It is 51 years since Peter Gabriel elevated Genesis from a burgeoning cult band to the stuff of music press covers by unexpectedly taking the stage at a Dublin gig clad in his wife’s Ossie Clarke dress and a fox’s head. It was a long time ago – “when dinosaurs roamed the earth and me and Tony both had hair,” as he puts it tonight, casting a glance in the direction of bassist Tony Levin’s shining pate – but clearly a lesson from that evening stuck with him. If you’ve got a tough sell on your hands – and tricky 22-minute songs played by reticent public schoolboys were never likely to elbow Bowie and Marc Bolan from the front pages in 1972 – it helps to dress it up.
So it is with Gabriel’s current tour. It’s not so much that the show is long, although the two sets top out at more than two hours. It’s that half of the 20 songs he performs are new, the contents of his first album of fresh material in 21 years, i/o, which may or may not come out at the end of this year. Some of them have trickled out online – Gabriel has been releasing a new song every full moon – but half of them have not.
