Videodrone #2: Modern Love

Videodrone is a weekly feature looking at music videos from the last half century.

Modern Love (1977)

When it comes to musical innovators, one artist who never gets enough credit is Peter Gabriel. Whether it was his prog-rock musings and way-out-there stage costumes with Genesis, or his solo career explorations into art-rock, or his embrace of world music sounds, or his work with human rights organizations, Gabriel has never been one to rest on his laurels. He also was an early adopter of music video as a medium, starting with his 1977 self-titled solo debut (later referred to as Peter Gabriel 1 or Car because he called each of his first four solo albums Peter Gabriel).

The album's first single was "Solsbury Hill," which went to #13 on the U.K. singles chart and later became iconic through its use in movies and commercials. The second single was "Modern Love" (not to be confused with the David Bowie megahit of the same name that was released in 1983), a ripper of a power pop song that featured Gabriel musing on the difficulties modern love while backed by the legendary Robert Fripp and Steve Hunter (known for his work with Alice Cooper and Lou Reed) on guitar. 

Gabriel had originally wanted to release the innuendo-laden song as the first single. Still, the video is classic Gabriel: Weird and full of crazy imagery. It was directed by Peter Medak, who went on to direct movies like The Changeling, The Krays and Species II and episodes of TV shows as varied as Hart to Hart, Magnum P.I., The Wire and Breaking Bad. 

Parts of the video were filmed at a mall in Shepherd's Bush, a London suburb, with Gabriel dressed in a fencer's mask and wearing athletic gear and jumping around on a moving escalator, singing, "Ah, the pain, modern love can be a strain." As the story goes, during the recording of the song, producer Bob Ezrin felt Gabriel wasn't getting enough emotion into that line, so he had an engineer hoist Gabriel up a ladder and duct-tape his armpits to a pillar in the studio. That seemed to get the desired result.

In the video, Gabriel is at first seen approaching a group of models and then later sings while surrounded by cutouts of another model. "Hey, I worship Diana by the light of the moon/When I pull out my pipe, she screams out of tune/In Paris my heart sinks when I see the Mona Lisa/She gives me the wink, then she shows me the freezer/Ah, the pain, modern love can be a strain."

Of course, if you lived in the U.S. in the summer of '77, you probably didn't see this video. There was no MTV for another four years and Gabriel was much more prominent in the U.K. at the time. There were different programs over there that would air videos. I never saw the video until a few years ago on YouTube; if it aired on MTV, I never saw it.

But Gabriel would obviously keep making videos that fared better. "Games Without Frontiers" and "I Don't Remember" from his 1980 album (often called Melt) and "Shock the Monkey" from 1982's Security, which became a hit on MTV. Everything blew up for Gabriel with his 1986 album So and its lead single "Sledgehammer," which had an innovative video that combined live-action and animation and absolutely dominated MTV. The song hit #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and the video won nine MTV Video Music Awards. Gabriel became a superstar, primarily thanks to that video. 

That momentum was derailed when it took Gabriel six years to release the follow-up album, Us, in 1992. It fared well and had videos that got a fair amount of MTV play with "Digging in the Dirt" and "Steam," but the success paled in comparison to So. Plus the rock world was fully in grunge mode by that point. 

Over the last 30-plus years, Gabriel has retreated into more of a low-profile role, releasing only three more studio albums, the most recent of which is 2023 I/O (although he's got a new release coming out in 2026). He's also done soundtrack work and has remained active in political and human rights initiatives.  I enjoyed his most recent album, but if you only know Gabriel from his more popular stuff, you should check out those first four solo albums. They're all excellent and interesting.

Gabriel was a well-known figure in the rock world long before his video stardom, but his first foray into video was certainly memorable, even if not that many people remember it.