During Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway tour, Peter Gabriel told his bandmates that he’d be leaving the group at the conclusion of the tour. Two years later Gabriel began an adventurous and wildly successful solo career with the release of “Solsbury Hill.” Between 1977 and 1982, Gabriel released four probing, dark solo albums each bearing his own name and forcing fans to come up with nicknames for them, like “Scratch.” Robert Fripp played on the first three of these albums and actually produced the second one. 1980’s “Melt” is perhaps the best one of the four, featuring “Biko,” “Intruder” (which featured pioneering use of the gated drum effect), and “Games Without Frontiers.”

For the 1980 tour to support the third solo album, Gabriel decided to concoct a clever, subversive version of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, also known as “Mao’s Little Red Book,” which had done so much to solidify Mao’s grip on power in the People’s Republic of China in the 1960s. This is what it looked like:
 

 
True to its name, it really was little; it was about the size of the palm of a person’s hand. The 1980 tour program suggested a dystopic work of fiction, echoing Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in the name of the tour, which was Tour of China 1984, thereby confusing historians for all time: The entire fun of the program, one might say, was that Gabriel was not touring China and it was not 1984. Basically it was all a mindfuck. The tour was limited to the United Kingdom and North America.

Durrell Bowman supplies a solid description of the 1980 tour in his book Experiencing Peter Gabriel: A Listener’s Companion:
 

The tour for Peter Gabriel III began in February 1980, was strangely billed the Tour of China 1984, and its shows began with the performers carrying torches through the audience and Gabriel arriving from the back of the hall like a weird creature, as the unusual drums and sound effects from the beginning of “Intruder” were being played. Presumably to match the tour’s bizarre totalitarian China parody, the band wore black, over-all-like jumpsuits and each audience member was given a program booklet made to look like the 1966 book Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung. ... The booklet included Gabriel’s head superimposed over those of other individuals, as well as Chinese newspaper ads, political posters, and comic books.

 
On his SYNERGY website, synth player Larry Fast has a few pics from and comments about that tour, including the “boiler suits” while “they were still new and black” and his backstage pass—note the Chinese ideograms on the front:
 

 
Of the Mao parody, Gabriel posted the following comment on his website:
 

One of the things at that time was that a lot of bands were keen to get be the first to play in China. There was a lot of press about it. So I thought that I would do the tour merchandise for a fictitious Chinese tour and it was the Tour of China 1984. We used Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book which had had more copies of it sold, or at least distributed, than any other book, as the model for the tour programme. That was fun to do.

 
Gabriel has never played a concert in China, but in 1994 he did play Hong Kong Stadium on the Secret World Tour—but that was three years before the British gave up control over the colony, after which it became the “Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China.”
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Peter Gabriel’s German albums