Peter Gabriel’s OVO

Revisiting his eclectic album on its 25th anniversary

OVO is odd. A turn-of-the-millennium pseudo-soundtrack. An hour-long folk/electronica/ambient concept album. An almost-hybrid of So and Passion, but stranger and more ambitious than either, OVO is a meandering musical triumph.

OVO is a unique gem in Gabriel’s catalogue. Originally created as the soundtrack to the Millennium Dome show, OVO stands firmly on its own. Listeners may be baffled by the transitions from Irish Gaelic to treated dulcimer hammer, then digeridoo, then folky dance, touching ballad, and loud rocker. And that’s just the first half of the album! To these ears, it’s a genre-jumping delight.

In many ways, OVO seems made for me. The boisterous song The Weavers Reel takes me right back to childhood square dances, the tender Father, Son reminds me of my own relationship with my Dad, and the 10-minute closer Make Tomorrow could easily serve as my social justice mantra.

Gabriel tied up two studios for 18 months to birth OVO. In typical Gabriel fashion, you have instruments being used in exquisite ways: the guitar riff in The Tower That Ate People is actually a distorted flute, and over the course of OVO you’ll hear double violin, tabla, screams, mandola, and more. In his words:

Gabriel’s last record with Genesis, the double concept album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, is a (perhaps flawed) prog rock masterpiece. Having celebrated its 50th anniversary, it is my favourite Genesis album by a good margin. Exceptional musicianship from bandmates Banks, Collins, Hackett and Rutherford while Gabriel’s usual lyrical wit is on full display. OVO came 25 years later, and is easily overlooked. Perhaps due to its initial limited release, negative connotations with the Millennium Dome, or ambiguity regarding its intended audience.

For Gabriel’s part, he wanted a challenge: “I knew what I was walking into and that it was a quite unpopular project. But the fact that it was going to be controversial was actually what attracted me.” Others discount the album since Gabriel shares vocal duties; he is lead on only two songs, unless you count his Gabrielese on The Man Who Loved the Earth and White Ashes.

OVO includes dozens of collaborators. In fact, most songs are sung by singers—all outstanding—other than Gabriel. Lead vocals are taken by the singer whose character features in the song: Richie Havens (Theo), Alison Goldfrapp (Beth), Gabriel (Ion), Elizabeth Fraser (Sofi), and Paul Buchanan (Skyboy).

The Story and Artwork

The title OVO, ‘egg’ in Portuguese, continues Gabriel’s fixation on short album titles with intriguing visual possibilities: 1, 2, 3, 4 (Security), So, Us, OVO, Up, i/o, and (upcoming) o/i. OVO is also a pictorial for the titular character, denoting his eyes and eyebrows. 

OVO tells the story of the three stages of human evolution, with hints of Romeo and Juliet. Each act is borrowed from a song title. Act 1 is the nature-focused The Man Who Loved the Earth, where the son Ion longs for his father’s respect and daughter Sofia longs for the mysterious Skyboy. Act 2, The Tower that Ate People, puts us in the current industrial era, with its wonders and terrors of machinery. Act 3, The Nest That Sailed the Sky, drifts us into the future, including the aerial conception (yes, you read that right) of OVO.

When I got the 2025 vinyl, I re-read The Story of OVO comic book, this time to my kids. While it starts innocently enough with maypole celebrations, my son exclaimed at the mature themes that turn up in Act 2: weapon creation, terrorism, intergenerational trauma, and suicide. As always with Gabriel, the intriguing ideas are many, though there is a reason I have read this comic perhaps thrice in 25 years, and have spun the OVO album some thousands of times.

Of note is a funereal connection to his most recent album. In the OVO comic, an acorn grows from mother Beth’s buried body, something Gabriel directly references wanting for himself when he is “laid to rest in my proper place.” The lyric from his 2023 song i/o (for which I made the dark-side mix music video, to be released by Gabriel in mid-July 2025) goes:

Shifting from the comic to the album artwork, we find compelling impermanent nature art created by Nils-Udo. Nils’ recurring theme of nests and eggs befits The Nest That Sailed the Sky, with his piece ‘Waternest’ featured on the album cover. The boy in this image, named Josh, is actually the son of Real World employee Susie Millns. In keeping with the ephemeral nature of Nils’ artistic practice, the sizeable nest was later burned in Gabriel’s garden. The other artwork on the inner sleeves, prominent in the newly released vinyl edition for Record Store Day 2025, have verdant ferns and moss contrasted with blood red petals and berries to create the plant-inspired visuals. 

Nils-Udo predates Andy Goldsworthy; Goldsworthy did not work on OVO, though did provide artwork for the song Washing of the Water on Gabriel’s Us.

Dome and Nest Versions

There are two versions of OVO. The slight difference in tracklist results in a strikingly different listening experience.

Gabriel has an exceptional catalogue with few misfires. The opening song—The Story of OVO, at least in the ‘nest’ edition—is an exception. The music is a rousing funk-pop-electric mix, and I especially dig Gabriel’s vocals during the chorus. But the too on-the-nose rap lyrics, sung energetically by Neneh Cherry and Rasco, fall flat.

Beginning the album with The Story of OVO undercuts the melodic majesty of Low Light, and renders the funky motif of The Man Who Loved the Earth redundant, since it overplays its welcome. Admittedly I carry familiarity bias, as I listened to the initially released ‘dome’ version (which begins with Low Light) for nearly a year before getting the ‘nest’ version.

The Music

For me the album opens with the ceremonious Low Light: a nearly 7-minute mood setter. Irish vocalist Iarla O'lionaird offers an ethereal call that glides alongside subtly rapturous strings. The final minute lands with a thudding nord bass that brings us back down to Earth, with chords you feel in your bones. This brooding, atmospheric opener builds and shifts layers of sound—synth, strings, Gaelic, Ney flute, Ravi Shankar double violin, bass—until you are fully held in the lingering notes.

From here we flow into the gentle pace of The Time of the Turning. The lyrics, seeded from the soil, are sung with earthy resonance by Richie Havens, who opened Woodstock back in 1969. He is accompanied by the angelic voice of an uncredited (likely by her management’s request) Alison Goldfrapp.

There is something deceptively simple about this tune, which is perhaps the point. The last verse “If we can stand up / while all else falls sense” is a spine-shiverer. Despite not singing on this song himself, the deep sense of comfort this song evokes distinguishes this as one of my favourite Gabriel compositions. The Time of the Turning washes over you like a warm river of nostalgia.

The next two songs, largely instrumental, may be the most divisive. On one hand they are an oddity in Gabriel’s catalogue: fiddle, brass, and didgeridoo. Where else will you hear Ganga Girl in musical conversation with The Dhol Foundation? And yet the familiar rhythmic synths guided by unmistakable grooves abound. The Man Who Loved the Earth is one of the funkiest things Gabriel has ever done. And Johnny Kalsi leads The Dhol Foundation’s monstrous drumming to serve up the finale of The Weavers Reel, waves of percussion that raise the pulse with thunderous elation.

After the drums have thrummed a toe-tapping beat into your heart, the next song pulls on those same heart strings.

Father, Son slows and strips things down to piano, Tony Levin bass, and a bit of brass. This tender song, inspired in part during Gabriel’s long drives along the moors and dunes of the North Devon coast, is the most internal-focused on an otherwise external-focused album. And here Gabriel’s sonic diversity shines: one moment he is singing a heartfelt vocal about doing yoga with his dad, while the next song thrusts us into our inevitable technocracy.   

The Tower That Ate People is one of Gabriel’s best rockers, and a live staple on his Back to Front tour. The often-straightforward lyric drips with meaning even more relevant in today’s AI world: “When you strip it right back / Man feed machine, machine feed man”. Gabriel has stated his preference for the Steve Osborne mix, which is the version he performs live (and notably omits the “we’re building up and up” verse and fantastic climax lyric “till we can touch the sky”). An earlier version of this song, called 100 Days to Go, was released on Real World Notes #9 in January 2000, and includes the ending section of Rhythm of the Heat.

Revenge is the slightest song on the album, simply due to its 90 second run time. Though I will always listen to Gabriel play wild with percussion.

White Ashes is an intriguing track due to Sussan Deyhim’s vocal screams. I would love an album of these creative instrumentals. I adore Gabriel’s lyricism, yet removing vocals from the equation invites a further creative push, as seen on Passion or the exceptional songs Running to the Rain and Gracie’s Recapture from his under-appreciated Long Walk Home soundtrack.

The bridge of Downside-Up remains a spirited highlight. I’m sure I wore out my CD copy listening to this infectious end section of “Falling deep in the sky”. Paul Buchanan and Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins share vocal duties. (Gabriel does sing lead vocals on Downside-Up on other recordings.)

The Nest that Sailed the Sky is pure, floating magic. Reminiscent of Low Light’s wall of sound with its soothing strings and Shankar double violin, Nest almost feels like a lullaby, a purpose it served as the final song on his orchestra-backed New Blood tour. You can also hear parts of this song on two tracks on Long Walk Home: A Sense of Hope and The Return Part 2.

The Tree That Went Up, cut from the ‘nest’ edition, is the penultimate song. It borrows a keyboard motif from the spectacular It is Accomplished (one of countless peak moments on Passion). Being the most powerful song from that album, I appreciate its inclusion here on the ‘dome’ edition, and its euphoric celebratory wonder.

Make Tomorrow is OVO’s iconic finale. One of Gabriel’s longest songs from his solo career, excepting Full Stretch, a four-song album featuring tracks from New Blood slowed down into unrecognizable ambience. (For the curious, you can find Full Stretch via Gabriel’s $5/month Bandcamp subscription, as well as the demo of This is the Road from the So sessions, an early incarnation of Make Tomorrow.)

Make Tomorrow is a call to action:

The outro is three minutes of pulsing bass, crashing percussion, and the programming wizardry of BT (who also worked on Tower). In the final verse we hear “In each one of us / A dream can burn like the sun”, and thus ends Gabriel’s ambitious dream that is OVO.

Final Thoughts

OVO dropped in 2000 during one of Gabriel’s most creatively fertile years. His soundtrack to Rabbit-Proof Fence released in June 2002, and his ‘proper’ studio album Up just three months later. His next studio album, the double Grammy-winning i/o, would not arrive until 2023. (Though Gabriel was plenty busy in-between, including several tours, his covers orchestral album Scratch My Back, New Blood, a So 25th anniversary boxset, an album of stellar soundtrack songs playfully titled Rated PG, and the digital-only ‘odds and sods’ collection Flotsam and Jetsam.)

Discogs has trouble classifying OVO, listing it as electronic, Celtic, tribal, rock, pop, folk, world, country, ambient, stage, and screen. Percussively OVO is also a smorgasbord: The Dhol Foundation (featuring master drummer Johnny Kalsi), Adzido (featuring master drummer George Dzikunu), Ged Lynch, Steve Gadd, and Gabriel regular Manu Katché all feature.

Sometimes maligned for being a convoluted, genre-jumping, not-quite-an-album and not-quite-a-soundtrack is exactly why I find OVO so beautifully enigmatic. This album is a rich sonic odyssey bookended by two of the strongest tracks from his career: Low Light and Make Tomorrorw. OVO’s message of the cautions of technology and need to make tomorrow today—given the climate crisis and generative AI—is more relevant than ever. 

OVO’s oddness is endearing. As a musicphile, I’m always in search of melodies and moments that transcend. Moments that combine to offer an album-length imaginative journey. Moments that tingle the spine and stir up the hidden pockets of the soul. OVO offers such an aural odyssey.

Odds and Ends