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Peter Gabriel DVD Review - Still Growing Up/Live & Unwrapped

– From a performance standpoint, I believe that Peter Gabriel has always done an incredible job of combining spectacle with artistry. The musicianship displayed by his band has always been nothing less than superb, while the semi-futuristic choreography of his stagecraft lends each performance a degree of well-crafted, pre-conceived earnestness. Watching this DVD, though, it quickly becomes apparent that the light show is just as important to the performance as the music.

There are already a number of video products featuring live performances and video collections of Peter Gabriel’s music, but this collection has the others beat. The production is lush and the sound is brilliant, but the visual presentation is nothing less than fantastic. The performance disk is compiled from various settings throughout Europe, and the unique beauty of each location seems to energize both the band and the audience. There is something about the worldly nature of Gabriel’s music that suits the various European settings brilliantly. His music has always been about cultural respect, so it is rewarding to see audiences from France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland and northern England so enraptured by the band’s performance. There are telling and informative elements as well, such as when Gabriel tells a story in French about his inspiration for writing “San Jacinto”. Moments like these make it obvious that Peter Gabriel is a global artist, in the truest sense of the term, crossing cultural boundaries while implicitly proving that they can all coexist in harmony.

Admittedly, the second disk is a bit redundant, featuring large excerpts from the concert performances featured on disk one, interspliced with interview footage. Taken on its own, it’s a fascinating documentary, but it is best viewed as a separate entity from the concert disk. Studio footage of the band performing “Darkness”, “No Way Out” and “Growing Up” add to the appeal of the package, as do a few extra tracks that are excerpted from previous tours and television shows.