One of my all-time favorite albums is Peter Gabriel’s “Security” (sometimes just known as Peter Gabriel IV). Here are segments from an almost 50 minute long, behind-the-scenes look at the making of the album.  This comes from the long-running British TV program The South Bank Show.

Haunting Ethiopian flutes… field-recorded audio fragments from a local junkyard… the outrageously expensive Fairlight CMI sampler… Gabriel brought together all these elements and much more over an 18 month period. The process of writing and producing the album is truly eye-opening. Lesson learned from Gabriel: Less is more. The often tortuous process he went through resulted in hundreds of hours of studio recordings, which were often stripped down to only a few minutes of material for each track.  But the journey he undertook is inspiring.