Peter Gabriel
Before the Flood
Peter Gabriel Demos
1975

1. Howling At The Moon
2. Excuse Me
3. Funny Man
4. No More Mickey (aka Richard MacPhail)
5. Get the Guns - listen carefully for the root of "Down the Dolce Vita"
6. Here Comes the Flood
7. God Knows


These are supposed to be very early demos recorded for Car album (1976, Atco - Atco being Atlantic, a Warner subsidiary label). These demos are raw; they may have been done in Gabriel's home studio or possibly at Fuse Music, England, which somehow was connected with Warner Brothers. Most of the songs are acoustic piano with a few accompanying support tracks and Peter singing -- which makes me believe this was from Peter's home studio efforts. 

The story is that this demos tape was found in a warehouse cleaning closet in white tape box marked: 7 1/2ips 1/4 trk stereo Gabriel/Hall Fuse Music. Unfortunately, the tape box had become water-soaked and the bown-oxide tape was rotting.  The tape had some warbley spots from the neglect and also quite a lot of tape hiss and lost tone. The tape has been processed to improve the sound. "Get the Guns" appears to have been recorded badly or with misaligned heads so it could not be improved as much as the other songs. On the whole there is a tiny bit of tape hiss but no more than you'd expect from such an old artifact. There is also one small glitch from a later cassette-to-cd transfer in "Excuse Me".

Along with tape, the warehouse box also contained the lead sheets, listing the composers as "Peter Gabriel and Tony Hall" and  marked with a stamp from Fuse Music, England. They were lead melody transcriptions for copyright purposes, not hand-written by Gabriel or anything. 

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.

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

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