Monday, May 30, 2011

PG - 1975 - Before The Flood (demos)


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Dr. Forrester said...

Before the Flood: Peter Gabriel Demos 1975 - goody PitchFix version

Original FLACs >
goody - dBpowerAMP (Convert to WAV) > Cool Edit Pro (Pitch Correction +47 cents) > TLH (FLAC, sigs)

01 Howling At The Moon 3:05
02 Excuse Me 3:42
03 Funny Man 4:27
04 No More Mickey (aka Richard MacPhail) 2:45
05 Get the Guns (listen carefully for the root of "Down the Dolce Vita") 2:55
06 Here Comes the Flood 3:39
07 God Knows 4:59

These are evidently very early demos recorded for "car" (1976, Atco - Atco being Atlantic, a Warner subsidiary label). They are extremely raw; they may have been done in Gabriel's home studio. Most are acoustic piano with a few accompanying support tracks and Peter singing.

The songs come from a white tape box marked: 7 1/2ips 1/4 trk stereo Gabriel/Hall Fuse Music

The lead sheets had the composer's names given as "Peter Gabriel and Tony Hall" and were marked with a stamp from Fuse Music, England; they were merely lead melody transcriptions for copyright purposes, not hand-written by Gabriel or anything.

At that time, the best research i could come up with was that Fuse was somehow connected to Warner Bros (maybe like Sire was, but English; a sub-distribution deal?)... I later heard that the Fuse Music building burned down and took a whole lot of master tapes with it, and that this reel is quite probably the only surviving record of these demos.

This brown-oxide tape was discovered rotting in a water-soaked box shoved into a cleaning closet, along with the lead sheets, in a cavernous and seldom-used warehouse. It was lost/forgotten/abandoned. The tape had some warbley spots from the neglect and also quite a lot of tape hiss and lost tone.

I processed the material for several weeks before I was satisfied as to the quality, although "Get the Guns" was problemmatic to begin with; the Master appears to have been recorded badly or with misaligned heads. On the whole there is a tiny bit of tape hiss but no more than you'd expect from such a "live" environment. There is unfortunately one small glitch from a later cassette-to-cd transfer in "Excuse Me" ("Looking for Lost Angeleeeeee") so don't think it's your file or player :)

Enjoy this very raw and simple glimpse into the creative process of Peter Gabriel.

(man-on-the-spot), June 2006

May 30, 2011 at 2:56 AM

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