MUSIC
The Song That Saves Lives —Peter Gabriel’s ‘Don’t Give Up’
The importance of friendship and community during tough times
Around 1985, Peter Gabriel’s wife, Jill, stumbled upon a dark newspaper article about a woman who jumped out of a towering block of flats with her child and killed herself.
That grim tale lit the creative fuse for Gabriel’s 1986 masterpiece — Don’t Give Up.
You only have to read the thousands of comments on the mesmerizing video featuring Gabriel and fellow English songstress Kate Bush to see how this song reached deep into people’s souls, maybe even pulling some back from the edge.
When commenting on the song, Gabriel said, “The basic idea is that handling failure is one of the hardest things we have to learn to do.”
Friend’s star Matthew Perry once admitted this tune was his lifeline during bouts of the blues. Sadly, he did give up.
The lyrics paint a picture of a downtrodden community, much like I remember Thatcher’s Britain in the late ’80s, with recession biting hard and folks drowning in negative equity with…
