Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.5

Peter Gabriel - Classic Albums: So Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 23, 2012

This may come as something of a shock to younger readers here, but there was a time in the not so distant past when MTV played these things called “music videos”. These so-called “music videos” were short films used to promote an artist’s latest songs, and when MTV started broadcasting in August of 1981, there’s no denying that there was a primitive, almost quasi-home movie ambience to a lot of what was seen in those early days. (The foregoing is of course said with tongue firmly planted in cheek, for those who can’t easily discern tone in the printed word.) By the time Peter Gabriel’s So album was released in 1986, though, music videos had become decidedly more ambitious, and indeed there were often blatant attempts to push the artistic envelope with any given video outing. Still, probably no one expected Peter Gabriel, then still not exactly a household name and just beginning his mainstream explosion courtesy of So itself, to seemingly take over the airwaves with his inventive and frankly kind of goofy video for his huge hit “Sledgehammer”. As several commentators state in this appealing documentary built around the recording and release of So, many incorrectly thought of Gabriel as a kind of dry, persona-less artist, not realizing that he has an outré sense of humor, albeit one on the understated side of things, as is probably the case with many Brits. “Sledgehammer” was one of the first outright MTV “sensations”, a music video that exploded beyond the bounds of even that (then) music-centric channel and became part of a wider pop culture zeitgeist. It’s still one of the most fondly remembered music videos of all time, and there’s little doubt that it helped put Peter Gabriel firmly on the map as a major bestselling artist. But truth be told “Sledgehammer,” either the song or the video, is but one part of the So puzzle, and this brief but very informative documentary helps to fit all those other pieces firmly into place.

What becomes quite clear as this documentary proceeds is how incredibly meticulous Peter Gabriel and his producer Daniel Lanois were about the project. Literally hundreds (yes, hundreds) of takes were saved for several songs, and in some cases the artists would go through these takes one by one to select any given take a measure at a time. It must be kept in mind that this album was being recorded in the eighties, long before hard drive recording systems were the norm, something which make cut and paste editing almost as easy as it is in a word processing document. What this means is that some of these songs were literally spliced together on tape, as is described in some detail with regard to “In Your Eyes”.

Gabriel is firmly on record stating he’s only too aware of how slowly he works, and that is one reason he wanted to set up his own shop, as it were, instead of renting studio time from someone else. He did end up renting—a beautiful farmhouse—but he filled it with his own equipment and then took literally months to record So, something that was exacerbated by two 24 track recording consoles malfunctioning and not being in perfect synch with each other. That meant that a lot of the first takes of various songs, while preferable, couldn’t easily be ported over to later additional layers, resulting in a sort of engineering nightmare. Only dedicated work by a team of engineers was able to overcome this deficiency.

There are a lot of really fascinating interviews scattered throughout this piece, including of course Gabriel and Lanois, but also some cogent talking head segments from a Rolling Stone writer and Youssou N’Dour, the Senegalese multinstrumentalist and vocalist whose contributions to the album helped push him into the popular consciousness in a way he had never before experienced. In fact what is evident throughout this documentary is how open Gabriel was to combining different ideas and cultures into one cohesive hybrid. This even informs some of his lyrics, as he discusses vis a vis “In Your Eyes”, where he states that he wanted something that worked simultaneously as a religious treatise and a love song. Gabriel also comes off as an incredibly intuitive philosophical thinker, especially when he starts commenting on things like peripheral vision (such as seen on trains passing by landscapes very quickly) getting us past our atavistic flight or fight sensibilities and opening us up to a greater reality.

As might be expected, there’s also copious time given over to the fact that this album more than any previous Gabriel release was a product of the MTV generation, and not only because of the immense impact that the “Sledgehammer” video had on audiences. This was a rare case of a certain synergy working between an artist and an audience, something facilitated by the then very trendy reach of the MTV universe. As one of the interview subjects states, while this album is undeniably filled with the sounds of the eighties (as in its ubiquitous use of Linn drum loops), it’s one of those unusual albums that seems to be timeless even as it evokes a specific era.

Peter Gabriel - Classic Albums: So Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Classic Albums: Peter Gabriel So is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Eagle Rock Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080i transfer in 1.78:1 (with occasional elements in their original 1.33:1 aspect ratio). The video quality here is about what you would expect of a contemporary television outing. Current interview segments pop rather nicely, if not overwhelmingly, with fine detail good enough that you can easily read the slider labels on Lanois' mixing board even in a midrange shot. Some of the stock footage and archival footage varies greatly in quality, but nothing is downright horrible throughout this enterprise. Some of the oldest Gabriel concert footage probably fares most poorly, but its historical value outweighs its iffy quality.

Peter Gabriel - Classic Albums: So Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Classic Albums: Peter Gabriel So features an uncompressed LPCM 2.0 mix that suffices quite well for this documentary which only occasionally offers anything longer than a snippet of Gabriel's music. The bulk of this outing is talking head segments, and those are offered here with sterling fidelity if obviously not much in the way of even stereo separation. Some of the best sonic elements are actually in the supplemental features, where we get a bit more uninterrupted Gabriel music.

Peter Gabriel - Classic Albums: So Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Bonus Material (HD; 35:33) includes:

  Big Time provides some background on this tune, including tyring to synch various tracks and ideas with each other.
  Amnesty Tours has Gabriel talking about working with Bono to get the public more aware of Amnesty International.
  The Making of 'Sledgehammer' talks a lot about Gabriel's sense of humor and how that informed the famous music video. In Your Eyes is a really interesting little piece on the multi-layering that created one of the most memorable songs off of the album.

Peter Gabriel - Classic Albums: So Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Classic Albums: Peter Gabriel So is a really fascinating piece and should actually appeal to anyone with an interest in how an album is recorded and assembled, not necessarily only Peter Gabriel-centric fans. All of the interview segments are really cogent and informative, and Gabriel's contributions especially are quite thoughtful and insightful. Anyone who grew up as a child (or even adult) of MTV will no doubt remember the impact that "Sledgehammer" had at the time, but what this documentary makes clear is how careful the artists were in assembling the entire album from start to finish, a task which took an incredibly long and deliberate time to accomplish. This Blu-ray has some very appealing supplementary material which only adds to its allure, though some Gabriel fans are no doubt going to wish the disc offered more uninterrupted Gabriel music than it does. Despite occasionally questionable video quality elements, this release comes Recommended.