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(Real World)The legendary prog-turned-pop star started work on his new album in the mid-90s and has drip-fed its songs to fans, but it is anything but disjointedPeter Gabriel’s tenth studio album of original material has been compared to both the Beach Boys’ Smile and Guns N’ Roses’ Chinese Democracy. These were two records with legendarily elephantine gestation periods, although the latter seems an inadequate yardstick: Chinese Democracy came out 15 years after Guns N’ Roses’ previous album, a veritable rush release compared to the 28 years Gabriel has been working on i/o.Its production apparently began concurrently with that of his last album of original material Up, in 1995 – before 70% of the artists in the current UK singles Top 10 were even born. It was first scheduled for release in 2004, two years after Up came out, although you could hardly accuse Gabriel of slacking in the interim period: he’s released nine albums – collections of cover versions and his own songs re-recorded with an orchestra, a film soundtrack, the collaborative work Big Blue Ball (also begun in 1995), three live albums and two compilations – toured seven times, co-founded and sold a digital distribution network, helped launch the international non-governmental organisation the Elders, the “brain-on-music entertainment, media and tech studio” Reverberation and Panopticom. The latter is an “infinitely expandable, universally accessible data globe” for which i/o’s opening track of the same name acts as a kind of jingle, albeit a luxuriously-appointed one: it lasts more than five minutes, comes, like the rest of i/o in two distinct mixes (one by Mark “Spike” Stent and one by Tchad Blake) and features both Brian Eno on synth and session musician supremo Tony Levin on bass. Continue reading...