Peter Gabriel

Peter Brian Gabriel (born 13 February 1950) is an English singer-songwriter, musician, and human rights activist. He is known primarily for both his solo career and his eight-year run as the lead vocalist of Genesis. A winner of multiple major awards, he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Genesis and as a solo artist.

While attending Charterhouse School in Surrey, Gabriel was a member of the band Garden Wall, which merged into Genesis in 1967. Beginning with From Genesis to Revelation (1969), Gabriel acted as their lead vocalist and principal lyricist, and several of the albums released during his tenure, such as Nursery Cryme (1971), Foxtrot (1972) and Selling England by the Pound (1973), are considered progressive rock classics. Known for his theatrical performances and stage costumes, Gabriel’s relations with his bandmates became strained around the release of the concept album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway in 1974, and Gabriel left the band in 1975 following a world tour to support the album. He was replaced by drummer Phil Collins. Gabriel took a brief musical hiatus before launching a successful solo career with four self-titled studio albums, which spanned progressive rock, new wave, post-punk, and world music styles. They contained the hit singles "Solsbury Hill" (1977), "Games Without Frontiers" (1980), "Shock the Monkey" (1982), and "Biko" (1980), an anti-apartheid protest anthem.

In 1986, Gabriel released the worldbeat-influenced album So, his best-selling release; it is certified triple-platinum in the UK and quintuple-platinum in the US. Considered to be one of the best albums of the 1980s, it transformed him from a cult artist into an international superstar. The album's most successful single, "Sledgehammer", won a record nine MTV Awards at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards. A 2011 Time report said "Sledgehammer" was the most played music video of all time on MTV. He released further albums Us (1992) and Up (2002), the latter his last album of new songs for 21 years. During the interim, he contributed the song "Down to Earth" to the Pixar film WALL-E (2008), recorded a cover album of other artists' songs, Scratch My Back (2010), and sponsored a companion album on which his own songs were covered by the same artists, And I'll Scratch Yours (2013). He embarked on the Back to Front Tour (2012–14), and the Rock Paper Scissors Tour with Sting (2016). Gabriel released a new album, I/O, in 2023, and supported it with the I/O The Tour that year. He has been releasing songs to the lunar cycle for the follow-up album O\I (2026).

A supporter of world music for much of his career, Gabriel co-founded the World of Music, Arts and Dance (WOMAD) festival in 1982 and wrote the soundtrack for Martin Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which is considered a landmark in the world and new age genres. He founded Real World Studios in Wiltshire, where he produces and promotes world music through his Real World Records label. Gabriel was an early pioneer of digital distribution methods for music through his co-founding of OD2, one of the first online music download services. He has also been involved in numerous humanitarian efforts. Beginning with Amnesty International’s A Conspiracy of Hope tour in 1986, he has headlined several human rights benefit concerts, including Amnesty’s Human Rights Now! tour in 1988, and co-created the human rights organisation Witness in 1992. He developed the idea for The Elders, an organisation of public figures recognized as peace activists, alongside Nelson Mandela and Richard Branson in 2007.

Gabriel has won three Brit Awards, seven Grammy Awards, 13 MTV Video Music Awards, the inaugural Pioneer Award at the BT Digital Music Awards, the Q Lifetime Achievement, the Ivor Novello Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Polar Music Prize. He was named a BMI Icon at the 57th annual BMI London Awards for his "influence on generations of music makers". In recognition of his human rights activism, he received the Man of Peace award from the Nobel Peace Prize laureates in 2006, and Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people worldwide in 2008. AllMusic has described him as "one of rock's most ambitious, innovative musicians, as well as one of its most political". In 2026, Loudwire ranked him as the second greatest progressive rock singer of all time. In recognition of his musical achievements, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of South Australia in 2015.

Read more about this composer on Wikipedia.