Lovesong: Here Comes the Flood: Peter Gabriel

After my initial indifference, I've been loving 'New Blood', Peter Gabriel's re-visiting of his back catalogue; the live DVD is pretty awesome also. There's talk of a release of an album of reciprocated Gabriel covers from those whose songs were covered on 'Scratch My Back'; apparently half of the tracks are in the bag.
His voice is still fantastic (up there with Paul Buchanan, Paddy McAloon and Bowie as the greatest British vocalist of the last 30 years... Discuss?); what he's lost in dynamic range he's more than made up for with world weary gravitas.
I did find this oddity from a 1979 Kate Bush Xmas special which is a reminder of his early raw power; he still sounds like the lead singer with Genesis here; is there an effect on his voice or has he just not spat out the TCP? It always sounded like he was singing through a heavenly hookah to me...

Incidentally, I used to play squash with Mike Gibbs who I knew as a jazz trombonist and arranger.
We became great mates but it wasn't until we'd known each other for a year or two that Mike admitted to having done all of the string arrangements for Gabriel's solo debut, including the fairly bombastic/fantastic version of 'Here Comes the Flood'.

Mike also did the film music for Bill Forsyth's film of 'Housekeeping'.
I was invited to the screen testing on Wardour Street and fell asleep on the shoulder of an old geezer in a sheepskin; was later invited to the after show drinks party and introduced to the director.
Mr Forsyth was still wearing his sheepskin jacket...
The Mike Gibbs Big Band are still touring and Mike still does film music; a lovely man, brilliant musician, bog standard squash player...