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There's no polite way to say this. Peter Gabriel has grown old. The first time I remember seeing him was in the thumpingly original Sledgehammer video. His head was pulsing and mutating like a ball of plasticene but beneath the dancing fruit and vegetables he was clearly a good-looking guy.
That was in 1986, and over the following decade as he popularised world music with WOMAD, opened his Real World studios in Wiltshire, wrote film scores for Scorsese and mounted ever more spectacular tours with theatrical designer Robert le Plage, it seemed he would always be the blue-eyed boy of experimental pop.
But somewhere along the way, the intellectual pin-up who dated Rosanna Arquette and Sinead O'Connor has turned into the old sage with white hair, who's just disappeared into the trees.
We were due to meet for this interview at Real World but the studios were full, so Gabriel and entourage have decamped to Box House, a sandstone pile up the narrow, leafy lane. When I arrive the air is humming with bumblebees and the oak door stands open. The sound of backing musicians rehearsing for the forthcoming tour floats through from another room. Peter is being photographed in the garden, explains Carolyn, his personal assistant, so I sit outside in the sun watching peacocks strut about the lawn.
After a while a fabulous lunch is spread out on a long table and he appears. Everyone wants to talk to him, to ask him things, but he sails by politely, a word here, a joke there, an amused, faintly ironic smile above his snowy goatee.
This new billy-goat beard, our pastoral surroundings and the friends and flunkies milling around lend him the air of a country squire. Or perhaps the High Wizard of some benign cult. Whatever. There's definitely a magnetism about him. It's fame, of course, and money. But there's something else that draws you in. Contentment. "I may be chubbier but I'm much more comfortable now," he says. "Before, I wanted everyone to like me."
He was in "bad shape" going into his 40s. Deeply depressed. But a long time has gone by since his last album, Us - ten whole years since he went public with the pain and rage...