“It’s a kind of sexual metaphor:” The Making Of Sledgehammer, By Peter Gabriel

Article first published in Uncut in August, 2012

After doing soundtrack to Birdy, we’d had our fill of experimental stuff,” Peter Gabriel tells Uncut. “I didn’t want to do instrumental album, or another album without cymbals or hi-hats! I wanted to take my time and do a proper pop record, with strong songs and strong melodies.”

One of those was “Sledgehammer”. What started as a funky jam session ended up as one of the biggest singles of the ’80s, transforming Peter Gabriel into a global chart-topper and MTV icon.

Like his previous albums – his fourth self-titled release and Birdy – it was recorded in Gabriel’s studio in the grounds of Ashcombe House, the country house north-east of Bath that was his home from 1978 to 1986.

The studio was an old cattle barn, a one-storey stone building, surrounded by cows and spectacular views of the Somerset countryside. For over a year, the key participants (producer Daniel Lanois, guitarist David Rhodes and engineer Kevin Killen) stayed in Gabriel’s house, working long days.

“There was a lot of hilarity and fun,” says Killen. “But we started to go a bit stir crazy after a while. When the female backing singers arrived to record the vocals for ‘Sledgehammer’, I remember Dan and Peter tying me to a chair because I’d barely seen a woman in months.”

Like most of So, “Sledgehammer” started with Gabriel playing song ideas on a keyboard, accompanied by a drum machine, while Rhodes and Lanois jammed along. Lanois and Killen would then edit these jams down to the best bits. “The bass and drums would come last,” says Lanois. “It’s the complete opposite of how you’d usually work, but it was perfect for this project.”

KEY PLAYERS

PETER GABRIEL: My soundtrack to Alan Parker’s Birdy established the core trio for So. I had guitarist David Rhodes, a long-term collaborator since about 1979, and he introduced me to Daniel Lanois, who he’d met through his work with Jon Hassell. Dan was a great source of ideas and inspiration, some of which he’d acquired from working with Brian Eno. He was able to slow things down and get me to work with sound and ambience. And he was crucial to shaping the ideas I came up with into songs.

DAVID RHODES: Some people claimed that “Sledgehammer” was the
last song we recorded on the album. It was actually the first! We started jamming around that riff towards the end of the Birdy sessions. It set the mood-playful, experimental, improvisatory – for the whole of So.

KEVIN KILLEN: Dan and David would play guitars, and Peter would operate a drum machine and play a Prophet 5. Sometimes he’d play a Yamaha CP70, or an Emulator.

DANIEL LANOIS: Peter was working with a beatbox, and he had the basic groove for “Sledgehammer” for a long time. It was a basic hip-hop shuffle, and Peter would play this syncopated organ stab over the top, while singing the wordless melody.

We had these yellow construction hats hanging around the studio, Peter got us to wear them. I was the foreman: “OK guys, I’m gonna ding the workbell and you won’t get another ding until lunch break. Now, let’s hit it with a sledgehammer!”

RHODES: We certainly wore the yellow hats, on and off, throughout the album. It was a nice touch. Peter’s very good at lightening the mood when things get too heavy.

LANOIS: So you had this beat and Peter’s sustained organ line. But it needed something fast on the top of this relatively slow groove. So me and David would play 16ths over the top, on our guitars. The kind of thing that Stevie Wonder would play on a Clavinet-chicka-chicka-chicka-chicka-but we were playing them on surf guitars. That’s how it came to life.

GABRIEL: I was also playing around with a new box of tricks called an emulator, and it had this nice, exotic shakuhachi sound. We thought that would sound odd on a funk track!

“This is the new stuff…we go dancing in’,’Show for me and I will show for you’. Those were all Peter’s vocal ad-libs.”

Daniel Lanois

LANOIS: When we we jamming the song, the best parts came when the fixed part of the arrangement ended. I tried to leave a good five or six minutes of outro, which is when Peter and David would start going real crazy. Peter’s a real improv master: all those vocal inflections ‘I kicked the habit’, ‘This is the new stuff…we go dancing in’,’Show for me and I will show for you’. Those were all Peter’s vocal ad-libs. Because we were working to a click-track, it was easy to edit the best ad-libs down and then splice them into the song. I’d then ask Peter to take these random, wordless ad-libs and turn them into proper, structured lyrics.

GABRIEL: What are the lyrics about? What do you think they’re about? Isn’t it obvious? Ha ha!

LANOIS: It’s the kind of sexual metaphor that you get in blues songs. “Squeeze my lemon ’til the juice runs down my leg.” That’s the Sledgehammer I guess!

GABRIEL: You could see the whole of So as a homage to black pop music-be it from Africa, Latin America or the United States – but “Sledgehammer” was the most obvious R’n’B rip-off. In terms of groove, lyrics and melody, it’s my tribute to that Stax-y kind of soul music.

LANOIS: My worry was that it didn’t groove enough. It was quite slow and so it needed quite a lot of syncopation to work. Peter tended to work with rock drummers-[adopts primitive, grunting sound] boom-CHA, boom-boom CHA – and we recorded lots of them on that song, but none of them really worked. I started going a little crazy. “Can’t anyone play a fuckin’ shuffle? You Brits, this ain’t fuckin’ skiffle!” Then there was this Senegalese guy, George Acogny, who was working with Peter, and he suggested his friend Manu Katché…

KILLEN: Manu came over from Paris, and he was amazing. He got into the groove immediately. Did it in one take, and then left to catch a train back to London!

LANOIS: Peter’s dream was to get the Memphis Horns to play on it. I only felt confident to ask them once we’d locked down a groove with Manu Katché, and Tony Levin recorded his amazing bassline. Then I felt I could go face the Memphis Horns with my head held high!

WAYNE JACKSON: I got a call from Peter’s people and flew over to New York to record at The Power Station. Peter and Daniel were there. The weird thing was that it was pretty much the only session I ever played without my man Andrew Love, tenor saxophone in the Memphis Horns [Love passed away on April 12, 2012). He was playing a session down in Dallas, Texas. So I had to hire two hip New York guys to take his place: Don Mikkelsen on trombone and Mark Rivera on saxophone. We played on “Sledgehammer” and “Big Time”.

WE TALKED A LOT ABOUT ‘IZZUMS’

GABRIEL: It was incredibly exciting to have Wayne there. He’d played at the best gig I’d ever seen in my life-Otis Redding at the Ram Jam Club in Brixton when I was 16.

JACKSON: Peter was incredibly knowledgeable about my work. I do remember that gig in Brixton. Intimate venue, absolutely packed, sweat dripping off the roof, that kind of place. Peter’s got a great soul voice. He knows how to let rip, like the best soul singers.

LANOIS: We talked a lot about “izzums”. That was our word for anything in music that gets expressed but isn’t heard. The Memphis Horns play with tons of “izzums”. It’s not just the notes – it’s about the tonguing, the hesitations, the inflections, that’s what comes out in the record. They’re insinuated. We played Wayne the basic horn line and he filled it with izzums.

JACKSON: The track was already quite well developed, but it needed something in the mid- range to kick it off. I wrote the horn part the way I wrote all the old Stax parts. Playing by ear, I wrote the fanfare and arranged the harmonies for the tenor and trombone to play.

KILLEN: You lose all perspective when you’re working on an album for more than a year, but when the guys from Virgin- and the Americans from Geffen – came down to the studio, they were incredibly excited. It became clear that “Sledge” was going to be the lead single.

GABRIEL: I took a risk and decided to spend quite a lot of money on the video for “Sledge”. I was introduced to this wonderful director, Stephen R Johnson. He introduced me to the Quay Brothers; I introduced him to David Sproxton from Aardman Animations.

DAVID SPROXTON: Peter and the director Stephen Johnson wrote a very rough storyboard -three sheets of A3 with some sketches. Then Stephen came down to Bristol, where me, Pete Lord, Nick Park and a few others started filling this storyboard out. We had three weeks of prep before the filming – we started to build the sets, work out the animation, make models. One idea was to have an ice block in the shape of Peter’s head so we could smash it with an axe. We did a face cast of Peter and turned it into a vinyl mould, filled it with water and put it in a deep freeze. We thought we’d have enough time to make half a dozen ice heads prior to the shoot, but it took a lot longer to freeze than we thought. We ended up with just the one!

GABRIEL: It’s a shame how so many artists just spent a couple of hours with a video director and let them illustrate their music. It’s an important part of what you do. You have a responsibility to learn about it.

SPROXTON: We shot it in our old space in Wetherell Place in Clifton, Bristol – a 2,000-square-foot Victorian warehouse where we shot the first Creature Comforts, the adverts for Lurpak and Cuprinol and most of A Grand Day Out. You had four or five separate stages dotted around the space, filming simultaneously. You had the claymation models of Peter’s head. You had Steve and Tim Quay doing their animations with wooden objects, fruit and fish. You had Peter on his back, under a sheet of glass, as they moved objects on top and around him. And you had Nick Park doing his dancing chickens sequence. We were going to make them in latex, but Stephen demanded fresh chickens. So Nick – who’s actually a keen ornithologist! – bought some from a supermarket, filled them with aluminium wire and started animating them. If you watch the footage, you can see them start fresh and pale pink and quickly getting red and grotty under days of hot studio lights.

GABRIEL: David and Nick told me that they were going to use me as an animated model. So I spent a couple of days, lying under a glass screen, being filmed with bright lights and a rostrum camera, being painted, having my hair played with, everything. The most painful thing was having the sky painted, frame by frame, on my face. The clouds would be moved across, and my skin got very sore after the clouds had hit the halfway point!

“There’s no perfume like success, but whichever class you travel, it’s the same bags in the hold.”

Peter Gabriel

SPROXTON: It was a week of solid filming. We started it on Monday morning, just after Easter in 1986. We started at 8am and worked late most nights. On the Saturday we worked through the night until Sunday afternoon. The last bit, with the backing singers on the chairs, was shot at the Glynne Wickham Studio Theatre, part of Bristol University’s drama department. The beauty of that space is that it had fly rails at the back, rails from which you can swap scenery. So, by constantly swapping those backdrops, we were able to animate the wallpaper and the windows.

GABRIEL: That final scene was me being a song and dance man. That was a long day’s work!

SPROXTON: Everyone was exhausted by this time. We all mucked in for that final scene. You can see me and Nick Park and everyone else in those shots. The only reason why the girls playing the singers sit down on chairs is because they were tired of standing! But Peter was incredible. He had more energy than all of us combined. He was jumping around, standing for hours, never getting tired. So we finished it on the Sunday. The film went for developing on the Monday, was edited on the Tuesday and Wednesday and – amazingly – on the Thursday it went out on Top Of The Pops! It sounds like a remarkable turnaround, but that was standard for a music video.

GABRIEL: The success of So – largely fuelled by “Sledgehammer” – was also a great facilitator. Many of the things I love to do today – Witness.org, thetoolbox.net, the Elders.org, Gabble and Womad – would have been a lot more difficult to realise without the opportunities that success can bring. There’s no perfume like success, but whichever class you travel, it’s the same bags in the hold.