I Have the Touch: Two Vintage Peter Gabriel Live Sets Get Physical Releases

Peter Gabriel Live at WOMAD 1982
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Peter Gabriel may be prepping an unexpected new album this year (o\i, the comparatively rapid follow-up to 2023’s decades-in-development i/o) – but don’t worry: he’s got catalogue plans, too! Over the next few months, the two time Rock & Roll Hall of Famer will offer physical releases of two archival live shows he released digitally last year: Live At WOMAD 1982, and In the Big Room, a live-in-studio set from 2003.

Live At WOMAD takes listeners back to the first installment of Gabriel’s founded festival of the same name, occurring over a weekend in the summer of 1982 at the Bath & West Showground in remote Shepton Mallet, Somerset, England. WOMAD (World Of Music, Arts and Dance) saw the former Genesis singer put his interest in music from other cultures front and center, offering acts from Europe (The Beat, Echo & The Bunnymen, Simple Minds) as well as Africa and Asia (the Drummers of Burundi, Imrat Khan, Suns of Arqa and the Ekome National Dance Company) and even a set from American jazz musician Don Cherry.

Gabriel’s performance, held for a capacity crowd of 4,000 people at the indoor Showering Pavilion on the showground, was something truly special: seven of the nine songs on the set list had been recorded for his as-yet unreleased fourth solo album (released eponymously in most territories and under the name Security in the U.S.). With a band that included several of the album’s personnel (guitarist David Rhodes, synth player Larry Fast, drummer Jerry Marotta) and other special guests (guitarist Peter Hammill of Van Der Graf Generator, future Simple Minds bassist John Giblin and select percussion from Ekome), this “special festival set of non-album material” (available on CD or three sides of vinyl) further established Gabriel as a dynamic concert performer (his first concert LP, Plays Live, came out in 1983) and keen connoisseur of non-Western music. (The Security material, including “San Jacinto,” “I Have the Touch” and “Shock the Monkey,” would hit stores that fall, and Gabriel would perform a one-off reunion with Genesis that year to defray the exorbitant costs of the festival, which continues to operate today.)

Peter Gabriel In the Big Room
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The next live set In the Big Room jumps two decades, after Gabriel’s commercial peak of So (1986) and a series of innovative music videos. 2002’s Up would only be his third album of pop material since Security, and this 2CD or 2LP set features a special, intimate set from the end of the Growing Up Tour he embarked on to promote it in 2003. The November 23 set took place in the biggest studio space of Gabriel’s own Real World Studios, for an intimate ticketed audience consisting of members of Gabriel’s Full Moon fan club. The Growing Up band – Rhodes and Richard Evans on guitar, longtime bassist Tony Levin, drummer Ged Lynch, keyboardist Rachel Z and daughter Melanie Gabriel on backing vocals – offered renditions of favorites from Up (“More Than This,” “Darkness,” “Signal to Noise”), deeper catalogue cuts (Up outtake “Burn You Up, Burn You Down,” released on 2003’s compilation Hit, the OVO cut “The Tower That Ate People”) and all-around favorites including “Games Without Frontiers,” “Digging in the Dirt,” “Shock the Monkey” and “In Your Eyes.”

In the Big Room is available physically on March 6, with Live At WOMAD 1982 following on May 8, by which point o\i will still be rolling out track by track with each lunar cycle. Pre-order links and full track lists are below; as an Amazon affiliate, we earn from qualifying purchases.

Live At WOMAD 1982 (Real World, 2026)

CD: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada
2LP: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada

  1. San Jacinto
  2. The Family and the Fishing Net
  3. I Have the Touch
  4. Lay Your Hands on Me
  5. Shock the Monkey
  6. I Go Swimming
  7. The Rhythm of the Heat
  8. Kiss of Life
  9. Biko

All tracks recorded live at the WOMAD Festival, Bath & West Showground, Shepton Mallet, Somerset, England – 7/16/1982

In the Big Room (Real World, 2026)

2CD: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada
2LP: Amazon U.S. / Amazon U.K. / Amazon Canada

Disc 1

  1. Burn You Up, Burn You Down
  2. More Than This
  3. Games Without Frontiers
  4. Downside Up
  5. Mercy Street
  6. Darkness
  7. Digging in the Dirt
  8. The Tower That Ate People

Disc 2

  1. San Jacinto
  2. Shock the Monkey
  3. Signal to Noise
  4. Secret World
  5. Father, Son
  6. In Your Eyes

All tracks recorded live in the Big Room of Real World Studios, Box, Wiltshire, England – 11/23/2003

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Mike Duquette
Mike Duquette

Mike Duquette (Founder) was fascinated with catalog music ever since he was a teenager. A 2009 graduate of Seton Hall University with a B.A. in journalism, Mike paired his profession with his passion through The Second Disc, one of the first sites to focus on all reissue labels great and small. His passion for reissues turned into a career, having written at and worked for all three major catalogue music labels and contributing to Allmusic, Billboard, Discogs, City Pages and Ultimate Classic Rock. He's penned liner notes for Verve, Chess, Mondo and Soul Music Records.

Born and raised in New Jersey, Mike lives in Astoria, Queens with his wife, a cat named Ravioli, twin daughters and a large yet tasteful collection of music.

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