Don’t Give Up (Version 1)
Don’t Give Up (version 2)
Don’t Give Up (Secret World Live with Paula Cole)
Return with us now to the thrilling days of yesteryear, a tume before music had turned to crap, a time when people who made music could actually sing and play instruments.
Peter Gabriel’s tenure as lead singer of Genesis marked the band’s creative heyday. After his departure, Genesis went on to become a hugh commercial success (emphisis on the word commercial), while Gabriel eventually became a megastar in his own right. No cause-related benefit concert of the 1980s was complete without Gabriel performing Red Rain and Biko.
I was at Gabriel’s first-ever solo show at the legendary Capitol Theatre in Passaic, NJ on March 5, 1977. The opening act was Television. Unfortunately, the suburban prog-rock audience wasn’t ready for Television’s New York new wave sound, and the band was literally booed off the stage.
But I digress. The reason that I chose to highlight this particular song isn’t because it’s Gabriel’s best or even my favorite. I selected it because it’s topical.
Don’t Give Up, a duet with Kate Bush, tells the story of an unemployed man who’s at the end of his rope because he can’t find a job during hard economic times.
We’re living in that time now. The current American president cares more about nationalizing the private sector and listening to the sound of his own voice than doing anything effective to stimulate the economy so people can get back to work.
There are three videos this time. The two studio versions were directed by Kevin Godley and Lol Creme. The first features Peter and Kate embracing and revolving while the sun slowly goes into and out of an eclipse. The second shows Gabriel superimposed over a town with people in hard times. The last video is a live version filmed at the Secret World Live concert in Italy and features Paula Cole as the other singer in the duet.
Posted by Marc 
When I interviewed Paul Kelly in Adelaide, Australia in 1992, I asked him what bands he was listening to. In his response, he mentioned Died Pretty, along with The Go-Betweens and The Triffids. When I got back to the U.S., I made an effort to check them out. I’m glad I did, because it exposed me to a musical avenue that I barely knew existed at the time.
What would the seventies have been without Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel?
Sinéad Lohan is one of music’s enigmatic figure. She appeared on the international scene with her second album, No Mermaid, had a couple of minor hits, had a baby, and then vanished.
Listening to Katell Keineg, one is constantly aware of the duality in her music: modern and seemingly ancient, melodic with dissonant elements, soft but intense, deeply personal and unknowable.
By the time I heard of House of Love, they had just broken up. I was in a CD store in Brookline, MA back when I was living in Boston. There was music playing in the store, something wonderful that I’d never heard before. I asked the guy at the counter what it was. He told me it was House of Love. I don’t remember which album it was, maybe A Spy in the House of Love. The copy they were playing was for sale so I bought it. Then I hunted down the rest of the band’s CDs.
Lloyd Cole flew under my radar. I’d heard of him, but I wasn’t all that familiar with his music until sometime last year when I bought a couple of his albums, 1984-1989, and Music in a Foreign Language. How’d I miss him? I mean, I currently have 15,122 songs on my hard drive, which works about to about 1,260 albums if you allow for 12 songs on an album. Dunno, I guess it’s just one of those things.
Paul Kelly has received much recognition in his native Australia—he was inducted into the the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Hall of Fame in 1997. He remains less well-known in the United States, where the current top 20 includes albums by Lady GaGa, Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears, and the rap “musicians” du jour.
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