How Peter Gabriel Got His Mozo Working

In July 1986, Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’ beat his former band Genesis’s ‘Invisible Touch’ to the top of the US pop charts. After the dark, ominous and sometimes paranoid tone of his first four solo albums, ‘Sledgehammer’ seemed to resemble nothing else Gabriel had recorded, with its playful excursion into soul and surreal sexual double-entendre. ‘Mozo’ was one of Gabriel’s first ‘identity reconstructions’ during this period-a mercurial, shapeshifting figure who ‘came from nowhere, disrupting people’s lives and causing changes and then disappearing’. Certain aspects of Mozo resemble Coyote in Native American stories, a trickster character whose pranks and exploits are often sexual in nature. Through Mozo, it can be said, Gabriel got in touch with his mojo; unshackled from the progressive-pomp-storytelling image of his persona with Genesis, Gabriel was free to explore the soul roots of his adolescence.