Peter Gabriel

Peter Brian Gabriel (born 13 February 1950) is an English singer-songwriter, musician, and human rights activist. He is known for being a co-founder and the lead vocalist of Genesis for their first eight years and for his subsequent solo career. A winner of multiple major awards, he has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Genesis and as a solo artist. While attending Charterhouse School in Surrey, Gabriel co-founded Genesis in 1967. As the band's lead vocalist and principal lyricist, several of the albums released during his tenure, such as Nursery Cryme (1971), Foxtrot (1972) and Selling England by the Pound (1973), are considered progressive rock classics. Known for his theatrical performances and stage costumes, Gabriel's relations with his bandmates became strained around the release of the concept album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway in 1974, and he left the band in 1975 following a world tour to support the album. Genesis continued with drummer Phil Collins handling lead vocals. Gabriel took a brief musical hiatus before launching a successful solo career with four self-titled studio albums, which spanned progressive rock, new wave, post-punk, and world music styles. They contained the hit singles "Solsbury Hill" (1977), "Games Without Frontiers" (1980), "Shock the Monkey" (1982), and "Biko" (1980), a protest song against apartheid in South Africa. In 1986, Gabriel released the worldbeat-influenced album So, his best-selling release; it is certified triple-platinum in the UK and quintuple-platinum in the US. Considered to be one of the best albums of the 1980s, it transformed him from a cult artist into an international superstar. The album's most successful single, "Sledgehammer", won a record nine MTV Awards at the 1987 MTV Video Music Awards. A 2011 Time report said "Sledgehammer" was the most played music video of...