Peter Gabriel has dedicated his solo career to looking forward — but for a few moments during the final stop on his tour with Sting on July 24, the former Genesis frontman treated fans to a chapter from his past.
As JamBase reports, Sting’s tour arrangement for the Police classic “Message in a Bottle” included an introductory segment that lifted a musical passage from the Genesis song “Dancing With the Moonlit Knight,” from 1973’s Selling England by the Pound. Given that their shows found Sting and Gabriel sharing the stage, it was perhaps inevitable that Gabriel would join in at some point — and that moment arrived during the tour finale in Edmonton, Canada.
Gabriel, as shown in the fan-shot footage above, lent vocals to the first portion of “Dancing With the Moonlit Knight” — marking, as JamBase notes, the first time in more than 30 years he’d performed that or any other Genesis song in concert. While surprising, Gabriel’s quick Genesis nod isn’t the only time he’s revisited his musical history in recent years: in 2011, he released New Blood, a selection of songs from his solo career re-recorded in an orchestral setting.
Back off the road, both Gabriel and Sting are preparing new studio albums. Gabriel’s next effort, the still-unscheduled follow-up to 2002’s Up, was recently preceded by the new single “I’m Amazing.” Sting, meanwhile, has announced the pending release of an LP titled 57th & 9th; according to producer Martin Kierszenbaum, the record has a rock sound that hearkens back to the Police.
