My unofficial theme song throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has been Peter Gabriel’s “I Have the Touch”. Not the polished, light-industrial, somewhat sterile album version from Security (1982), the fourth of his self-titled records, but the live version found on 1983’s Plays Live—which was, incidentally, recently (and somewhat anachronistically) rereleased in its full 2CD format.
My attachment to the live version is prompted in part by the fact that the live music experience has, of course, been one of many social interactions in America that have either disappeared or taken on a hue of contagion since March 2020. This has, somewhat paradoxically, given any concert recording a fresh quality of the archival, the antique. Generally, I don’t enjoy “live recordings”. Why listen to something muddied by indistinct yelling from the audience, errors by the band, and long improvisations when one could engage with a song without mediation? The live recording of 1982’s “I Have the Touch”, however, mediates this experience in quite a different way, that is phenomenological and, in these times, highly political.