Games Without Frontiers (Patreon)

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Thanks to the wonderful Annie McDuffie for helping me get this monster to work. Go back her on Patreon, or buy her music. 

1979 was an incubational year in Peter Gabriel’s career. After touring and releasing his two inaugural albums the previous two years, he spent much of his time in the studio and limited his concert appearances to the festival circuit. At the end of the year he appeared on the BBC to duet on a Roy Harper cover with Kate Bush, signaling to the British public that this 21-year-old singer was an integral part of the music industry’s future who could hold her own against Peter Gabriel (Sinéad O’Connor claims she was impressed by Bush’s resilience to Gabriel’s advances). While coordinating these public appearances, Gabriel was preparing for his most important work to date as a solo artist, readying listeners for his next move.

Leaving Genesis was a colossal move for Gabriel. The frontman of a major band leaving at its popular peak usually heralded doom for both the individual and the collective. Occasionally a band like the Beatles was too big to fail to the point the public would buy anything its members released, and in the Eighties Paul Weller’s decision to disband The Jam at the height of their chart clout was a power move, but usually dramatic changes like this mean career implosion for everyone involved. Yet Gabriel simply moved his trajectory into an area without his band. His lengthy meditations on pastoral England translated easily into a tradition of solo British art rockers. Gabriel’s first single “Solsbury Hill” is an astonishing kiss-off to his former band. He effectively signs off of Genesis with “you can keep my things/they’ve come to take me home,” signaling that his prog rock band wouldn’t be his entire body of work — only a launching pad for the rest of it. 

While Gabriel’s early solo career was successful, he wasn’t in Van Morrison or Paul McCartney territory. “Solsbury Hill” narrowly missed the top 10 in the UK (it peaked at #13), and his next two releases “Modern Love” and “D.I.Y.” failed to even chart, so Gabriel didn’t have a major single as a solo artist. He’d fared better in the album charts, where both his first LPs had reached #7 and 10# respectively. In a markedly pretentious move against the record industry, Gabriel released two eponymous albums, a trend he only broke with after making four of those. These days the records are known by the content of their cover art, resulting in Gabriel’s first two albums being called “Car” and “Scratch.” The albums’ dual eponymy is somewhat significant to their content. Both are ambitious and have their charms, particularly the Robert Fripp-produced “Scratch,” but they’re more notable for their obtuseness than particular listenability. While the albums are admirable testaments to an artist finding his footing without four talented musicians behind him (“Scratch” is the better album for Robert Fripp’s involvement), they’re far from Gabriel’s creative peak. For all that these are ambitious albums, their aimlessness doesn’t help Gabriel appear as a confident force on his own. It would take three tries for him to channel the power of “Solsbury Hill” into a whole album.

Gabriel’s third album Melt (named after its Storm Thorgerson-designed half-deliquescent cover art) is the singer at his peak. Melt showcases Gabriel at his most articulate and furious, synthesizing the musical extravagance of Genesis with Gabriel’s skill for writing tight pop songs. The clarifying hand of producer Steve Lillywhite helps discipline Gabriel’s songs, keeping them mostly quick and clear. A highly respectable cast of musical players contributes to the album — Robert Fripp, Paul Weller, XTC’s Dave Gregory, Gabriel’s former bandmate Phil Collins, and our own Kate Bush. The hedonistic burglary of “Intruder,” a loss of agency in “No Self Control,” “Family Snapshot” and its darkly compelling dive into the parricidal fantasies of a divorced couple’s child, the unintended queerness of “Not One of Us,” and the moving worldly overreach of “Biko” make Melt what it is: an astonishing musical statement on the world of 1980. The album is shot through with a sense of terror at what the world has become, framing it through the eyes of killers, families, and innocents. Gabriel is a wonderfully alienating songwriter on this record, assuming the roles of frighteningly complex characters and forcing the listener to confront the uncomfortable reality of how the human mind works in the early neoliberal age. Marcello Carlin is right to be baffled by the fact that Melt got to #1. When are #1 albums this chilling?

Yet it’s easy to overstate Melt’s horror drive. It sails through its perfectly reasonable run time of 45 minutes, boasting catchy melodies throughout. At his core, Gabriel is a pop songwriter with a golden ear for melody and a quintessential delight in language. Rarely is this more evident than on “Games Without Frontiers,” one of the best singles of 1980. The song’s opening riff creeps in like it’s anxious to be there. The rest of the song is similarly queasy as it progresses in 4/4 and E flat minor, treading through distinct sequences but always sounding a bit hopeless and angry. 

A key aspect of the song is its intro: Kate Bush’s guest vocal, which consists exclusively of her coldly stating “jeux san frontières.” It’s a sly title drop: a French translation of the song’s name before Gabriel sings the actual vernacular title to close out the chorus. Gabriel is simultaneously expressing an awareness of form and international consciousness. And he gives the song’s title to this 21-year-old pop neophyte. What’s the significance of Kate Bush doing this? You could explain it away as Gabriel deploying the chart’s hot new talent for clout, but the choice of Bush as a guest vocalist demonstrates savvy on Gabriel’s part.

Bush has comfortably settled into a tradition of British art rockers following Pink Floyd, Genesis, Bowie, and John. This is the scene where her career started and more or less the one she stuck to. Her influence extended well beyond it — by the late 80s she has more in common with the wellspring of women in alternative music who were popping up at the time — but this is the scene where she made her name. Gabriel has clearly recognized this. She’s something of a musical heir of his, opting for aesthetic maximalism and musical conversations about the nature of Englishness. And both Bush and Gabriel are deeply invested in that conversation at this time. In 1979, Gabriel and Bush were both recording their third albums, both of which dropped in 1980 and reflected global turmoil, channeling this into some bold, dark pop songs. A double feature of Never for Ever and Melt would probably reveal a few things about the two records: they’re on the same wavelength, tapping into how this new, dark political reality has fundamentally warped the dynamics of ordinary family lives. The two artists were in artistic communion with each other, making distinct albums but clearly having the same conversation. Gabriel inviting Bush to open a single for him wasn’t just a business move: he clearly understood Kate Bush was the future. 

In “Games Without Frontiers,” Bush acts as doomsayer, uttering the words “jeux san frontières” like a hex on a country. Perhaps they are a hex: Jeux San Frontières is a TV game show based in France. Conceived by French President Charles de Gaulle before a Situationist-enabled populace of French youths scared the shit out of him, the programme is a series of absurd games participated in by numerous European countries for the purpose of unifying the continent. Really. Countries would come together for the purpose of doing things like putting people in Centurion costumes and making them play in swimming pools on television. It was an utterly embarrassing gig, and in its original incarnation lasted for thirty-four years. It’s planned for a revival now. Why did it succeed, and why did twenty countries get ensnared by this nonsense? Perhaps sheer spectacle was the purpose. People like seeing absurd things happen on TV. Or perhaps isn’t the right word, as we’re somewhat immune to absurdity in a world where the most powerful man alive lies about his own tweets seconds after posting them. It’s a way of procrastination — the longer we keep up a sham of countries coming together under the banner of Doing Very Silly Things for the Camera, the less we have to pay attention to the atrocities said nations commit on a domestic and international level. If our governments are honest about playing games, what’s the problem?

This trend is a source of horror in “Games Without Frontiers.” The first verse is a list of playground transactions between children: “Hans plays with Lotte/Lotte plays with Jane/Jane plays with Willi/Willi is happy again.” Gabriel’s regimen of playing children then turns sinister with some conspicuous names, as he finishes the first part of the verse with “Adolf builds a bonfire/Enrico plays with it.” The invocation of Adolf Hitler and Enrico Fermi is startling: what the hell have these two figures got to do with a bunch of children’s games? 

The rest of the first verse has a similarly cavalier attitude to imperialist conquests: “whistling tunes/we HIDE in the dunes by the seaside,” “whistling tunes/we’re PISSING on goons in the jungle.” This is song is talking about acts of war, and specific historical ones like World War II and Vietnam. However, there’s no conveying of human cost or mortality in these acts. The bomb-throwing and gunfire are reduced to boys with their toys going out on adventures. Gabriel’s playful approach to language takes a creepy turn in this regard as he sums up war with sing-song lyrics like “if looks could kill/they probably will.” The stiff upper-lip of Victoriana has been subsumed by the image-over-cold-reality practices of neoliberalism. As long as we have fun with our killing, it’s a nothing more than an entertaining pastime. Gabriel rams the futile cruelty of this new status quo home in the chorus’ punchline: “games without frontiers/WAR WITHOUT TEARS.” 

Choosing TV game shows as mode for this callousness is… interesting, to say the least. It’s a trick Doctor Who would utilize decades later. The international business reality TV Dragons’ Den thrives on the cruelty of venture capitalists exploiting younger entrepreneurs and mocking them on television as they do it. Game shows treat their contestants as disposable: you either survive the competition and win lots of money, or settle into obscurity. It’s a scale model of capitalism, deeming a single individual worthy of moderate glory while leaving an entire group to languish in poverty, debt, and shame. Jeux San Frontières applies this model to entire countries, placing different kinds of nationalism against each other (amusingly, Germany was the most frequent winner, with six finale victories). It’s like imperialism, but without victims.

Gabriel consciously invokes the programme by using different titles for it, including the show’s English name (“it’s a knockout!”). The second verse of the song is more nationally oriented than the first, pulling out iconographies of individual countries for its games (“Andre has a red flag/Chiang Chang’s is blue/they all have hills to fly them on/except for Lin Tai Yu”). Leaning hard into the metaphor, Gabriel focuses less on individual conflicts than a global mass of military conflicts, allowing them to amass into one ugly tournament of bloodshed. Violence stops being a personal affair of bodies being blown away and more a big TV event — what was it Jean Baudrillard said about the Gulf War never taking place? Peter Gabriel got there first.

The delightfully trippy video helmed by Ashes to Ashes director David Mallet (but edited by others) has a nice mix of complementary images, placing Gabriel in front of a wall of TVs all showing his face and intercutting that with footage of war crimes, atomic bombs, and malicious carnival attractions depicting malignant little Americas. Gabriel doesn’t only know how to record this song: he gets how it should look too (granted the video has been re-edited many times to reach its current state, but it got there eventually). 

The track is, typically for Gabriel, an astonishing production too. Listening to the various synth parts of the song and picking them apart alone would justify several listens. Add David Rhodes’ guitar playing to the mix, disperse the conga percussion of Jerry Marotta throughout, some whistling, and put it all under the precise guidance of Steve Lillywhite, and you’ve got an essential rock song on your hand.  

“Games Without Frontiers” shines under extensive study. You could write a whole book using it as a framework. Little music from 1980 holds up as well as this: transcribing the present of the early 80s led to astonishing writing of the future. Even if you hadn’t heard the song before, if “Games Without Frontiers” popped up on the radio you might just look up and ponder what weird future it came from. Terrifyingly, we know the answer: it was always our own. 

Probably at Bath and Townhouse (London) recorded largely in spring-summer of 1979, but according to Gaffaweb’s chronology of Kate Bush’s career, Bush cut her guest vocal in early 1980. Regularly performed live by Gabriel. Personnel: Peter Gabriel — vocals, synthesizer, synth bass, whistles. David Rhodes — guitar. Jerry Motta — drums, percussion. Larry Fast — synthesizer, synth bass. Kate Bush — backing vocals. Steve Lillywhite — production, whistles. Hugh Padgham — whistles.