Peter Gabriel

A Hard
Lesson

The blue-moon song: released on May 31, the second full moon of the month, and the oldest piece on o\i. Gabriel started it in Senegal in the late eighties or early nineties, in love with the music he heard there and the tension of its polyrhythms, threes against fours. Quirky, strange and long by his own description, it is a journey about finding your place and how you fit in, assembled like a jigsaw over three decades from more contributors than the rest of the album put together, with old R&B and folk in the mix. Mark “Spike” Stent’s Bright-Side Mix came first; Tchad Blake’s Dark-Side Mix followed at the new moon in mid-June.

Words and music by Peter Gabriel; produced by Peter Gabriel and Mike Elizondo. Built up over the years: guitar by Tony Berg, Gabriel’s A&R man in the nineties, and a great deal by David Rhodes; traces of an industrial version by Richard Evans, who also added mandolin and other acoustic instruments around a harpsichord sample; bass by Mike Elizondo; rhythms by Abe Rounds. Bright-Side Mix by Mark “Spike” Stent; Dark-Side Mix by Tchad Blake. Real World Records. Artwork for the single: stills from Francis Alÿs’s film Cuentos Patrióticos, made with Rafael Ortega – a man, a pole and a circle of sheep, after the civil servants of Mexico City who bleated in protest in 1968. Photograph: François-Edmond Fortier, Dakar – Jeunes lutteurs Lébous, postcard, early 1900s – young Lébou wrestlers in the ring of their village. Private collection.