Peter Brian Gabriel (born February 13, 1950, in Cobham, Surrey) is an English musician. He first came to fame as a member of the progressive rock group Genesis, went on to a successful solo career, and more recently has focused on producing and promoting world music and pioneering digital distribution methods for music. In addition he has been involved in various humanitarian efforts.
Gabriel founded Genesis in 1967 while a pupil at Charterhouse School with bandmates Tony Banks, Anthony Phillips, and Mike Rutherford. The name of the band was suggested by fellow Charterhouse School alumnus, the now disgraced Jonathan King.
Genesis quickly became one of the most talked-about bands in the UK and eventually Italy, Belgium and other European countries, largely due to Gabriel's flamboyant stage presence, which involved numerous bizarre costume changes and comical, dreamlike stories told as the introduction to each song.
Among Gabriel's many famous costumes (which he developed partly as way of overcoming his stage fright) were "The Flower" (worn for "Supper's Ready", from Foxtrot), "Britannia" (worn for "Dancing With The Moonlit Knight," from Selling England by the Pound), "Old King Cole" (worn for "The Musical Box", from Nursery Cryme), "Rael" (worn throughout most of the performance of the album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway), and "The Slipperman" (worn during "The Colony of Slippermen," also from The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway).
During "The Knife," a popular live song from the Trespass album, Gabriel would perform a stunt that, two decades later, became a fixture of hard-rock and heavy-metal concerts: stage diving. On one occasion, he broke a leg leaping into the crowd - but managed to climb back up onto the stage and finish the performance. Gabriel occasionally would fall backwards into crowds during his solo shows (notably shown in his concert film PoV during the song "Lay Your Hands On Me") and allow the crowd to pass him around, but stopped crowd surfing as he became older.
