Elbow's Guy Garvey:

“The first time we met him, he stuck his hand out and said, ‘Hello, I’m Peter’ – you’re like, ‘I fucking know, man!’ He’s really sweet and humble. There’s a natural shyness to him whilst also being prone to a dirty joke and a big laugh.

“I used to make an annual trip to Real World to write lyrics and, if he was about, Peter would join me for a cup of tea. One day I said to him, ‘Peter, you must miss video as art form’ because he really went for it creatively with the likes of ‘Sledgehammer’. He went, ‘Yeah, yeah. You know, the only things people watch over and over again now are religious videos and pornography.’ I was like, ‘Peter Gabriel: Sit On My Faith!’ and he slapped his thigh laughing. I was like, ‘I made Peter Gabriel laugh!’”

(2024)

On Peter's Real World Studios:

“He's done very positive things with his success. He's built an absolute cathedral to sound. It's beautiful. He's fighting tooth and nail to keep it open, and it's purely out of love.

"I like that he loved world music enough to make the most successful festival for world music [WOMAD], and the most successful label for world music as well [Real World Records]. He's just a very, very big-hearted man, and it's a testament to him that everyone who works in his studio adores him. He's a great bloke.”

(2014)

Junior Brother:

"At 15, in a one-hundred-year-old seminary-turned-boys school, the tenets of Gaelic football and Catholic guilt were the pillars holding up an all-powerful notion of manhood. Into this confounding maelstrom came, via my iTunes library, an album called Nursery Cryme by Genesis. Not the Phil Collins-led, shoulder-padded, synth-pop poster-boys of later fame – this was instead a group of youthful, awkward misfits producing deeply imaginative, power-house evocations of a hidden England: both fantastical and real, as well as archaic and theatric.

"The lead vocal was the bait upon the hook, and upon further study, also the heart of the eccentricity. Through Gabriel’s intensely weird presentation, the band’s electricity could flow, and the young me was shown a way out of the smothering conventions propping up my teenage life. I happily bit the bait, and was reeled into a world which offered the comfort, confusion and potential of embracing eccentricity..."

(2023)

The 1975's Matty Healy:

“The thing I’ve always connected with is artists at their peak. Most of the ones that I idolised and grew up with were at their peak in the ’80s – Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Paul Simon etc. That was a time when pop music wasn’t so encumbered by irony and cynicism. If you look at So by Peter Gabriel, it’s got Smash Hits all over it, but it’s also a really forward thinking piece of work. That time is perceived as a bygone era, but it’s still relevant – it’s when people got pop music right.”

(2013)

Listen to more tracks from Peter Gabriel below: