Music Arcades: Peter Gabriel: Peter Gabriel, Ein Deutsches Album

I couldn't find it this record in the place where I expected it to be in my collection, between Genesis and Kate Bush, next to So. I had to go album-by-album through the whole collection, and, when I still couldn't find it, I almost abandoned the search. In the process I found an album of gamelan music, which I'd previously abandoned as being a faulty entry in my database, so there was a spin-off benefit at least. Only on the second pass along the shelf did I find Ein Deutsches Album, several feet from So, but next to another Gabriel record. Ninety five percent of the time my thematic ordering or the collection works very well, but when it fails, it takes a long time to recover.

I had the English version of this album on tape, recorded from Jeremy's copy, and bought this version for novelty value a year or two later. I like the idea of people doing translations of their albums, and wish more would do it. As far as I know, Peter Gabriel did German versions of this album and the one that follows it, but that's all.

Thirty years on, it's odd to remember that this album features a hit single (Top 10?) and was itself a minor hit. No cymbals again, as Wikipedia observes. The sound palette is very much of its time, but no less engaging for that. Well, I say "engaging", but in fact it's the sound of alienation and anomie — of clichéd psychopathology, as I remember PG admitting in a Sounds interview at the time. I played Eindringling (Intruder) to the Boy, and he wasn't too impressed. "Blondie!" he requested, and I had to concede that I could see why that would be more up his street. Still, he liked singing along to Biko, kind of.