Peter Gabriel Crowns His Breakthrough Year

Somewhere between Bowie and Bruce, you’ll find Peter Gabriel.

At his Forum concert Monday, the English singer didn’t flash Bowie-style glamour and theatricality, but he showed that he knows how to stylize a performance. And while he lacks Springsteen’s force and charisma, he established a similar intimacy with the audience. When you spread your arms and fall backwards off the stage into the crowd, you’d better have a good relationship with them.

That was the crowning episode in a show that neatly capped the veteran performer’s breakthrough year. After a decade of enjoying the widespread respect and the loyal-but-relatively-small-following accorded cult artists, Peter Gabriel is suddenly all over the place.

He’s hung on to the respect--first with his acclaimed album “So,” and then with his commitment to last summer’s Amnesty International concert tour. But he’s also made his strongest marketplace move, getting into the Top 10 with the soul-music tribute-cum-spoof “Sledgehammer.”

That combination of commerce and integrity has helped make Gabriel a hot item, and his current American tour is one of the year’s biggies.

That’s the kind of atmosphere that can lead to overreaching and loss of perspective, but Gabriel’s concert Monday--the first of two nights at the Forum--was firmly in his established mode. While it wasn’t a quantum leap forward, it summarized with authority a wide range of his work.

From appearances, Gabriel is an unlikely rock star. He looks more like a friendly mailman, with a round face whose expression inevitably returns to one of bemusement or worry. His dancing and other stage moves are energetic but hardly graceful--he seems to be set into crazy motion by the combustion of his English tightness sparked by American soul music.

At points he went through some ritualistic gestures and engaged in a bit of role-playing and acting-out, but overall this wasn’t a highly stylized performance. (Most of the flash was left to the amazing lighting rigs. Three-eyed, long-necked things that roamed the stage, they were the source of a liquid stream in “San Jacinto,” then became menacing mantises on “No Self Control” and inquisitive creatures sniffing at a sleeping Gabriel on “Mercy Street.”)

The keynote was direct delivery, with the reliance on the quality of the songs themselves and the appeal of his distinctive blend of art-rock with Third World elements. Gabriel’s four-man band could sound like a high-tech army when it gathered force for the poignant, powerful crescendos, but remained light and agile enough to dip easily into the jazzy and folk-country terrain where Gabriel took some of the songs.

Interestingly, it wasn’t necessarily Gabriel’s most ambitious songs that worked best live. He wasn’t able to put across the tangle of matrimony, consecration and cannibalism of “Family and the Fishing Net,” whereas “Big Time,” which seems simplistic in its surroundings on the “So” album, served him well as a concert rave-up.

But his determination to deepen and vary the set more often paid off. The complexity of “Family Snapshots,” for instance, didn’t prevent its assassin’s-eye-view from coming across with full dramatic impact.

Gabriel’s vocal signature is a huskiness and hoarseness that lend most everything he sings a sense of striving and a touch of melancholy. His exchange during the encore with Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour, who opened the show, really seemed to fire him up--he could use more prodding and challenging from his sidekicks during the body of the show.

As a human rights activist, Gabriel shouldn’t have been so tolerant of the crowd’s hostile reaction to his innocent, glancing reference to homosexuality. But it’s hard to fault a social conscience that yielded “Biko,” his memorial to the slain South African that ended Monday’s show with a stately benediction.