Welcome To The Pleasure Dome

06/15/2000 3:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Sylvie Simmons

The Millennium Dome, an enormous contraceptive cap built by the side of the River Thames as the focus for London's Y2K celebrations, is filled with bright and noisy exhibits--part educational, part entertainment, part commercial (imagine hippies taking over McDonald's and sponsoring walk-through theme park rides). Every day, four times a day, its 150-foot high, 12,000-capacity central arena (currently seating about 300; the Dome isn't too popular) hosts a half-hour show featuring more lights, props, and dry ice than a Kiss concert, with 200 dancers, trapeze artists, and acrobats performing to music composed by Peter Gabriel. An extended version of this show can be heard on OVO: The Millennium Show. Though not an official new Peter Gabriel album (he's one of the seven vocalists name-checked in the track listing), fans will welcome OVO as the first disc containing all-new Gabriel material since 1992's Us.

"I am very slow," Gabriel smiles apologetically, sitting in the breakfast room of his 200-year-old converted water mill in West England (HQ for his Real World studios, multimedia, and record company). "I've always been that way. Why? Because there's a lot of stuff that I don't think is good enough, and it takes me a long time before I reach the point where I can say, 'That's how it should be, it feels ready.' And because now I own more stuff and I've got more possibilities for diversions and displacement activity."

Gabriel was hard at work in his computer-filled loft studio on the real follow-up to Us, his new album Up (tentatively scheduled for release way before R.E.M.'s Up, it now looks like it won't be out until 2001), when another one of those diversions--the Dome project--came up. The combination of free artistic license (his story, his visuals, his music) and enormous budget (around $40 million) was simply too good to ignore: "Here was this huge playpen and a big sandbox where you could go in and build your sandcastle. That was the attraction." Another attraction was that, with a New Year's Eve 1999 opening date, the Dome project had a "big fat concrete deadline, which is something I think I need. The worst thing you can ever do to an artist is say, 'You can do anything you want.' If you say, 'I'm going to put you in this tight little box, now find your way out of it,' the artist responds really well." But the biggest hook was the chance to play around with an idea that's been haunting Gabriel for years: "trying to form an alternative theme park--a kind of Disneyland designed by the most interesting artists and scientists of our time." The Dome, in its planning stages, not only bore a resemblance to his Real World Experience Park, but had also consulted some of the same architects, designers, and technicians.

Twenty years ago, Gabriel came up with the vision for a technologically advanced, New Age utopia with artistic, educational, and spiritual theme-rides, enclosed in a dome with its own weather system. He discussed ideas and mapped out plans with everyone from David Byrne and Brian Eno (about creating an aural underground forest), to psychologist R.D. Laing (about designing a phobia-confronting "Ride Of Fears"), to numerous computer geniuses, including the inventor of virtual reality. Attempts to get funding to launch the theme park in Australia, Germany, and, most recently, Spain failed, but Gabriel, undaunted, is still working on it. "Perhaps in the end, when it finally does happen, it will keep more of its integrity intact because it has evolved slowly," he rationalizes. Meanwhile, he has raided the ideas for use in his many other projects, from his annual WOMAD world music festival to his CD-ROM, Eve.

By the sound of it, Gabrieland would have been a darned sight better than the Millennium Dome turned out. Admits Gabriel, "I would have done it differently if I'd have had that budget"--over $1 billion--"and the Dome has certainly been the most unpopular project in Britain, probably in my lifetime. But in a way that was also, perversely, an attraction. I always find interesting the struggle between two potentially opposing forces."

Such struggle is certainly something Gabriel knows a lot about, as a man who started out as a soul drummer and became the singer in a progressive rock band; a superstar who quit Genesis to be alone but has constantly surrounded himself with collaborators ever since; a nature-loving former hippie ("my hippie past is no secret--I mean, I'm someone who dressed up as a flower!") who loves computers and virtual reality; and a self-described "tight-assed Englishman" who has regularly indulged in the highly un-English pursuit of psychotherapy (where the most important thing he learned is "that you probably can't find happiness until you find sadness..."). His whole life and art, Gabriel says, have been a battle of opposites.

"I think that comes from my mom and dad. My dad's an electrical engineer, an inventor--reserved, shy, and analytical. My mom's more instinctive and emotional--music, classical, is her big thing. And I've got both. I have a depressive part of my nature and a hopeful, energetic side, more loving life and laughter. There is a sadness in a lot of the music I like, and I've always found it much, much easier to write miserable music than joyful music, but I'd love to do a bit of both."

Judging by his next album's title, Up, and by "Father, Son"--a tranquil hymn written after a powerful "breakthrough" week spent alone with his father ("he's getting old, and I felt I hadn't really bonded with him as much as I wanted...") that was originally intended for Up but requisitioned for OVO--Gabriel would appear to have done just that. "I am more comfortable with myself than I used to be. I got to what I felt was a light place--but only by pushing out the gunge," he smiles, adding, "It still oscillates between moments of depression and moments of joy and happiness."