There is a tenderness and vulnerability in her voice, which is very appealing, and I think she is very musical – the way she was improvising in certain places was very strong. I loved her singing with the Cocteau Twins and more recently with Massive Attack and I was very happy that she was willing to get involved. Elizabeth Fraser is singing Sofia, the daughter. We have a lot of great vocalists working on this record, and that was exciting for us. In a sense making music is trying to trap magic as it happens.īecause we were telling a story with different characters, it seemed much more effective to have different people singing their parts. Just when you think you have trapped it, it disappears in front of you. Sounds are easier to store safely but mood is a fickle beast. You’ve forgotten what was giving it life, whereas if you keep the tape running, you can always come back to the moments that really catch fire. You think that you are playing exactly the same things as you were playing before, but somehow the spirit is gone and it is a dead corpse that you are working with. So often in music it’s something in the air. I learnt many years ago that you should keep tape running, although it seems wasteful to keep a DAT permanently on go whenever noise is being made, but we caught some moments which might have otherwise been lost. There was a ton of material so Edel and Alan, as well as working on the music, were trying to log everything. Sometimes we would all get together to look at some rhythmic elements downstairs in one of the studios. Richard Evans and Edel Griffiths were both in the Workroom doing different things.
We effectively tied up two studios for 18 months and (engineers) Richard Chappell and Alan Coleman were down in the writing room studio, which I call the garden shed, outside at the back. The brass band grew out of the mining villages and in reference to the industrial era, the middle section of the record, they provided a very evocative and nostalgic sound. So to that end, the Dhol Foundation put in some Asian rhythms, we have some African rhythms from Adzido, there is some didgeridoo and Arabian rhythmic elements as well. Against that we wanted to set a more contemporary Britain, which would be more multi-cultural and it would include Asian elements, African, Australian – as sort of broader mixture of influences. One is the British sensibility, with references from history and folk music.
One of the ideas that interested me was trying to present two views of Britain. As the story was partly a sort of creation myth, the egg element was in there and so was the idea at the end that the baby OVO was born as a representative of the future. I have always liked symmetrical words and palindromes visually, and OVO seemed to fit. I like the way you get a graphic element to the text rather than just a text with it’s own language. “With titles I always like things which are short – I use two letter titles often on my own records. Some of the tracks from OVO have become fixtures of the Gabriel canon, among them Downside Up and The Nest That Sailed Away, both of which would be reprised ten years later on the orchestral album New Blood. Released halfway through 2000, OVO boasts a stellar cast, including Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser, Neneh Cherry, Alison Goldfrapp and Paul Buchanan from The Blue Nile. Hurdy-gurdys butted up alongside drum & bass, ancient dancing the same millennium-celebrating dance as modern. Helping to tell the story of three generations of the same family living through three distinct eras – the past, the present, the future – Peter’s soundtrack accordingly drew from deep, long-held tradition and from contemporary grooves. OVO is the Gabriel-authored soundtrack to the Millennium Dome Show, the 160-artist extravaganza that underwent 999 performances during the 365 days in 2000 that the Dome was open.