/peter-gabriel/2023/capital-one-arena-washington-dc-3a255e3.html
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 10/02/2023 08:26AM by zwirnm.
