Pop Music : Gabriel Warms Up at Prince’s Glam Slam

Not that he’s a complete ascetic by any means, but still Peter Gabriel may be the most stoical figure yet to perform between the two giant plaster bikini girls holding up the proscenium at Prince’s new Glam Slam club downtown.

Doing a rare club show there on Saturday as a warm-up for an upcoming arena tour, Gabriel walked out to the lip of the stage alone and looked directly into the heart of the screaming audience with a straight, soulful face, which he managed to keep for nearly all the remaining two hours. Only the introduction of the band members and the climbing on stage of a couple of Vanity wanna-bes from the crowd got him to crack a smile.

Such austerity of facial expression may have been apropos, considering that two-thirds of the show was given over to the mostly sober material from “Us,” Gabriel’s recent broken-relationship album. And this up-close setting offered a good glimpse of Gabriel’s sad eyes, without the cloaking makeup of the old days or the arena distances of most tours.

Still, Gabriel was far from completely out of place in a setting usually reserved for bacchanalian rhythm & blues--”Sledgehammer,” “Steam” and “Kiss That Frog” saw to that, all involving goofy dance-step choreography that included the subtlest pelvic thrusts ever known to Glam Slam. The moves being tried out will no doubt be seen in the upcoming larger-hall shows, since this was effectively a dress rehearsal. Still, it was amusing to imagine Gabriel being possessed by the spirit of the proprietor just for the evening.

The through-line connecting newer, mournful ballads and the handful of hard-hitting oldies was the consistent, uniquely defined brilliance of Gabriel’s usual band--the trio of guitarist David Rhodes, bassist Tony Levin and drummer Manu Katche, with violinist Shankar and keyboardist Joy Askew also along this tour. Gabriel’s music doesn’t allow much in the way of “solo” spots, but a musician couldn’t ask for a better unit to shine within.

Of the rearranged chestnuts, “Games Without Frontiers” was the standout, coming off both funkier and more Beatlesque here; “Shaking the Tree,” too, was reintroduced with a few more power chords. But he doesn’t have a better song old or new than the recent “Digging In the Dirt,” which provided the set an emotionally and musically pummeling penultimate catharsis.