Peter Gabriel: What’s Up.

Up is in stores now.

A decade after digging in the dirt of his personal life on Us, the legendary - and the word isn't used lightly - Peter Gabriel, former frontman of Genesis, solo artist, composer, singer/songwriter and multimedia artist is now Up. At least that is what the title of his seventh solo album would have you believe.

"Up is a positive word," he says, "and I think if I listen to the music on the album now there are some pretty miserable songs there, so I don't know if it fits that well but I've sort of grown with it. I think perhaps personally I'm in a good place at the moment and I think probably more up than on the previous couple of albums say. So maybe there is some relationship there but I don't think there is so much relationship in the music itself. I've always found it harder to write happy music than sad music. I had thought that there was a bit of a hospital anthem, a sort of 'So, Us Up?' that I could string together, so it had a sort of logic to it."

In fact, darkness plays throughout Up, although it isn't overwhelming and is often a catalyst to finding its antonym. There is though a song called Darkness that he rushes to explain.

"Darkness was titled House In The Woods and is about fear. For myself and other people it's the fear that stops you doing things that you could gain an awful lot from. I was just looking at that in myself. It feels to me more of a bookends record that looks on the beginning and end of life more than the middle period. That explains the sort of childhood references in this song - I grew up on this farm near Horsall Common which is where the Martians landed in H.G Wells' War Of The Worlds, but it was quite a moody place to play in as a kid. There was this woman who was squatting in the woods in a caravan and you could never tell if it was occupied but we'd heard noises in there from time to time and there was newspaper over all the windows so you couldn't look in but to our five/six year old imagination she was a witch and very scary. So we always ran very fast when we crossed the path by her caravan."

Up is a wonderful record. It's certainly his best solo record and that is saying much considering how its predecessors have each been celebrated. What's best about Up is that nothing sounds contrived. If Peter Gabriel has ever had a musical fault it has been his earnestness and sometimes that just hasn't quite translated on record. That said, he's probably written more great songs than most of his contemporaries - Solsbury Hill, Here Comes The Flood, On the Air, Biko, Shock the Monkey, Wallflower, Humdrum, The Rhythm Of The Heat, Red Rain, Big Time, Sledgehammer, In Your Eyes, to name a dozen. Then there's his soundtrack work, particularly for Alan Parker's Birdy, and the heady haunting Passion, music for Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation Of Christ. Earlier this year he returned with an equally imaginative and atmospheric soundtrack, Long Walk Home, for the Phillip Noyce film Rabbit Proof Fence.

His description of songwriting is nothing short of funny, even to Peter Gabriel:

"I have a sort of messy sprawling technique of writing really which is you throw all this stuff at the wall and then you just chip away and spiral inwards and try and find the centre. I remember talking to (mentor and producer of the Beatles) George Martin about this as a sort of production technique and he was appalled at the waste involved. He could only envisage having a definite result in mind, which you went straight to and you knew how to get there. I've tried that too but I'm not very good at it so I work this other way. The actual slog work of the lyrics is something I have to go away for usually. It takes anything from half a day to ten days for me to nail a lyric. I go away and stay in a bed and breakfast or drive around a place. I have to do that on my own. In fact, I think that for me, travel is good for lyrics.

"What it comes down to, and a reason for the time this album took, is that I enjoy the process of making music better than being a travelling sales man, so I think in part I've been avoiding getting into it and I also tend to get attracted to detours. I also want to try and take stuff in because often when you make a record you're spewing stuff out and unless you've had enough input how can you expect it to be interesting or have anything new to reflect or comment on."