Peter Gabriel – Street Spirit (Fade Out)
Has Peter Gabriel‘s version of Street Spirit (Fade Out) been aligned merely with the word ‘bad’? How gauche. This cover is worse than bad: it’s so astonishingly stupid that there are a number of taxing questions that could legitimately be asked with a straight face.
- Could two five year old children have done any worse?
- Could these children have done any worse if they were deaf?
- Or blind?
- Or without arms and left to bash the instruments with spanners held between their teeth, whilst also trying to sing the words?
- etc.
Spoken word introductions rarely work, but here, Peter’s stab at the first few lines veers dazzlingly close to William Shatner’s epically ridiculous Speak-The-Song, Take-The-Cash cover of Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds.
Undeterred by such an unambiguously shonky start, he then proceeds with a song that could kindly be described as ‘sparse’. In fact, the song is virtually empty – to the point that it seems most likely that Gabriel accidentally pushed down 122 of the 124 faders and then absent mindedly pushed the “Send to record label” button.
Careful investigation has revealed a tantalising glimpse into the legendarily bold and experimental in studio approach practised by Peter. To achieve such an idiosyncratic sound, he took the hole-punched cards from auto-playing piano, gave them to a monkey to cut up and reassemble, then fed it back through the machine, all the time clapping like an excited toddler.
After a while, his derring-do tilt at boundary-prodding includes a trip into an infant-regressive state. Like the child given a tape recorder who initially fills the first ten minutes pretending to be on local radio, he too then starts making bored mouth-noises to fill the remaining 80 minutes of cassette tape.
If Peter Gabriel had indeed recorded himself aping a local radio DJ – inventing traffic reports, wacky phone-ins, news stories about grannies fending off hopeless attackers – it would honestly be preferable than listening to him grunt, squeak and grimace his way through Street Spirit.
This song isn’t just a waste of time, it actually sucks in time from the rest of your life: as you ride the bus, drive the car, or at any moment when your mind is idling even a millisecond – each of these times when you wonder how this could have ever been considered a beneficial contribution to humankind’s greater good.
Oh, time, precious time. The only thing between each of us and the endless black, empty nothingness of death – all greedily and unwittingly gobbled up by Peter; Peter the Great Destroyer of Time.
And every time you even think of how bad this song is, or what we have done to deserve it, or how you could have recorded a better version by farting through a recorder and teaching a duck to quack the lyrics, Peter has robbed you of just a few more precious seconds, and you will be just that little bit closer to the end, the final sweet release.
Every time an unwanted stride closer to escape. Escape from the agonies brought about by a cover that proves that there are no winners, just losers; losers who savagely crippled their precious eye-wink of existence stranded on a meaningless planet in an endless universe listening to Peter Gabriel’s cover of Street Spirit (Fade Out).
Huge thanks to Chris from Broken Sound for bringing this monstrosity to my attention. If you know a woeful cover that will make us all feel that bit better about ourselves, why not email me and share the dubious wealth?
RELATED POSTS:
Yup, the first minute could be interpreted as painful, but Gabriel has always been in the forefront of ‘experimental’ (over-used word these days) in multi-media, so it’s unfair just to judge him the way you would, say a pub chanter. In fact I’d say he’s revolutionary and multi-faceted. See – William Burroughs (of course).
Hi Starless!
I am all for ‘experimental’ – I own enough Tortoise albums to justify that – and as such, in theory, I support PG in making and publishing this cover. In fact, I would vigorously defend his right to make such covers.
It’s just that I’d rather put my head in a soup tureen and bang a spoon against the outside for half an hour than listen to it ever again. It made me feel sad.
Thanks for commenting!
Joe
Starless this is not “experimental” it’s just plain f@#king awful (whatever PG’s past achievements)
Josef Mengele was experimental, and it wasn’t a good thing
Ha ha – thanks Steve, for managing to boil down my entire article into one pithy statement.
I reacted even more violently to the whole album, and spewed it at my blog here:
http://empireofthesenseless.blogspot.com/2010/03/so.html
I take pleasure in, lead to I found exactly what I was looking for. You have ended my 4 day lengthy hunt! God Bless you man. Have a great day. Bye