“It was business as usual in police room 619.....”

The casualness of the first line of Peter Gabriel’s “Biko” is deliberately shocking. Delivered as though it was the mundane for a rock song, the singer adopts a standard rock stanza form as familiar as “woke up this morning, blues on my mind.”

“Biko” is one of five new Gabriel songs about to be delivered onto an album and pre-aired on this current British tour. Gabriel remains a fascination, now displaying a more direct politicization. The new songs show perhaps better than anything in his past exactly how he effects something that is still unique in terms of popular music, subversive, risking failure.