Gabriel, Peter – 1975.XX.XX – Before The Flood Demos – Gabriel’s Home Studio – DEMOS 1CD A

Before the Flood: Peter Gabriel Demos 1975

01 Howling At The Moon 02 Excuse Me 03 Funny Man 04 No More Mickey (aka Richard MacPhail)
05 Get the Guns (listen carefully for the root of “Down the Dolce Vita”) 06 Here Comes the Flood
07 God Knows

These are evidently very early demos recorded for “car” (1976, Atco – Atco being Atlantic, a Warner subsidiary label). They are extremely raw; they may have been done in Gabriel’s home studio. Most are acoustic piano with a few accompanying support tracks and Peter singing.

The songs come from a white tape box marked: 7 1/2ips 1/4 trk stereo Gabriel/Hall Fuse Music

The lead sheets had the composer’s names given as “Peter Gabriel and Tony Hall” and were marked with a stamp from Fuse Music, England; they were merely lead melody transcriptions for copyright purposes, not hand-written by Gabriel or anything.

At that time, the best research i could come up with was that Fuse was somehow connected to Warner Bros (maybe like Sire was, but English; a sub-distribution deal?)… I later heard that the Fuse Music building burned down and took a whole lot of master tapes with it, and that this reel is quite probably the only surviving record of these demos.

This brown-oxide tape was discovered rotting in a water-soaked box shoved into a cleaning closet, along with the lead sheets, in a cavernous and seldom-used warehouse. It was lost/forgotten/abandoned. The tape had some warbley spots from the neglect and also quite a lot of tape hiss and lost tone.

I processed the material for several weeks before I was satisfied as to the quality, although “Get the Guns” was problemmatic to begin with; the Master appears to have been recorded badly or with misaligned heads. On the whole there is a tiny bit of tape hiss but no more than you’d expect from such a “live” environment. There is unfortunately one small glitch from a later cassette-to-cd transfer in “Excuse Me” (“Looking for Lost Angeleeeeee”) so don’t think it’s your file or player 🙂

Enjoy this very raw and simple glimpse into the creative process of Peter Gabriel.