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 all time on MTV. He released further albums Us (1992) and Up (2002), the latter his last album of new songs for 21 years. During the interim, he contributed the song "Down to Earth" to the Pixar film WALL-E (2008), recorded a cover album of other artists' songs, Scratch My Back (2010), and sponsored a companion album on which his own songs were covered by the same artists, And I'll Scratch Yours (2013). He embarked on the Back to Front Tour (2012–14), and the Rock Paper Scissors Tour with Sting (2016). Gabriel released a new album, I/O, in 2023, and supported it with the I/O The Tour that year. He has been releasing songs to the lunar cycle for the follow-up album O\I (2026).
A supporter of world music for much of his career, Gabriel co-founded the World of Music, Arts and Dance (WOMAD) festival in 1982 and wrote the soundtrack for Martin Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which is considered a landmark in the world and new age genres. He founded Real World Studios in Wiltshire, where he produces and promotes world music through his Real World Records label. Gabriel was an early pioneer of digital distribution methods for music through his co-founding of OD2, one of the first online music download services. He has also been involved in numerous humanitarian efforts. Beginning with Amnesty International’s A Conspiracy of Hope tour in 1986, he has headlined several human rights benefit concerts, including Amnesty's Human Rights Now! tour in 1988, and co-created the human rights organisation Witness in 1992. He developed the idea for The Elders, an organisation of public figures recognised as peace activists, alongside Nelson Mandela and Richard Branson in 2007.
Gabriel has won three Brit Awards, seven Grammy Awards,, the inaugural Pioneer Award at the BT Digital Music Awards, the Q Lifetime Achievement, the Ivor Novello Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the Polar Music Prize. He was named a BMI Icon at the 57th annual BMI London Awards for his "influence on generations of music makers". In recognition of his human rights activism, he received the Man of Peace award from the Nobel Peace Prize laureates in 2006, and Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people worldwide in 2008. AllMusic has described him as "one of rock's most ambitious, innovative musicians, as well as one of its most political". In 2026, Loudwire ranked him as the second greatest progressive rock singer of all time. In recognition of his musical achievements, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of South Australia in 2015.
Early life Gabriel was born in Chobham, Surrey, on 13 February 1950, the son of Edith Irene (née Allen, 1921–2016) and Ralph Parton Gabriel (1912–2012). His mother, who came from a musical family, was the daughter of Colonel Edward Allen, who was the chairman of the Civil Service Department Store on the Strand. His father, who was the son of Christopher Burton Gabriel (1876–1947), was an electrical-engineer and dairy-farm owner from a family of London timber merchants. His great-great-great-uncle, Sir Thomas Gabriel, 1st Baronet, was Lord Mayor of London from 1866 to 1877.
Gabriel was raised at Deep Pool Farm, a Victorian manor, near Chobham. He attended the private primary-school Cable House, Woking, and St. Andrews Preparatory School for Boys, Horsell, at the latter of which his teachers noticed his singing talent, but he focussed on piano lessons from his mother. He also developed an interest in drumming and, when aged 10 years, bought a floor tom.
Gabriel later remarked of his early influences, "Hymns played quite a large part. They were the closest I came to soul music before I discovered soul music. There are certain hymns that you can scream your lungs out on, and I used to love that. It was great when you used to get the old shivers down the back."Capital Radio interview with Alan Freeman, broadcast October 1982; transcribed in Gabriel fanzine White Shadow (#3, pp12) by editor Fred Tomsett He wrote his first song, "Sammy the Slug", at age 12. An aunt gave him money for professional singing-lessons around this time, which he used to buy the Beatles' debut album Please Please Me soon after its release. In September 1963, he started at the public Charterhouse School, Godalming. There, he was a drummer and vocalist for his first band, the trad jazz outfit called the Milords (or M'Lords). This was followed by a holiday band called the Spoken Word, which recorded an acetate in 1966. Gabriel played drums in both these bands, with Mike Rutherford later commenting, "Pete wasand still is, I thinka frustrated drummer."Neer, Dan (1985). Mike on Mike [interview LP], Atlantic Recording Corporation.
Career 1965–1975: Early career and Genesis In 1965, while still at Charterhouse, Gabriel formed the band Garden Wall with his schoolmates Tony Banks on piano, Johnny Trapman on trumpet, and Chris Stewart on drums. Banks had started at Charterhouse at the same time as Gabriel, and the two were uninterested in school activities but bonded over music and started to write songs. At their final concert before they broke up, Gabriel wore a kaftan and beads and showered the audience with petals he had picked from neighbouring gardens. Garden Wall disbanded in 1967; Gabriel and Banks were invited by their Charterhouse schoolmates Anthony Phillips and Mike Rutherford, who were in their own band at the school called Anon until it split up the previous year, to work on a demo tape of songs together. Gabriel and Banks contributed "She Is Beautiful", the first song they wrote together. The tape was sent to Charterhouse alumnus, musician Jonathan King, who was immediately enthusiastic largely due to Gabriel's vocals. He signed the group and suggested that their name be Gabriel's Angels, but this was unpopular with the other members, and they soon settled on his other suggestion of Genesis.
After King suggested they stick to more straightforward pop, Gabriel and Banks wrote "The Silent Sun" as a pastiche of the Bee Gees, one of King's favourite bands. It became Genesis' first single, released in 1968, and was included on their debut studio album From Genesis to Revelation (1968). Following the commercial failure of From Genesis to Revelation, the band went their separate ways, and Gabriel continued his studies at Charterhouse. In September 1969, Gabriel, Banks, Rutherford, and Phillips decided to drop their plans and make Genesis a full-time band. In early 1970, Gabriel played the flute on Mona Bone Jakon by Cat Stevens. The second studio album by Genesis, Trespass (1970), marked Gabriel expanding his musical output with the flute, accordion, tambourine, and bass drum, and incorporating his soul music influences. Gabriel explained that he was driven to play these instruments because he was uncomfortable with doing nothing during instrumental sections. He would have preferred to play keyboard instruments, but said, "[Banks] was extraordinarily possessive about the keyboards. I'd done a bit of flute at school, I always liked the sound, and a little bit of oboe (I was an even worse oboe player, but it made a couple of good noises now and again). Then the bass drum was something physical, visual, that I could kick hard and occasionally it was in time!" The album sold few copies, with Gabriel at one point securing a place to study at the London School of Film Technique because the band "seemed to be dying".
Genesis soon recruited guitarist Steve Hackett and drummer Phil Collins. Gabriel began growing in confidence as a frontman; during an encore performance of "The Knife" on 19 June 1971, he took a running jump into the audience and expected them to catch him, only for them to instead move out of the way and leave him to land on the floor and break his ankle. He consequently had to perform Genesis' next several shows with a wheelchair and crutches. Also during the Trespass tour, he started to recite stories to introduce songs as a way to cover the silence while the band tuned their instruments or technical faults were being fixed. These stories were all improvised on the spot, and evolved as the tour went along. The opener of their next studio album, Nursery Cryme (1971), "The Musical Box", was their first song in which Gabriel incorporated a story and characters into the lyrics, as the lyrics to previous story-based Genesis songs such as "White Mountain" and "One-Eyed Hound" were all written by other members of the group. Gabriel was the primary writer of "Harold the Barrel", another story song on Nursery Cryme, with Collins helping him on the lyrics.
The shows featuring Foxtrot (1972) marked a key development in Gabriel's stage performance. During a show in Dublin in September 1972, he disappeared from the set during the instrumental section of "The Musical Box" and reappeared in his wife's red dress and a fox's head, mimicking the album's cover. The idea of the fox costume had been suggested to him by Paul Conroy and Glen Colson, employees of Genesis's record label, Charisma Records. Gabriel said he consulted the rest of Genesis about the fox costume but grew tired of arguing about it, but the other members all maintained that nothing was said about it beforehand and that when Gabriel came out in costume they initially mistook him for a fan invading the stage. The incident received front-page coverage in Melody Maker, giving them national exposure which allowed the group to double their performance fee. One of Gabriel's stories was printed on the liner notes of their live album, Genesis Live (1973). By late 1973, following the success of Selling England by the Pound (1973), which centred on English themes and literary and materialistic references, a typical Genesis show had Gabriel wear fluorescent make-up, a cape, and bat wings for "Watcher of the Skies", a helmet, chest plate, and a shield for "Dancing with the Moonlit Knight", a crown of thorns and a flower mask for "Supper's Ready", and an old man mask for "The Musical Box".