Bubbling like it’s coming to the boil

This is a review of the Peter Gabriel / Hamish Hamilton gig-film Back to Front (2014)

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14 April

This is a review of the Peter Gabriel / Hamish Hamilton gig-film Back to Front (2014)

This blog posting revisits the track ‘Steam’, from Peter Gabriel’s album US, on the occasion of the screening of Hamish Hamilton’s documentary Back to Front (2014), which seeks to capture the O2 Arena gig(s) on Gabriel’s tour to celebrate the album So, the seminal fifth studio LP – the film itself was viewed at Cineworld, Stevenage, on 20 March 2014

Gabriel’s lyric for ‘Steam’ (the fourth track on the album US (or, more likely, Us without capitalization), which was released in 1992) is more than the collection of lists that it may at first resemble. For, with its concatenating juxtapositions, Gabriel draws upon sources such as a phrase from The Apostles’ Creed in You know the quick and the dead (which he has rhymed with the polarity of a common form of colour-blindness in You know your green from your red), and they neatly form rhymes that never fail to please, however many times they are heard : a matter both of writing, and of Gabriel’s sure delivery of his own material.

In a way, at least for its upbeat style and tempo, ‘Steam’ looks back to ‘Sledgehammer’ from So (from 1986, on the album So ). Yet, if ‘Sledgehammer’ is a kinky sort of love song (with more than a hint of sexual aggression and suggestion*), the familiarity of knowing another person that is talked of here is not remotely sexual, let alone reverential. Rather, it seems to resemble ‘Big Time’**, but seen from the outside in – its praying to ‘a big god’, kneeling in a big church, and the claim that :
And my heaven will be a big heaven
And I will walk through the front door

So, of this other person, ‘Steam’ says :

When heaven’s doors are shut
You get them open but
I know you


Clearly enough, there is a pattern of shared experience here (a theme that gets revisited in track seven, ‘Digging in the Dirt’), one of having, in all sorts of ways, travelled together, but not – on this side, at least – very happily. Therefore, the relations are uneasy, tense, and the narrating persona finds the other character’s hypocrisy insupportable – or is it resenting the other’s, as it were, ‘lived knowledge’, and using a religious belief as a pretext for discrimination ?

In the preceding track, ‘The Blood of Eden’*** there is a reference to ‘the heated and the holy’, who seem to be in a position of judgement in a song that always suggests that it may, at least in part, concern the AIDS epidemic in Africa. It also, not just by evoking the Biblical Paradise in its title, concerns itself with religiosity :

The heated and the holy
Oh they’re sitting there on high
So secure with everything they’re buying


and :

Is that a dagger or a crucifix I see
You hold so tightly in your hand
And all the while the distance grows between
you and me
I do not understand


If ‘Steam’ does follow on from ‘Blood of Eden’***, then ‘Only Us’ seems to follow after, as a tentative assertion of searching, after finding my way home from / the great escape (a lyric that, with variations, revolves around this lyric), but (to a rhythm like a heartbeat, or a lullaby) :

The further on I go, oh the less I know
I can find only us breathing
Only us sleeping
Only us dreaming
Only us


End-notes

* One is reminded of The Beatles’ track ‘Helter Skelter’, from what (because of Richard Hamilton’s sleeve design) is usually known as The White Album.

** Which speaks from the inside out, and is also from the album So.

*** It may, on the basis of content, actually begin a run of songs on the album, which form a triptych*** (or, maybe, a longer sequence of four songs, starting with ‘Love to be Loved’…)) : each track on US is a response to a piece of art, of which a reproduction is shown in the CD booklet.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)