Rock review: Peter Gabriel

3Arena, Dublin

****

Rightly regarded as one of rock music's most committed innovators, Peter Gabriel continues to surprise. The first to arrive on a night of them is the announcement from the stage, with Gabriel positioned at a piano, that the show will be segmented into three sections: acoustic, electronic/experimental, and a complete performance of his 1986 album, So. As Gabriel tells us this, the house lights stay up, and the crew, dressed in orange medical scrubs, busy themselves around and about the sound equipment.

Designed by someone with a liking of both Fritz Lang's Metropolis and James Cameron's Terminator, the largely monochromatic retro-futuristic stage set looks simultaneously wonderful and bleak. The band members are all bald and dressed in multi-zipped black overalls; the crew reappear similarly attired, wearing fencing masks, as they operate onstage lights that are wheeled around on large cranes. Factor in some very odd but effective dad-dancing choreography, and the very real sense that most men in the audience look remarkably like Simon Pegg, and you've got an evening that might be slightly nostalgic but is nevertheless rooted in the here and now.

With the "acoustic" section performed in the glare of house lights, songs such as Come Talk to Me, Shock the Monkey and Family Snapshot arrive half-formed yet highly strung. It is when the final song in that list segues into the second section that matters really take off. Biding their time until this point, the band now channel Nine Inch Nails while Gabriel sings avant-pop songs such as Digging in the Dirt, Secret World, and No Self Control. The crane lighting swoops and stalks, and, before the strobe effects take hold, we're into section three.

So made a pop star out of Gabriel, who up to then was best-known as the former lead singer of prog-rockers Genesis, and for eccentric but accessible hit songs such as Solsbury Hill and Games Without Frontiers. The biggest hits from So (Sledgehammer, Don't Give Up, Big Time, In Your Eyes) are delivered with precision and received with rapturous appreciation.

The gig ends with the highly emotive, reactionary Biko. An obligatory outro, perhaps, but like the artful show it crowns, it highlights Gabriel's aesthetic: humanity tinged with innovation, ideas and intellect.