Peter Gabriel - Scratch My Back

Over the years Peter Gabriel has provided us with some food for thought. Do we really know how to ‘Shock The Monkey’? Do we want him to be our ‘Sledgehammer’? With the release of his eighth studio album (and his first covers album) all he asks of his listeners is a simple request: Scratch My Back. While this may conjure images of some melancholic dog desperately with a belly-itch the album alludes to an interesting project of Gabriel’s whereby he has covered songs by twelve artists an in return they are to do the same on the upcoming album aptly named I’ll Scratch Yours.

Is this a vanity project so that a new generation can see his songs covered by ‘cool’ artists? Yes it probably is, but he wouldn’t be the first to attempt this and nor will he be the last. Also with a list of artists ranging from Radiohead to Arcade Fire to Paul Simon, the mouth waters at what their combined talents will make of the Peter Gabriel back catalogue.

However, two tracks into the album and you can make a pretty educated guess what Peter Gabriel is trying to do, and it does not exactly warrant blissful listening most of the time. In essence for every song covered he has broken it down into its most basic parts (i.e. the lyrics and the general melody) then he has thrown out all the production alongside drums, guitars and any other instrument that cannot be satisfied with a string section, brass band or piano. Therefore everything begins to sound rather solemn and repetitive. By doing this, Scratch My Back becomes an odd mix of Johnny Cash’s America project and William Shatner’s rendition of ‘Rocket Man’ where you want to laugh but because most of the music would be perfectly placed at your uncle’s funeral, you feel that you cannot.

An example of this would be his attempt to cover Regina Spektor’s ‘Après Moi’. The original has a huge piano section and relies heavily on the emotion provided by her voice, including her now-trademark glottal stops, and then there is the building up of the production which perfectly accompanies the increased fervour of her vocals and piano. However, when Peter Gabriel does this he actually could use the majority of instruments she chose to (and to be fair he does) but his vocals and arrangement are just doomed to rob this song of all its effect so when it concludes, you as a listener may remain unmoved which does not come as much of a surprise.

The vocal delivery too gets tiresome as there are times where his voice sounds so distorted that it actually sounds like he has chosen to gargle the words rather than sing (‘Listening Wind’). Also, some of these cover/reinterpretations just end up completely passing you by; his cover of Radiohead’s ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’, for instance, removes the beauty of the delivery and as such renders it unrecognisable. In fact the mathematically inclined may be able to draw a graph for this album showing a negative relationship between enjoyment and how familiar you are with the original.

As albums go this ends up the equivalent of if your father got out a Hammond organ and started playing ‘Paper Planes’ whilst half-whispering the rap and using a tuba to mimic the ‘ka-ching’ sound. If anything it makes the concept of the follow-up album even more palatable as all that combined talent are bound to produce a far better effort.

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