The Judge
RAVES!
Date: 08/02/11
Peter Gabriel - "Here Comes The Flood" (1977)
I seem to be in an oddly vulnerable emotional state at the moment. I know what has triggered it, and I'm trying to put together a blog post which might explore and explain the matter further. More on that some time soon. Perhaps. 
One symptom of this - which also manifested itself the last time this happened - is that certain pieces of music, certain songs, have a profound effect on me. This is one such.
Here Comes The Flood was the closing track on Peter Gabriel's first solo album in 1977. Gabriel said that it was about a psychic flood (*) but - as ever - there is more to it than that.
Gabriel expressed dissatisfaction with the version on the album, regarding the production and orchestration as being decidedly overegged. All his subsequent versions of the song have been with standard rock instrumentation, or solo with piano. However, I think - partly no doubt because it's the version I first heard - that the setting of the original is just right for what can only adequately be called an apocalyptic vision; a sweeping away of all that has gone before, a washing away of all that is familiar and comforting, leaving only ourselves, but profoundly changed.
(*) Saw a newspaper billboard today which spoke of "260 SHEEP DROWNED IN FLLOD". Yes, that's right, "FLLOD". Embarrassing for our local rag, the more so as it would have been duplicated on all their billboards this afternoon, in letters some six inches high.
