Peter Gabriel deconstructs music, reconstructs world

AFP

Peter Gabriel strips songs to their bare essentials in his latest album, the first in eight years, but he is as passionate about new technologies and saving the world as he is about music.

Looking forward to a concert tour to promote "Scratch My Back", the former Genesis frontman sits shoeless -- "I like big boots but always take them off" -- in a Paris hotel room, chatting about human rights and the music industry.

"The industry," Gabriel, 60, told AFP, "is a corpse but there's lots of interesting things crawling out of it.

"In some ways it reminds me of the early 60s because there wasn't a lot of business then the way we know it, so people could write or rewrite the rules," he said.