“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.

Always accepted as something of an experimentalist, Gabriel takes popular forms and, like Bowie, Peter Gabriel also falls outside existing rock perimeters and definitions while using the recognizable old ones. It’s a construction of time and space that is aloof from the crowd while deliberately leaving clues. Gabriel's influences suddenly jut out at you during live performance, the Springsteen pacing on “And Through The Wire” with its frenetic build and reliance on the romantic acknowledgement of any form of escape; the overt reference to Weather Report’s musical configuration on bass and sax riffs.

With all this going on behind him, carefully placed between the lines, it’s still what Gabriel forms with words that makes him as important a rock writer as Robbie Robertson. While Robertson sketched in the un-recorded history of America(particularly its rural poor) in the style of the great American novel, Gabriel’s sparse lines conjure a contemporary harshness not quite as futuristic as Bowie yet all the more disturbing for their intimacy in time. His is the voice of modern man in torment, surrounded by daylight terrors. More importantly, he writes so sparsely that it becomes his spaces that are so chilling. It’s what Gabriel doesn’t say, and the way he doesn’t say it, that gives him his greatest impact.

Gabriel takes his outline and fills in the missing lines with music. Such construction lies outside the normal rock structures. On “Biko” there’s no gory recounting of torture and little polemic, yet the effect is as politically defiant, even if it signals Gabriel’s usual risks by assuming a knowledge from his audience that clearly does not always exist. In fact “Biko” is rare among Gabriel songs in that it doesn’t use his usual format of working his words and music counterpoint to each other. Instead it builds to a chant that rises from the core of the song, a lament that deliberately refers back geographically to the Africa of Biko. It’s a sign of respect from Gabriel to the young black revolutionary, a capturing of environment that is Gabriel’s talent, a reconstruction of tribal music ' patterns.

“Family Snapshot” is not a new theme for rock. Snipers as subject matter make cinematic ballads better than anyone. Eljon John, Bob. Geldof....give me a rock song that sounds like “Taxi Driver” and I’ll give you a number one hit single. The psychology Gabriel gives his sniper (alienated individual, rejected as a child.. .) is riot exactly a breakthrough for rock Freudian analysis. It has the edge on others of its kind simply because it stays in black and white, Gabriel holds back the lyrics right through. It becomes an assassin’s diary—neat, meticulous.

The risk side of Gabriel is more clarified, live. The British tour has shown yet again that acceptance only leads him to move one stage further and go for broke if necessary. On stage the extra dimension is not the Great Rock Performer in the tradition that even Bowie bathes in, but the more internalized identification with his songs narrative, with the human being who becomes the subject matter. Gabriel is the assasin, cowering over his piano, sly in a strange way, then suddenly straightening up. The picture is of single-mindness. The clarity of suicide and murder.

The .same subtle technique is used for the songs of madness, of electric shock treatments in bolted rooms where Gabriel’s voice is the zombied recipient: “We do what we’re told/We do what we’re told..."

Mad, locked away in the ballad of “Normal Life” his voice whispers vacancy: “It’s nice here/eating with a spoon/they won’t give you a knife.” The song has only these two lyric line?; They *re given as a clue in the midst of musical whiteness, a present not written, a terrible thing to perceive in your own mind, Gabriel feeds you just enough for your imagination to see him cowering in the corner of a room smiling mad and placid, dropping food off before it can reach his mouth. At the piano he sings quietly to himself, picking out a nursery tune with his fingers. When he suddenly arches his back and screams it is the howl of protest and pain at what is happening back in that room, and it shocks because he pulls away the picture of childish madness to adult agony..

As he did in “Mother Of Violence,” Gabriel’s fondest and most workable trick is to set up frightened/hence frightening lyrics against gentle, melodic, familiar constructions. If Gabriel fails as a rock performer in the tradition it is, in part, thi$ dogged continuation of his individualism and left of field stage presentation that does it. His songs’ conflict is reflected in his determination to break with rock conventions. He seems to deliberately destroy the tensions of the build up, the songs creating atmospheric layers unbroken towards the end of the act. Just as there is a lack of the usual arrogance associated with the performer (to the extent that the Sunday Times critic, rather embarrasingly, practically wept over his typewriter for this vulnerable, fragile, small lonely man) so Gabriel deliberately intrudes between each tense atmospheric packet of song, refusing to allow the audience not to be dragged back to reality. Having set up a pervasive atmosphere and content of alienation (from his lyrics to the huge upturned strip lights on stage that add to a scenario of electronic Metropolis) Gabriel seems ready to risk performance “failure” by hauling the audience back from the comfort of indulging in the narrative of the film he presents. It’s as though, with such shocking lyric motifs, so much menace aforethought, Gabriel’s songs actually frighten him.