April 1986, London: British musician Peter Gabriel (former Genesis frontman) releases on Charisma Records the single “Sledgehammer” - the first single from his fifth solo album So. By July 1986 - #1 Billboard Hot 100 in the US, where it displaced his own former band Genesis's “Invisible Touch” from the top. In the UK - #4. By end of 1986 - over 5 million copies worldwide. But the track's main fame isn't the music - it's the video, which MTV in 2011 named the greatest clip in its history.
Who Peter Gabriel was by 1986
Peter Gabriel left Genesis in 1975 after the album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. By 1986 he had four solo albums behind him, all titled Peter Gabriel (he insisted on this to force labels to market each separately). Commercial results - modest: “Games Without Frontiers” UK #4 in 1980, “Shock the Monkey” US #29 in 1982. No real US breakthrough.
By 1985 Gabriel knew he needed to make a fundamentally different album - American, pop-oriented, with instrumental hybridity but a mainstream sound. He spent nearly two years preparing, assembling at Ashcombe House studio in Bath a team of British, American and Senegalese musicians.
Recording
Recording ran from October 1984 to March 1986 - 17 months, unprecedentedly long for a pop album. Producer - Daniel Lanois (Canadian, previously working with Brian Eno, later with U2 and Bob Dylan). Budget for the whole So album - around £600,000. “Sledgehammer” was the album's most expensive single, £180,000 on recording and mix.
“I wanted "Sledgehammer" to sound like 60s soul but with modern 80s production. That's harder than it sounds - if you take real soul, it sounds old-school; if you go clean pop, you lose the soul”, Gabriel told Musician Magazine in 1986.
Instrumentation
- Kurzweil 250 - sampler, main orchestral bedding and the shakuhachi intro sample
- Prophet VS - pads and lead
- Yamaha DX7 - electric piano in the verse
- Fairlight CMI Series III - drum samples and brass duck
- Live chorus - Rick Astley (yes, the same - he worked as a session backing vocalist before his solo career), Dreu Young, P.P. Arnold
- Live horns - Memphis Horns, the session musicians who had played with Elvis and Isaac Hayes
- Live bass - Tony Levin on Chapman Stick (as on Nick Beggs's “Too Shy”)
- Japanese shakuhachi flute - a sample in the Kurzweil 250, taken from a 1981 recording; that empty intro melody, immediately recognisable
The hybrid - electronics (Kurzweil, Fairlight) plus a live rhythm section (Memphis Horns). For 1986 this was innovative: most pop hits chose either full synthesis or full analog. Gabriel took a third route.
The video masterpiece
The “Sledgehammer” clip was directed by Stephen Johnson in collaboration with Aardman Animations (the team behind “Wallace and Gromit”). The entire piece is stop-motion animation, where Gabriel lies under a sheet of glass while above him, frame by frame, dancing fruit, vegetables, fish and plasticine puppets are filmed. Each frame required physical shooting: 25 fps × 4:58 = 7,450 individual frames.
Shooting lasted 16 weeks. Gabriel spent about 80 hours total under the glass, motionless, while the frames were shot above him. He couldn't move a millimetre - otherwise the clip broke. Budget - £400,000, one of the most expensive videos of the 80s.
In 1987 the “Sledgehammer” clip won 9 MTV Video Music Awards, including “Video of the Year” - an MTV record unbeaten through 2024. In 2011 MTV named “Sledgehammer” the best clip in the channel's entire 30-year history. On YouTube it's among the hundred most-watched 80s videos.
Numbers
- US: #1 Billboard Hot 100 (July 1986), 1 week; 2× platinum
- UK: #4, 13 weeks in top 40
- Canada: #1 RPM, 2 weeks
- Germany: #10
- Netherlands: #5
- France: #4
- Australia: #8
- Japan: #18 Oricon International
- Sweden: #7
Total sales by end of 1987 - 5 million copies. The So album - 5× platinum in the US, 8× in UK. For a British art-rock singer previously working in a niche segment, this was the breakthrough - turning him into a full-fledged global pop star.
What this record left
“Sledgehammer” did three things. First - it proved stop-motion animation could be commercially successful in a pop clip. Before Gabriel, stop-motion was treated as a kids' genre; after, the technique went mainstream. Aardman Animations would later produce clips for MC Hammer and Coldplay, then the full-length “Chicken Run” and “Shaun the Sheep”. Second - it legitimised the mix of live and sampled elements in a pop song. Third - it became a crossover point for artists moving from prog-rock into pop - the same path would be followed by Phil Collins, Sting, Roger Waters.
By 2024 Spotify shows over 580 million streams of “Sledgehammer”. In 2021 Netflix released a documentary about Peter Gabriel's career and the numbers his record pushed. Related breakdowns - “Axel F” Faltermeyer, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”, Fairlight CMI.