Surprisingly, I’ve never featured Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’ before, though I’ve blogged about four other tracks on the 9-song So album. This song was the record’s biggest hit, and Gabriel’s biggest North American hit, period.
Two other interesting bits of trivia I learned from the song’s Wikipedia page: the song ‘Sledgehammer’ replaced at #1 on the charts was ‘Invisible Touch‘ by Gabriel’s former band, Genesis; and ‘Sledgehammer’ is the most-played video of all time by MTV.
Peter Gabriel’s first four solo albums were all titled Peter Gabriel for some reason. His third, released in 1980, is popularly referred to as Melt due to its cover image.
As a kid, I owned this album on vinyl but didn’t play it very often. I remember it best for closing track ‘Biko,’ which I once played at school for an assignment asking us to pick a song about an historical figure. Pretty cool choice for an elementary school, if you ask me.
I owned my first CD player in the late 80s. It was a large black boom box with a cassette deck on the front and the CD unit on top. Something like this, but not quite as slick.
The first three CDs I bought were albums I had owned on vinyl but wanted to experience in this new, sonically superior format (I guess vinyl enthusiasts would quibble with the “sonically superior” part). One was U2’s The Joshua Tree, another was Paul Simon’s Graceland and the third was Peter Gabriel’s So.
Continuing my look at acclaimed albums released in 1982, we arrive at Peter Gabriel’s self-titled fourth solo album. Not to be confused with his self-titled first, second and third solo albums.
Gabriel is an imaginative fellow, but that imagination didn’t extend to his album titles. Those first four albums, all officially titled Peter Gabriel, have come to be known by a word derived from the album covers: Car, Scratch, Melt and Security.
Meet Me In Montauk 
