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I knew it was good. I think we all knew it was good.

But it was only when we started getting hits, which is sort of a rare thing in my life,

that you start thinking, "Maybe we're gonna sell something here."

Peter Gabriel was the classic definition of a cult artist before 'So'.

He was well-known, he was well-respected,

but he was not in that league where we talk about The Beatles,

The Stones, Bob Dylan, Fleetwood Mac. But 'So' changed that in an enormous way.

I guess it was May, '85. Came home from New York,

we got picked up at Heathrow

by David Stallbaumer, who was Peter's assistant.

And as we were driving down the motorway, he had asked me

how long did Peter and Dan indicate I was gonna be out to Ashcombe House for?

And I said, "Anywhere from two weeks to six weeks."

And he kind of mused for a moment, then he looked over and he said,

"You're gonna be here until next March."

And that was ten months later and he was spot on.

It took us a year to finish 'So', almost to the day.

And I wasn't aware of this but I was told after the fact

that that's the fastest record that Peter ever made.

I knew that he was a person who thought about music in a different way.

"How can music enter the culture in a different way other than just records,

product, songs, you buy them and take them home?"

"But how else could you experience music?"

Could all of those things meld at one moment in time to make a record

that could not necessarily fit into the masses,

but actually find a way for the mass to come to him?

I shook hands with Peter. I said, "Listen, I think this couId be really great for you

and let's not let up until we're satisfied that it could touch a lot of hearts."

I think the songs were just amazing and great songs,

a great producer. Just magical.

Imagine if somebody drops off a big lump of granite on your front lawn,

and it's your job to make a nice skinny sculpture out of it by spring.

That was kind of our job.

I think one of the reasons I've been able to have a career over all this time

is that I followed my heart and my nose.

You sniff around and you find something interesting, and you chase it.

And that is what makes life interesting.

I'd had a dream that was a bit like the parting of the Red Sea,

with these two walls and these glass bottles

that would fill up with blood.

That would enable them to walk to the other side,

screw onto the other wall and empty the blood out.

That was, I guess, a little version of life and death.

There is a sense of danger, loss.

This notion of Red Rain, it's not specifically blood.

But it's hard not to think of that as an image of blood,

of people drowning, of people helpless.

I always wanted it to crash open at the front

and for it to feel really driven.

I spent a lot of time, and Dan, too, on trying to get the sequence right.

And what we used to do

is put the beginnings and endings of all the songs on little cassettes,

so you can try all the different permutations.

And I think with Red Rain, fairly early on, that was gonna be an opener.

We put a lot of work into those drums. This was before digital technology.

And so Jerry Marotta must've played the drums,

I think, about eight takes.

The idea was it was always to try to do something different,

do things, be a little unconventional, or a lot unconventional.

I love that about Peter.

He's really a master of low-end.

He can really shape the bottom of a song the way no one else can.

And then it was my job, after Jerry left, to go through everything,

and make sure that I had included Jerry's best playing, bar at a time.

It's getting in there and trying things and trying things in a little different way,

being unusual.

But I think it was worth it.

You hear all the idiosyncratic details of Jerry's performance

and it's got a lot of power.

Got a very deep, philosophical thing performance-wise.

It wasn't like the pop songs.

It was dark, much darker.

As the ex-drummer that I am,

I have to get the drums right before anything else can happen.

You have to remember, one of his big influences as a kid was Otis Redding,

and he was a drummer before he was a singer.

The past records, as Jerry Marotta will remind us all of,

were not allowed to have any cymbals. No cymbals and no hi-hat

because Peter didn't want a whole bunch of splashing around, noisy things

to take up any room in the mix.

One of the worst things you can ever do to an artist is give him complete freedom,

"cause I just sit there, thinking, "What the hell am I gonna do?"

But I think creative people are devious and if you tell them what they can't do,

they'll find a way around it. So I thought, "Okay,

well, maybe, I know I'm devious, too, so I'll create my own set of rules

of things that I can or can't do. And that'll force me to think of alternatives."

So, no cymbals.

I love hi-hat. And I said to Peter,

"Let's make this record a nice hi-hat record. Why not?"

He's fascinating, Dan, 'cause he's a mixture of, I think, quite a rough and tough dad,

on one hand, and a very soft and tender mum,

and he can be both things.

And he decided to follow my instinct

and so we allowed cymbals and hi-hats into the project.

And that was quite a change for him.

One of the things that I asked Stewart Copeland to do,

'cause he's a virtuoso hi-hat player,

was focus in on the hi-hat. So this is where we started

with the hi-hat on the drum program.

It does a job that motors along but doesn't have any personality.

So, here's Stewart.

Of what we put on the record, I'd say Red Rain probably took the most out of me.

It's the one that... It was very flat,

and it was my job to make it so that it evolved sonically and emotionally.

I wanted his emotions to come to the forefront.

To wear no mask and no veil,

and to have no mirrored contact lenses,

and no trickery. Just take everything off

and let the songs be heard. And I think that was a good call.

I think it was sort of a nice segue into the next chapter for Peter.

So consequently, I think these songs are more revealing, they're more naked,

they've taken risks, and listeners feel that when a man takes a risk.

I've always been slow, so I worked out early on

that it was gonna be a lot cheaper if I tried to buy the equipment

and set up a little studio, rather than rent a studio.

So I was looking basically for a place that I could afford,

so we rented this old farmhouse.

And we started putting some equipment in there.

But it was away from everything.

The cows would come and lick the windows occasionally.

And I loved it.

I first got an invitation to work with Peter Gabriel

when I was living in Hamilton in Ontario in Canada, that's near Toronto.

And it was an invitation to come in

and help him with a soundtrack for a film called Birdie.

I jumped on the plane the next day

and we carried on with that work

and Peter gave me access to his entire library.

He said, "Whatever you find in here, do what you like with it,

what I expect in the end is some nice surprises."

I knew I didn't have time to generate a whole new score

so I wanted to use part of the score using existing material

and sort of remixes and extrapolate mood

from some of the readymade material.

And I did provide him a lot of surprises, sonic surprises.

And he invited me to stay on to work on his now new singing record

which was to become So.

You saw the two together, they still had hair,

and the two together, they were one.

When I first met Dan, I remember now,

in the studio, I looked at him and he was the perfect complement to Peter.

He understood Peter.

As I walked down the lane with my bag,

Peter came out of Ashcombe House,

something jumped on me. I felt that I had known him before.

I just felt something genetically connected with him,

if not by birth.

And I knew right at that moment that I should work with him.

Ashcombe was made of two main buildings,

the house, a beautiful garden, and then the cow barn.

I think it had been used as a functioning cow barn,

I don't know how long back, but the cows are still around in the fields.

It felt and behaved like a proper studio but it was all done very inexpensively.

Peter walked in and said, "Great. Let's get started."

"We're gonna start making a record." And that was when we started the...

That was the initial birth process for 'So'.

We were both surrounded by a brand new studio

with a bunch of equipment that neither of us knew really how to operate.

They turned the barn into a studio. It was perfect for Peter.

It was great 'cause it was kind of like that thing

where we're at home, we're in our own environment.

So that was it. He'd go in the back to work on lyrics

and pop the tracks and sing out loud

while I worked in the smaller room in the front tidying things up

and getting the room ready for the next level of work.

And we had a good work ethic and we treated it like a construction site.

In fact, we even had the construction site hard hats.

And we just had a policy where we'd put on the hard hat before starting work.

I listened to his solo records and I liked them.

And I thought that he had been very adventurous and brave

with his sonics and with his songs.

All four records before that were titled "Peter Gabriel".

I used to remember all the different albums, not from titles,

but from the pictures, from the artwork.

Then you had big vinyl artwork.

It was a whole ritual to getting an album, opening it, smelling it,

and I also thought that when you had good artwork,

why did you have to have all this text all over the top of it

and make it look like a piece of advertising?

You go from the first record with Here Comes The Flood,

Solsbury Hill, the second album, which is more eccentric, darker,

produced by Robert Fripp. Games Without Frontiers.

That's when you have Biko. You get this sense

that he's working his way forward. And by calling each record, "Peter Gabriel,"

the point was, "These are not separate, discreet statements,

"this is part of my continuing body of work."

It was sort of cult-sy and occasional flashes.

So, Games Without Frontiers, Shock the Monkey,

Solsbury Hill had sort of broken through to a wider audience.

And then I'd sort of retreat back into the bushes

with my normal crowd.

So there's occasional moments in the daylight.

Those songs had been said already and we were entering a new body of work.

Sledgehammer, actually, that crashed the door down

for such a wide audience that everything else that was on the record,

that was important, that was convincing,

that was committed, that all came through as well.

I remember that Sledgehammer we did very last, in fact we were packing up.

And Peter, in typical Peter fashion, said, "I have this idea for the next album

of a piece. Would you mind just doing a run-through of it?"

One of the many things I love about Peter

is in his mind, he's only a couple months away from doing his next album,

even when he's finishing an album,

and the rest of us know we're gonna have to wait years

maybe even for this one to come out.

So we just reassembled the stuff

and did a quick version or two of Sledgehammer

and then we packed up and went home thinking, "No one'll ever hear that track."

Everyone thinks, "Sledgehammer, he must've been trying to write a hit."

It wasn't Iike that. I loved R&B, soul music,

and so in a way, this was a little bit of homage to that.

I had made these jazz records, jazz fusion,

which was totally not Peter's bag.

But I had also recorded a song as a tribute to the island where I was born.

In that piece of music, there was a drummer which was Manu Katche.

I got a phone call in my room. So of course, I answered the phone.

And someone on the phone says, "Hello, is this Manu? It's Peter Gabriel."

I said, "Yeah, okay."

So I thought it was my friend doing a joke. I said, "Yeah, okay, Camille."

Peter was calling him. He was not returning Peter's calls.

Five minutes later, the phone rings again.

"Hello, Manu, this is Peter Gabriel." I said, "Camille, okay, stop it."

Peter called me in New York and said,

"I don't know what's going on with this drummer,

he's not returning the call."

So I remember I called him with Peter on the line and we said,

I said to Manu, "Manu, what's going on?"

And he said, "I would love to have you on my next project."

So I said to George, "Are you sure this guy can shuffle?"

"We have to have a man who understands the shuffle."

"It's not enough to just go...

...any more. We want...

...some kind of motion to it. Will Manu be able to do that?"

And he said, "Well, he's the best in Paris. Trust me, I think you'll love him."

Somebody like Manu coming to the table

was so unlike anything that had yet happened

in the entire recording process because he's a straight session guy.

There's a big garden in front of this and we'd just go out for a little bit of time

and then having tea in the kitchen and then coming back.

It has nothing to do like being in a professional studio

where you have to sign in when you get in and sign out when you leave the place

and then you have like two or three studios around

when people are working on different projects.

So the feeling was very, very different.

And plus, it's in the countryside, I mean, in the middle of the countryside,

which means there's nothing around like in a city.

He sat down and listened to the track once, maybe twice, with Peter in the control room,

not even in a room with him, and he just said,

"Okay, play what you think. Play what you think."

Manu did one take.

And I go back into the studio, I said, "We'll listen to it."

And I see Peter moving

and really having this great and nice smile on his face.

And I said, "You like it?" He said, "Yeah."

And Peter said, "Great, let's do it again." And Manu's response was, "Why?

"I've already done it."

Peter always likes another take

or a third take or a tenth take just to cover himself.

It was an American producer, I think it was Jerry Wexler...

No, it wasn't, Arif Mardin.

And one of his quotes was, "Fabulous, fabulous, fabulous."

"Now, do it again."

He was used to just doing things

hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times.

And Manu's point was, "I've already interpreted this as best I can."

As soon as I heard that track, I had the idea of what I wanted to play,

instantly remembered the groove and the bass, it was phenomenal.

Manu was following where the music seemed to be taking us.

And Manu was very good at just following that direction but doing it with his own style.

So it always sounds like him. And that's what I try to do on bass.

Sledgehammer is part of that classical, rhythm & blues, soul

that people understand instantly.

So once again, it fits. I would love to think

it's because when we recorded it, we recorded it with heart and soul.

The drums have that thing I was talking about, have a lovely kind of swing to them.

And then if we put in Tony's bass...

And I chose fretless bass.

I put an octave on it, and a little unusual to use a pick.

And I thought we came up with a good sound.

When I heard the track, I would say the song was about 50 or 60% completed

but there were no lyrics on it whatsoever.

So the backtrack was in, drums, bass, guitars.

It had some keyboards on it but it didn't have all the keyboards on it.

No vocals whatsoever, no background vocals, no lead vocal.

And Dan kept mentioning, "Well, it would be great to have horns on this,

'cause it had a soul feel."

So we went to the Power Station in New York

and had a couple of fellows come up from Memphis.

I was going up to play with some strange people

and I didn't know how it worked, but I'm good with folks.

I'm good with strangers so I figured I could make it work.

And I did.

Wayne Jackson with The Memphis Horns

was playing at the gig in Brixton when I saw Otis in 1967.

So it was a great thing for me to be able to work with them and work with him

and hear a lot of the stories firsthand about Otis.

The song had a certain sense of humour to it

and they felt like the horns would kind of highlight that humour.

There they are.

I liked the song and I loved the track. It felt good.

That's all. R&B feels good. And this felt good, too.

And I could see why he wanted something original sounding

to lean his music more towards soul rather than pop.

And I gave him that.

When they came back after being here for a week

and I heard them for the first time,

there was this big smile on my face

'cause it really helped pull the whole track together.

We were all very happy. Daniel and Peter just jumped up and ran around the studio,

just jumping up just like fairies.

They were so happy with the way it was coming off.

The thing about Sledgehammer is that it had that video.

And the video had such a charm, such a sense of humour,

which was something that people didn't realise about him.

I'd taken a risk and spent quite a lot of money on this video,

which was really unusual at the time.

People hadn't really done something like that.

I was introduced to this wonderful director, Stephen R. Johnson,

and he introduced me to the Quay Brothers,

and I introduced him to Aardman Animations,

all of whom worked together.

In those days, you more or less had to do it all in camera.

In other words, what you shot was what you got.

And you couldn't layer stuff in.

So basically, you were shooting everything frame by frame,

in camera. So Peter Gabriel's sitting in a chair,

we made a wig, we've got bumper cars, they are simply model cars

which are animated frame by frame.

And he would be directed to enunciate

the part of the word that he's meant to be singing.

You would direct his eyes to look right or look left on a frame by frame basis.

You were using Peter Gabriel effectively as an animated model.

Two weeks of sort of creative work in a very slow and painful process,

filming it old-style animation. So as clouds moved across my face,

they actually had to be painted frame by frame.

And then Nick Park was asked to animate these chickens.

So they'd already been out of the fridge for quite a while

while they had wire put in them

and then they were underneath the studio lights

and Nick is to be seen wearing protective clothing,

rubber gloves with a mask and stuff like that

because he was rightly anxious about salmonella.

After the Sledgehammer video was popular in America,

I noticed and had a laugh that there were more women in the audience.

Exactly. There were women in the audience,

which for the musicians was a wonderful thing.

So that was a change that changed for good

and we all kind of smiled about it on stage and took it for what it was.

And that was one change after So.

A song about a man and a woman faced with a problem of losing a job.

It's called Don't Give Up.

Don't Give Up started out as a rhythm-box pattern

that Peter had been fiddling around with on his LinnDrum

and had little tuned tom-toms.

And I always liked something about it.

And so this entire song was built around that little tom-tom pattern.

And I'd pitched the toms quite deliberately,

and then asked Tony if he could build on that.

And when Tony Levin came in,

then he mimicked the phrasing of the tom-tom pattern the best he could,

and he invented this beautiful part that floats on top.

And I thought that'd be a good bass part if I put notes to it.

So, I started...

And then I added harmony.

A little beatbox part here.

It's quite Jamaican, isn't it?

Then we can put some keys in for the chords.

Little faster.

We talked about Don't Give Up being a duet

and he was hoping to find...

Somebody who could sing a country song.

I'd seen these extraordinary black and white pictures

of the American Depression by Dorothea Lange.

And they were haunting, so that was sort of a trigger point,

but then there was quite a lot of unemployment going on, so...

I thought I would try and roll that in,

and in a way the Don't Give Up message felt like

sort of an emotional focal point for the lyric.

And originally, because of the American Depression starting point,

I'd actually thought of Dolly Parton, who I'm a big fan of.

And he wanted to try and get Dolly Parton, which I thought was inspired.

And she wasn't interested.

And I believe that when they called Dolly's manager,

I don't think any of them knew who Peter Gabriel was.

It's interesting that he did write it with Dolly Parton in mind,

because I can't imagine that voice in that setting.

From the point at which he mentioned Dolly Parton

he also mentioned Kate.

When Kate Bush walked in, it was a completely different energy, again.

What was a piece in development

turned into such a complete song, almost instantaneously.

So something that we've just been working on,

and working on, and working on for months,

and not really getting to any kind of finality

instantly changed.

Of course, we were all happy to be in her presence.

She was royalty pretty much, so...

She was literally standing right beside me here,

we're all working on headphones.

And we had the speakers turned down, so we're working on headphones,

and you could just hear the emotion just dripping out of her performance.

And literally every hair on my body was just standing up.

It needs to be really underplayed and intimate.

Don't Give Up is actually a really nice way

to come out of Red Rain and Sledgehammer

into something very soothing and very pointed.

And it's interesting that he gives that key line to Kate Bush,

he doesn't sing it himself.

He gives it to this beautiful female voice that has a lover's quality, maternal quality.

I think, and it's my impression, again,

that it's a homage to these songs, these duets,

that used to happen in the world of rhythm and blues,

when Otis Redding sang with Aretha Franklin.

He was paying a tribute, his respect to the music that he loves.

She was essentially brought in as an actor, really.

To play a role and to represent that part of the song.

And I can't imagine it being any better than it is.

She was like an angel and did it fantastically.

So, this is the wonderful Richard Tee on piano,

which is much more of a soul, gospel piano, which he does really well.

And then Peter... Where is Peter?

Falsetto comin' up.

Beautiful, huh?

There's a big difference on the record in the sound in the second half of the piece.

And I looked around the studio for some dampening material,

some foam rubber or something.

And my eyes fell on...

My bass case was full of diapers.

I had... Again, my two-month-old daughter was with me.

And somehow, I thought there might not be diapers in England,

I don't know what I was thinking, but...

I had packed everything full of diapers, every free space.

So, I put a diaper under the bass strings, which dampened the heck out of 'em.

And later Peter and Dan called that the "Super Wonder Nappy Bass Sound".

I am obsessive

about getting the right feel, the right performance.

And Tony's absolutely brilliant with...

One of the most amazing musicians I've ever worked with,

but occasionally he'll do something that doesn't fit the picture,

and I've got something else in my head.

I was working at a studio called the Wool Hall in Beckington, near Bath.

And I was over there for quite some time working on this record,

and also concurrently, I was just getting ready to start a new record

with Joni Mitchell, who was my wife at the time.

There was quite a vital music scene

around Bath and the surrounding area in Somerset.

There were a lot of groups doing work, Tears for Fears were up there.

Peter Hammill was a guy who was working nearby,

and so, there was a lot of studio hopping that went on,

within a half hour drive, people would just drop in to someone else's session,

and there was a number of different groups that were working on different things.

And so, Joni and I just became a part of that little scene there,

and when Peter called me, which I think it just turned out

that he had some things that were unfinished.

And he probably found out

from one of the circuit of people there that I was in town.

Some of the ideas for Mercy Street came relatively easily.

I mean, with Mercy Street I'd found by chance

these wonderful books of a poet called Anne Sexton,

and she became the focus.

I am a big fan of Anne Sexton's poetry and was since I was 14-15 years old.

And so, when I listened to the song, I knew what he had written about,

and sort of what the centre of the song was about.

And it was just incredibly moving to me.

The first thing that I did was...

And then the other part was a fretless bass part, but using tenths.

A lot of these songs changed.

Like, Mercy Street became the song it became by accident.

It actually was originally a song called Furrow,

that Peter had recorded down in Brazil, a couple of years before,

and he had recorded all the percussion elements.

In my percussion research,

the most interesting things were coming out of Africa and Brazil.

So, I went down to Brazil and to...

Wanted to record with some percussionists there.

On day, we were working on one song

and I just had the vary speed of the machine engaged.

So, the machine was actually running at its slowest potential speed.

And the next song on the reel was Furrow.

It started to play

and Dan and Peter and I all looked at one another and immediately went,

"What is that sound?"

Because it was running ten percent slower than it should be running.

There was something about the percussion and the graininess of the percussion.

We slowed down guitars and I think we slowed down the cymbals, as well,

'cause again, that sinking...

Giving the mixture weight and power.

We didn't use headphones for Peter singing. He had a little blaster at his piano.

I don't like headphones. They're like condoms for the ears in a way.

You don't feel you're really connected.

And the extraordinary thing is that you can get exactly the same musical information,

and sing really out of tune with headphones,

and be very precise as soon as you are singing to the speakers.

His monitor was really this little blaster,

and that's all he ever used and we just found a sweet spot.

Clearly, the blaster's at the back of the mike, so there was some separation,

and then tried to keep Peter as close to the mike as possible.

So, the vocals were really important in this, and I don't do a lot of vocal harmony work,

but here it felt really important. It was sort of

this sensual, dreamlike environment for Anne Sexton's world.

So, in the verse, one of the ideas to try and build the mystery

was to put a shadow vocal in. So, an octave below the main vocal,

there's this low voice. If you solo that.

With the lead voice as well.

The one part that we couldn't execute at the time

was the lowest voice, the low octave voice,

'cause that's just in a part of Peter's range that is beautiful-sounding,

but once he's up and about during the day and talking,

that part usually kind of disappears.

I had trouble doing that low voice.

And apparently...

Well, I do remember that in the morning, you have morning voice, you know?

I think a lot of people are familiar with that pre-coffee voice.

So, there was one evening we were discussing

how to go about executing that low harmony performance.

And I just suggested that perhaps, he would spend the night at the studio,

and I would prep the studio so that he could come in first thing the next morning,

and without talking to anybody, just put on the headphones and just start singing.

We started at 7:00 in the morning

in order to get this voice before it had risen up to its normal level.

And within an hour, we had a low harmony part on the track.

And that kind of helps pin the rest of the vocal,

that kind of gives you the base layer from which all the other voices elevate.

It's actually an effect that I liked a lot.

I've been very lucky musically,

I never have any trouble generating new ideas,

but lyrically, getting something that I think is okay,

and as I get older I think I get more critical. That is hard work.

He would not want to finish working on the lyrics,

and Dan, understandably, would want him to finish working on the lyrics.

I'm a master of distraction when I have a deadline.

Peter would take a lot of phone calls

when it got to an intense period of recording where he really needed to deliver.

He was a master at finding moments to delay.

I think I smashed a telephone and threw it in the bushes a few times,

because I didn't allow telephones on the session.

When Peter had been on the phone for a while,

and Danny eventually decided we needed to get back to work.

So, he took the phone out of Peter's hand and smashed it to pieces on the console,

without saying a word, just smashed it to bits,

and carried right on as if nothing had happened.

At a time when the lyrics were going a little slow and I said to Peter,

"Why don't you just go in that cow barn of yours,

and strike up the PA and get on with some lyrics?" So he went in.

And there were these huge spikes laying down there by the sliding door.

I took the spikes and I nailed him in the studio.

Peter had the PA turned up quite loud and he was playing the track,

and so, Dan took up the six-inch nail,

and with a hammer, in time with the music, hammered the door shut.

'Cause he was so frustrated at the speed or lack of speed.

There was one lyric I just couldn't get satisfied

with anything I was generating.

Peter didn't hear him while he was doing that.

So, lunch was called.

Dan and I went up for lunch and I remember saying to Dan,

"Do you think we should let Peter out?" "No, he'll be fine."

Peter's not a violent or aggressive man in any way, shape or form.

And he managed to take the doorframe right out,

to open the door, so he could get out of the room.

Which was quite a feat, it was a big, solid door,

double layers of cinderblocks and concrete. It's quite impressive.

And at the end of lunch, Peter says to Dan, "Can we have a word outside?"

So, they went outside and they exchanged a few words.

And then we went back to work, and that was it.

I almost got fired and not many lyrics were written,

but I think he got the idea that we weren't about to wait around for him.

Just, you know, "Let's get the job done here. Let's hit it with a sledgehammer."

It was really late in the process, it was probably October, November,

and then Peter was like, well, we only had eight songs.

There was another song that was also in play that didn't get finished.

And so, we realised, "Well, we need to come up with another song."

And then Peter came out and said, "Well, let's use Excellent Birds."

It was a sort of last-minute track coming from an alternative direction,

but I thought it could be a nice inclusion.

We came together in the studio to... And that was here in my studio.

And wrote this together, more or less trading lines I think,

is how we did it. "Let's do a song."

I said, "Well, I'm doing a show about natural history."

He said, "What about birds? Let's do something about birds."

We had 48 hours before the deadline to write the song,

including the lyric, record it, do the video.

And there was a point on the second night

where I'm trying to sing the vocal, and I'm on a stool.

And I just stopped.

And then after a while there's this, while the track is playing, snoring coming.

And there's no glass in the studio, but they stopped eventually,

and peered around and I had just fallen asleep mid-take,

trying to do my vocal,

and we looked a little weather-beaten the following day when we did the video.

Peter reached out to Laurie and asked if he could use the track.

And she obviously gave her permission,

and that's when we started actually changing it,

and trying to shape it, so that it would actually fit in

with the rest of the songs on the record.

That's one other thing that I really admire about Peter's music.

It's forward-looking, and the lyrics are forward and open,

and music is

so much often about regret.

I mean, if you didn't...

You wouldn't have much music if you didn't have lots of regrets, I mean...

I think Willie Nelson was the one who said, "90% of us end up with the wrong person,

and that's what makes the jukebox spin."

I don't think it was on the original vinyl version,

we didn't have enough space, 'cause you sort of forget about those days

where 22 or 24 minutes was the maximum you could pack onto a disk

if you wanted to have the bass with any power to it.

'Cause the bigger bass you have the deeper the grooves go.

And so, you need to push 'em up the record,

'cause the circle is getting smaller and smaller, if you imagine with the needle.

So, it's harder and harder to get any bass

as you arrive at the end.

Vinyl, actually, is still my preferred way of listening to music,

because of the warmth,

because of the physical interaction you have with the disc.

And even just the mere art of flipping it over, you're engaged with it.

On CD, when it was recently reissued a few years ago,

he put In Your Eyes at the back of the CD,

where apparently he had originally intended it to go.

But because of the way vinyl was, they made the other choice.

It's a rare instance where the CD's an improvement,

at least in the running order.

Because on the original album, it ended with We Do What We're Told,

and I think by putting it at the end of the CD,

he actually made the album more complete

and gave it that sense of optimism, that there is a future,

that we don't have to just do what we're told, and...

Sometimes you can find your greatest strength in the person next to you.

I still don't like this title business.

And maybe a way around it is just to have one or two letters.

'Cause then it becomes like a piece of graphic.

So, when I was thinking about So,

you know, I thought, "Okay, we'll just make it two letters,

and we choose letters that actually look quite nice in themselves."

He had an idea about having a trilogy of sorts with just a two-letter title.

"So" being one of 'em, "Us."

But maybe it was like a backlash of the complexity of the making

of this record that he wanted a nice, simple title.

The less letters you have, the bigger you can make them.

And so, you're out in the marketplace, you've got bigger billing than anyone else,

'cause you've only got two letters.

So, this was something that I liked and I've kept on doing ever since.

I was fascinated in Africa

that you could have a love song that was a religious song

and a romantic love song at the same time.

So, I was trying to see if I could get that ambiguity in this lyric.

For the track In Your Eyes,

Peter says to me, "Okay, we're gonna do that track, just play what you wanna play."

And in my mind, I said,

"What does that mean? I don't know what I wanna...

I'm just gonna play the track,

but what does that mean, play what you wanna play?"

'Cause I've never been used to that.

I've always been asked to play this or play like someone else.

I was facing him with my drum kit, he's just standing in front of me,

he put the headphones, I had the headphones,

asked to have the track in the headphones and started dancing like an African.

But you know Peter, the way he was at the time,

very English, great face, great smile, trying to dance like African guys.

I thought, "Okay, if that guy, a very English guy, go for it..."

That was the cue for me.

I just let it go. I just played like, "Okay, anything!" And it worked.

And so once again, this project was very big for me musically,

'cause I think he opened up my mind.

There's a talking drum here.

You can't miss with this. Everything he put up sounds great.

We had...

96, I think Kevin would probably be able to confirm this,

I think 96 different versions of In Your Eyes,

all on multi-track.

So, there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of different takes to choose from,

which were all organised by a gigantic wall chart,

which we eventually chopped together, bar by bar, just onto two-inch tape,

with Danny and Peter and everybody listening, just going,

"Okay, bar one, take 37. We like that.

"We'll take that one." So, that's where that one would go.

And we literally assembled that song

with three, six, twelve-inch pieces of two inch tape

to actually create the rhythm track.

We could've worked on that song for probably another couple of months.

And Youssou's part had gone on before Peter had done his lyrics.

So, Peter had to weave his performance around Youssou's,

which was a wonderful thing and a great tapestry to sing against,

but it still was a complicated arrangement.

Just the way he delivered on that was so radically different

from anything I think we were expecting.

I think there was a lot of joy in the track for me,

and when Youssou's voice sort of

milks that last bit of the song, it's like an ecstatic moment for me.

In Your Eyes became an absolute anthem live.

It was just the way in which that song was on the record

became a whole other world live.

It did go through a number of changes.

The thing that was consistent was the...

This sort of arpeggiated feature of the chorus,

and there was an African groove underlying it.

When we used to tour with Youssou, it was always a fantastic moment,

you know, like the sun coming out, so...

It was nice to tell a story, paint a picture and then, just have this sort of...

Open ecstasy.

It was really nice to see the energies of the two of them,

how they looked at each other, and I could feel that something magic was happening.

I listen to these tracks now, and I know that these tracks were built by a young man

who did nothing else with his life for a year.

And I can imagine what it's like to live the life of a monk now.

A lot of things came together, I think, that opened it up to a much broader audience

than I would normally get to.

It was the moment that the perfect storm hit, and the man, and the public, and the record,

and the tour and everything came together.

I surrounded myself with wonderful people, but in the end I think it's songs that speak.

"So" changed the landscape of recording for everybody.

I worked with a lot of guys and from that point on it set the standard.

It was such a well produced album of very well crafted songs,

of incredible singing and phenomenal lyrics.

It was the quintessential album.

The right moment with the right people in the right place with the right things to do.

I became fixated on it, let's say, and I...

To this day, it sounds to me like it could've been done yesterday.

He made a classic album

simply by making sure he made the best record he could at the moment.

And that's what classic albums are.

The best album you could make at that moment and with the notion that

you want it to live longer than you do, and he succeeded.

Big Time, I think a few drummers had a go at it,

including Stewart Copeland who I love, and has a great sound,

and I think that's him at the heart of the loop.

Stewart's playing was very exciting,

but it didn't quite match with the groove.

So Dan and I, we listened and we found

parts of his pattern that worked really well with the current groove.

And then we literally, as a demonstration to Peter, we made a mono track

onto a half-inch machine.

And then we literally flew that part in, every four bars into the song

to demonstrate to Peter that it could actually work.

And then Peter said, "I really like that."

"Now, can you go back and get all his drum fills as well?"

So we went back and then added all the drum fills.

And then David came in and added this really great guitar part,

but there was still something that wasn't quite settled

so David Stallbaumer and I took the song into the other room.

And Dan said, "Look, if you can make the bass part really sync with the drums,

then I think this song is going to be huge."

So we spent a day just trying to get...

With a Fairlight sequencer, trying to get the bass part to sync

with this original Linn 9000 drum pattern that Peter had done.

And once we established that, then the song really kind of just fell into shape.

So, a combination of that drum loop

and a pretty intense bass line from Tony

is the heart of that song.

For the song Big Time, of course, in the recording,

I had had Jerry Marotta play drum sticks on the bass strings.

And I just did the fingering of the left hand, that was easy.

When we were on tour, I was constantly practising with a drum stick in my hand,

trying to play this fast part with one hand and one drum stick.

I wasn't really succeeding on that, but I was practising a lot.

And one day at sound check Peter, walking by me and hearing me practise yet again,

kind of thought and then he said,

"Why don't you find a way to put two drumsticks on your fingers?"

So finally, I had these and with these, I was able to play the part from the record,

and that's how Funk Fingers were born.

But it's a funny song, you know.

I don't know if Peter ever did funny songs before, did he?

Life is full of contradictions.

And I think it was quite important for me to have something a little lighter

and sarcastic rather than just all this heartfelt stuff.

But this idea that

everything's just going to keep getting bigger and bigger

and growth will never stop,

and that's where you will find utopia

if you could just surround yourself with so much

outside of yourself, then you will be a happy man,

and he was making a mockery of that stance.

We left out the best line, though.

"Big, big, big, big,

bulge in my big pants."

It was definitely a sexual reference.

And Gail persuaded me that it wasn't going to fly in America.

These were early days, pre hip-hop.

And Peter's manager made him take it out. She said, "You can't do that."

With the Conspiracy of Hope Tour, which was '86,

Amnesty had gone to U2 to try and...

Who hadn't really broken America then. I think it was around the time of Red Rocks.

But they were thinking that U2 were getting some heat going,

and Amnesty wanted to increase their membership

in America particularly.

So Bono hustling me on the phone

and taking about Biko introducing him to Africa,

and saying that I had to be there.

You go to King Crimson gigs,

it was all guys scratching their chins, figuring out time signatures.

I'd go to Moody Blues... Even Moody Blues shows,

you tended to get people who were fairly serious about inter-galactic travel.

And Peter wasn't like that. He's actually a very accessible figure.

You know, I started meeting people

involved in the human rights world for the very first time,

meeting people who'd been tortured and so on

and suddenly this whole area of the world which I'd seen about

from a distance in newspapers or TV reports became very real.

He asked me if I would be up for

doing some touring on this Amnesty tour, and...

Of course, I was thrilled. I mean, I said, "Okay, absolutely."

That took me about two seconds to say yes.

I remember starting the tour and having so much fun.

Both because of the music of Peter's that we were playing,

which I was thrilled to be playing,

and the band that he had put together with Manu Katche and David Rhodes

and Ian Stanley was playing keyboards,

who is the keyboard player and one of the forces behind Tears For Fears.

And so, both with that

and also the whole synergy of touring

with a group of bands like the ones that were on that tour,

with U2 and The Neville Brothers

and all these great people.

I was talking to Joni on the phone, who was my wife at the time,

and just saying, "This is so great.

I can't even describe how much fun I'm having."

And she finally decided, "Okay.

Screw it. I'm gonna come out there and play, too."

So she came out for the New York Giants Stadium show,

and played a set with kind of borrowing musicians, borrowing Manu and myself.

She didn't even have a guitar. She had to borrow a guitar,

and put it in her tuning,

which then of course screwed the guitar player whose guitar it was,

because then, he was out of tune for his set. But that's a whole other story.

But anyhow, it was a fantastic experience,

and I loved being out on the road with those guys.

The thing with Amnesty, it was my first tour abroad.

I'd been just touring for myself in France with French artists,

just, like, you know, in land, so very different.

All of a sudden, once again, suddenly I'm on a huge stage

with amazing artists, huge names around, and there are tons of people in front of me.

So for me, it was my first tour abroad.

I mean, it was my first one and it just is gonna remain to the end of my days

'cause it's just, like, a huge and great

and amazing moment.

It felt particularly, as we say in French, "bon enfant".

I don't know how you translate "bon enfant" in English.

But I think it was a good relation between everyone, not forced.

And a lot of respect. You really could feel the respect.

I ended up getting asked to help with the '88 tour

which was to go around the world, Human Rights Now! Tour,

and I ended up doing Bono's hustling job,

and got Sting and Youssou and eventually Springsteen to come on board.

And I think for all those who took part, it was a life-changing experience.

And then luckily enough, I had the second Amnesty,

which was, for the case, much bigger. We had a DC-10. We all flew together.

And I met a lot of musicians, a lot of new artists. We jammed.

We were going around in a couple of planes,

one full of equipment, and the other full of musicians and crew

and occasionally, governments would get worried about

this Amnesty event stirring up unrest so they'd cancel the show,

and we'd be sitting in the front with Jack Healey and Bill Graham

and a map of the world, trying to work out where we could land this posse.

I mean, it was normally maybe one or two days ahead but, you know,

ridiculous things trying to set up a show with no notice,

but it was very exciting.

People have come,

come to bring change,

to end the human rights abuse,

end the disappearance, torture, execution.

You ended up inevitably talking about whatever human rights issues were going on

over time, and I remember India got very tricky

'cause we were sponsored by The Times of India,

who didn't like some of the stuff we were talking about that was happening in India.

But we were criticising our own countries. It wasn't just

a bunch of wealthy entertainers coming in and lecturing people,

which people get to hate quite reasonably.

We were trying to

allow people to tell their own stories, but using the musicians to get the press there.

My only regret is I never went to Africa for the concert. I should have done.

And Peter said it was phenomenal. They played Ivory Coast.

And at the time, Peter used to throw himself in the audience, and let himself get carried.

And it was all these black guys carrying this white guy around.

There are some visuals still around that are incredible.

I feel that there's a big need right now in the world that we're living in, in 2011,

of artists not just showing up and saying, "Okay, money for Somalia"

and stuff like that, and this is great. We shouldn't stop. We should keep going.

But there's a need for something like Conspiracy of Hope.

This feeling for the new generation of

four or five bands who take it upon their own to actually carry a message of hope.

Because this is what we do. This is what music is about.

It's about giving hope to people.

That's what it should be about anyways.

And that's the message that I got from this Amnesty tour,

is that we're really carrying hope around the world.

The thing about Sledgehammer is that it had that video,

and the video had such a charm, such a sense of humour,

which was something that people didn't realise about him.

He actually is a really funny guy.

You look at some of those old Genesis pictures of him dressed up as a flower.

That shit is funny.

It wasn't just progressive rock.

He was actually quite at ease with the humour of extremism,

of going the distance, of taking something a little bit further.

When you meet him at first, you think he's really quiet,

but he's got a wicked sense of humour

and he can really disarm you with his humour.

So, making the Sledgehammer video was actually in character.

People that know Peter and know him well

know that he's just one of the funniest guys there is.

He's just the jokester, and it's not what the persona is,

but he's a funny, affable guy. He's just a complete man.

I say this all the time, so it's not a strange thing.

It's like, you very rarely in your life get to meet complete human beings,

and Peter's as close to a complete human being as I've ever met.

I was introduced to this wonderful director, Stephen R. Johnson,

and he introduced me to the Quay Brothers,

and I introduced him to Aardman Animations,

all of whom worked together.

We held the meeting in our studio in Bristol, in our little converted garage,

and everything that was said by Stephen Johnson, I think,

was like bang on the money for us as far as we were concerned

because he was into this fantastically handmade look

and that was what we loved to hear.

So we thought, when the Sledgehammer offer came up, that this was a great idea.

It'll be seen internationally, which a lot of our work wasn't.

It was mostly limited to the UK TV.

So doing the music video

was great because at that time in the mid-'80s,

a lot of people were doing them, and we were aware

they were becoming an art form.

Stephen was the visionary behind it.

It was entirely his vision and we were all inspired by it, I think.

It was a pop promo, which we had never done before.

It was Peter Gabriel. It was very visual.

It was kind of right up our street.

It was doing stuff in camera with models and people.

And it was a great opportunity. We immediately said,

"Yes, we"ve got to do this." It was great fun.

He knew what he was doing, and so, by the way, did Peter.

They both knew about animation,

and that was really valuable because if they hadn't,

they would have been appalled and horrified

by the speed of things and the complication of things.

He was very clear and inspirational,

and it was quite surprising to us because he was American

and quite noisy and confident and used to working with a big crew

whereas animation is a rather private occupation.

Especially back then, it tended to be sort of one person with a model on the set.

And he was fairly approximate, in a good way.

I think for that project, you had to be. That wasn't the place for

an exacting, pedantic control-freak. That would have been horrible.

He had a catchphrase. He would say, "Shoot a whole bunch,"

meaning just shoot as many frames as you can in the time.

"Just shoot a whole bunch." I like that approximate tone.

And in return, we taught him easy-peasy, which he didn't know.

But people around the studio,

when he asked for something completely unreasonable and impossible,

"Easy-peasy. We can do that."

And so, there was a nice can-do attitude about the place.

It became just a very, very, very busy workshop.

So people were making things like

making the bumper-cars, for example,

or somebody was doing the drawn animation,

the background to the big dipper sequence,

somebody was taking a life cast of Peter to get the cast of his head to turn into ice.

And I guess, from the same mould, we made the big plasticine heads of Peter.

So just everything happening at once. That was the main impression.

But it's what everyone likes best is everyone diving in and doing fragments of jobs.

So, the first day, I think we finished at a reasonable hour,

probably at about 8:00 in the evening.

Every other day after that, we finished probably 10:00 or 11:00

and we'd start at probably 8:30.

And the last day, which started at probably 8:30 on a Saturday,

just ran through to about 4:00 in the morning on Sunday morning.

So we actually conquered the whole thing Monday through to Sunday morning.

Not quite non-stop, we did get some rest, but it was... They were long days.

But I'd say we had about four or five cameras going on it at any one time.

And I think that the whole thing was aired

I imagine on Top of the Pops on that following Thursday.

Sometimes we were playing it back.

There were certain sequences we were doing like four frames a second,

you just play it back very, very slowly.

Or we'd say to you, to Peter Gabriel,

"You're saying "sledge". You're on the "M" of hammer."

And you tell him what mouth shape he needed to make.

In the same way that you'd manipulate a puppet and put the, you know...

Same sort of thing, really, but with a human puppet.

Two weeks of sort of creative work in a very slow and painful process,

filming it old-style animation. So as clouds moved across my face,

they actually had to be painted frame by frame.

And the fish, too, which was great on day one, smelt horrible on day two.

The whole studio had a lovely, rich aroma. It stank really.

And then Nick Park was asked to animate these chickens.

So, they'd already been out of the fridge for quite a while

while they had wire put in them,

and then they were underneath the studio lights

and Nick is to be seen wearing protective clothing,

rubber gloves with a mask and stuff like that

because he was rightly anxious about salmonella.

The tools that we had available then in the mid-'80s

aren't the tools you got available now with digital editing,

chroma key, green screen, blue screen, CGI, compositing software.

You can literally do anything really, really quite quickly and quite slickly.

That's slightly why it's showing its age. It's a bit like watching old silent movies

that have got double exposure and stuff.

They all look a bit shimmery 'cause they're not...

And it's all they could do at the time, but they have a lovely feel to them.

And I also remember

that at some stage, Stephen decided that Peter should have some backing singers,

and he went and recruited kind of off the street these women that,

I don't think they were professional performers at all,

that became the backing singers.

And Stephen asked me to animate the backing singers.

And these women had never done anything like it before.

So they had to stand behind Peter,

and what they had to do was kind of move their... It was rather crude.

They were moving their arms across like this,

and moving their hips... So hips going against the arms.

So I'd have to say, "Stand on your left leg."

"Move your arms across to the right, and hold that," while the frame was taken.

"Now all take a half step to your right.

Hips further across to the right, please. Arms further across to the left,"

and take a frame. And they did this with good grace.

But they got pretty hacked off by the end.

At a certain stage they end up on chairs.

That wasn't the original narrative idea,

but clearly, they were getting so hacked off and bolshy that they were gonna walk out.

So we had to include chairs

so then they did their backing singing thing in sliding chairs thereafter.

Peter being absolutely the focal point of it and the centre of it all

was so up for it all and was willing to do almost anything

and we were obviously trying to make his life as comfortable as possible,

'cause there were some quite awkward and quite uncomfortable wigs we put him in.

But he was fantastic, absolutely fantastic.

And certainly, on that last day when we're shooting that big scene at the end

and he's in a suit made out of, you know, with the kind of Christmas tree lights on,

dancing around, and you realise it's like 3:00 on Sunday morning

to get all the stuff in the can.

He was as energised as anybody, and fantastic actually.

The funny thing is that after we did Sledgehammer,

it became immensely fashionable, and then lots of other

TV ads particularly, they would fake the same effect

by just shooting video and cutting it in a jerky way.

It's easy to fake.

But the joy of Sledgehammer is that it wasn't fake.

The extraordinary thing was, only a few weeks later, in fact

must have been just after Easter,

Peter Lord, and myself, and Rich Goleszowski and Nick Park

all went off to New York to work on the Pee-wee Herman show for a few months,

and I remember arriving in Manhattan and walking into Tower Records,

and suddenly, there it was on the screens in Tower Records.

I thought, "My God, it's hit!"

I mean, literally, in a way, it felt like it travelled over with us on the Virgin flight.

And there it was, on the screens in Manhattan.

And I tell you, it was a fantastic calling card, when people say,

"What are you doing here? What have you just done?"

"Just been shooting the Sledgehammer video." "What? Fantastic!"

It was an incredible calling card.

So when we arrived in New York, we were just some shy, retiring Brits.

And there, socially, it was a great calling card.

It was a fantastic thing to be able to say we'd done

'cause everyone knew it and that was wonderful.

We all thought, "This is a great song.

It's got a lovely beat, great lyrics, beautifully arranged."

And you kind of knew this is a quality piece of music.

And it had that sense like a lot of really good Motown, solid R&B.

You know this song's gonna have legs.

It's not just gonna be part of the frivolity of what was the pop music industry,

be forgotten in a couple of months.

There was something about it which had a sort of real quality kind of resonance.

And it's a lovely beat.

Even when I hear it now, you sort of get up and dance.

The chemistry with Peter was fantastic. I loved him like a brother and I still do.

And I think it was a very special time for the both of us.

Both in his own work and as a producer, he does a wonderful job, I think.

I particularly like what he did with Dylan, for example, as well.

He can bring...

I mean, obviously, he has a particular sound and all the rest,

which he'll always volunteer on any project he's working on,

but he's bigger than that.

He's definitely working to make something special and make it unique to that project.

He was great in understanding the emotional and the passionate side of things,

and pushing the writing and arranging.

Very dramatic track, this In Your Eyes.

Lot of layering on this.

Peter did have a liking for

this kind of a 12-string part that David Rhodes and I invented.

I think it's a real beauty.

It was originally called 61 'cause that was the number of the Linn program

that the groove was written around. And, in fact...

So, there was an African groove underlying it and then, we had some talking drum in it

from Youssou's wonderful talking drum player.

Peter is familiar with all of

the millions of different African rhythms and genres and sounds.

What Peter loves...

He's had a fascination with African music for a long time,

and I think this was a dream come true for him.

As I hear it now, I'm...

And Youssou N'Dour sounding beautiful, you know? One of the great phrasers.

And Manu Katche.

This drum beat got mimicked for decades after this.

That whole album "So" for me was,

of course, my big breakout abroad, but more than that, musically,

it was just like I'd just all of a sudden understood a lot of things

about how the music should be done, and how the music should be played.

That's just Manu and Peter now.

Just listening a lot to everyone, experience, of course,

but they just go with the flow

of what we're doing at the moment we're doing it.

They don't have things before in the head saying,

"Okay, we're gonna do this this way."

Producer says, "Okay, we're gonna cut this like that."

But no, everything is open. And once again,

doing sessions here was not the same ballgame at all.

It was just like, "You have to do it this way, structure-wise it's that way,"

and we have to cut it in one hour and that's it.

All of a sudden, in the middle of the country

with amazing musicians, amazing talents, everything's possible.

"You wanna do this? Let's try."

See what else we got here.

Tony Levin's bass.

We were very much into the bass playing the role of a drum at the time.

So, all this sliding around, that's what that's about.

Dan really knows the recording techniques and knows what he wants,

as far as bass, and his drums,

he knows what different techniques are gonna lead to and how they're gonna sound.

So, he's got the plan and he's there and doing that.

And then there's Peter

giving a kind of sideways approach to the thing and coming up with other ideas.

Through desperation, I've developed a theory which is

"Peripheral visual stimulation".

And that's not self abuse, by the way.

It's actually getting on a train,

and the way it goes is this...

That I think when we were running around, beating on our chests in the jungle,

whenever we were either hunting or being hunted,

the brain got used to working in overdrive

because we were either being killed or killing.

So everything was focused,

and all parts of the brain were sort of applied, or as many that were available.

So I think when we have peripheral visual stimulations,

like things just moving past you at high speed,

the brain automatically is freed up.

I've since suggested this to a few other people

and I think I should be on commission from the train companies,

because I know a few people who've been out there on the train.

The idea for WOMAD came on a train, there's lots of lyrics.

This is an example of some of Peter's ad-libs here that I always love.

And I would never erase these. I thought they were just little gold nuggets.

And I'd play them back to Peter and say,

"What about this? Could you do something like this again?"

I'm not a natural improviser. I mean, I love, musically, to create stuff,

but Youssou is a master effortless singer.

And I love to do it but it's not as effortless for me.

But I was still coming out with melodies and improvising on the spot.

And that was a lot of fun to do.

They're always touching to me, these little details.

So Youssou had these amazing improvisations.

So there, I would try and weave in

around what he was doing.

This was this Mr Bass Man, '50s type voice

that I thought would give it a nice colour, a nice anchor. It's quite cartoon-like,

but I really enjoy it. It makes people smile.

When I got involved,

there were two parallel tracks occurring at the same time.

One was to keep the project moving forward and we're continually recording,

and at the same time,

there was a bunch of technical issues that occurred in the beginning of the project

which basically caused the two tape machines not to stay in sync together.

So a lot of the performances

from the original take one versus take six,

they would start off in sync and then they would start drifting out of sync.

And for whatever reason,

a lot of times maybe, some of the later performances were the preferred takes.

And Peter would want to take the bass part from that performance

and put it in the first one and they just were not staying in time.

So we had to come up with a second set of tasks

that were done in the evening time

to try and get those performances back onto the original masters.

So we had two tape machines, two 24 tracks running in parallel.

So during the daytime,

we would record new parts or work on the existing arrangements

and then, late in the evening time after Peter had gone home, Dan and I,

and then really late, as I, myself, would sit there

and we had a big whiteboard and I would just have all these tasks

that I would have to try and execute and try and help the process move along

because you want to be able to perform

to the best representation of the song as it currently existed.

And without a certain part being on that master take,

it sometimes became harder to imagine.

There were a lot of very beautiful beginnings and tonalities that I did not want to lose.

We might not be going after that song

but just to be reminded that there was something there special

that might make its way to another song.

The way that a poet might write an incredible couplet,

but it's not living in a fixed poem, it's just a good couplet.

And that couplet can be moved, as Bob Dylan does, he moves his best couplets around.

So I felt that way about Peter's melodic ideas

and his riffs and for that matter, my sonics.

I kept really good notes and made sure that we built a really great house menu

because records are like,

let's say you've been cooking, and you got everybody coming over on Saturday night

and it's that night that you get to bring out your most unique and lovely dishes.

So I made a point of keeping really good track of these little ingredients

so they could live there in the end.

The best thing about Daniel Lanois' presence on 'So'

is that you don't hear his name

while you're listening to it.

It's a great trick of invisibility.

He did a lot to help realise

the mix of sort of human and electronic elements on that record.

There is a lot of programming of that vintage, we're talking mid-'80s, Linn drums.

That drum sound is actually quite identifiable to that period.

But it's one of the few records of that period that doesn't still sound like it's just 1986.

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