When I was growing up, it was a sign of a rock band’s senescence when they played their hits with an orchestra. It was even dodgy when Metallica did it, near the height of their powers. The spontaneity and edginess of rock music is almost immediately dulled when you add 50 to 100 people doing it with them, playing with precision and in perfect time.
Buy Peter Gabriel: Taking the Pulse Blu-rayPeter Gabriel’s New Blood project was a little different. It had its origins in his interesting, and at the time seemingly ill-fated Scratch My Back and I’ll Scratch Yours albums. The idea is he would do covers of other artists’ songs, but not with a rock band, an orchestra. And then other artists would cover his songs for a companion album. That sounds neat to the audience, and maybe like a homework assignment to the other groups involved. The other artist’s album took years to finally come to fruition. Gabriel did his bit, releasing his album in February of 2010. The singles from that album also included a new rendition of a Peter Gabriel tune with the orchestral arrangement.
This led to his next complete album, New Blood, which consisted of 14 tracks from Peter Gabriel’s career, completely reinvented and rearranged for the orchestra. And these re-arrangements were not just throwing some strings in to replace the guitar and bass. They were attempts to convey the entire context of emotion that Gabriel employs in his openly emotional music while divorcing it entirely from rock. No guitar, no rock drums. Orchestras can have a double bass, so he gets to cheat there.
And before releasing that album, Peter Gabriel took the concept on the road. So, audiences were hearing these orchestral concepts months before they were released. Taking the Pulse, which was recorded in an incredible stadium in Italy, Arena di Verona in late 2010, documents this early reaction to this reworked material.
Like most Peter Gabriel live shows, this one is highly choreographed, with a large video screen behind the performers. This video, directed by Peter’s daughter Anna Gabriel, intersperses concert footage with the direct feeds of the videos playing on those screens. It makes some of the songs feel more like quasi-music videos than live performances.
The set list is basically the New Blood album, in a different order with a couple of extras. Two that aren’t on the album, “Blood of Eden” and “Washing of the Water,” I found the most affecting performances in the show. But most everything has its point of interest, and the arrangements rarely follow the dreadful “just play the song, but with strings” formula of bad orchestra-rock albums.
The closest to that is “Solsbury Hill”, which reportedly Gabriel included against his will. But that song is so joyful and the audience so receptive that even the usually austere orchestra members seem to enjoy it.
A real question for Peter Gabriel fans, specifically those who like his concert videos is… why should you get this when you already have New Blood: Live in London? That was released on Blu-ray a decade ago, and contains the entire concert, including many of the covers from Scratch My Back. Those were performed at this Italian show, but this release only has the Peter Gabriel originals – essentially, half the concert.
For me, the answer would be that the New Blood: Live in London release looks like a standard concert recording. Taking the Pulse is more cinematic. The choices in editing, camera angles, and presentation look more like a concert film than Live in London‘s more pedestrian approach. For some, that might not be a point in its favor, as the music video elements and “artistic” angles might get in the way of their enjoyment of the concert.
I don’t have this dilemma, since, clearly, I have them both. And I think the focus of this release on the purely Peter Gabriel material, and the incredible venue in which it was filmed, give it a quality all its own. Speaking of quality, the video on this release is sharper than the other concert. Though that is definitely a relative statement, since this, like almost all concerts, was shot at night in adverse conditions. Several shots look soft and fuzzy, which is just the nature of filming live events, particularly something 15 years ago.
Taking the Pulse was shot in 2010, has a copyright in the booklet of 2014, but I cannot find on-line evidence of it having been released before this. Weirdly, I found a video on YouTube of the part of the concert that is not on this release, clearly professionally edited, but couldn’t find any provenance of it. Maybe it showed up on Italian TV?
That’s all beside the point. Taking the Pulse is an exceptional document of Peter Gabriel’s experiment with orchestral rock. It’s more stylized and cinematic than the previous release, while not succumbing to irritating pretension. As a Peter Gabriel concert enthusiast, I found this an exciting and emotional experience.
Peter Gabriel: Taking the Pulse has been released by Mercury Studios, a Universal company. There are no extras on the disc.
Watch “Downside Up”:
