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‘You still have us’: how Peter Gabriel’s Don’t Give Up became a lifeline for the lonely
Need a six-minute hug from Kate Bush? In the first in a new series on uplifting art, we remember the life-saving power of Don't Give Up
It's almost eight years since the video clip for Don’t Give Up first appeared on YouTube. Written and sung by Peter Gabriel, and featuring Kate Bush, the track has attracted more than 11,000 comments from viewers who claim it has helped avert suicide, guided them through grueling treatments for cancer, provided solace in times of bereavement, homelessness, illness both physical and mental, and much else.
"This song saved my life when I got back from Iraq and couldn't fit in or do anything right in life," one comment reads. "Kept me going through 3 years of chemo and I won’t give up," says another. "My wife died of cancer over ten years ago and I still feel her in my heart," writes a user going by Al Bundy. "This song helps me ease the pain of loneliness and hurt I feel every waking moment. Thank you, Peter Gabriel."
In an article for Medium, the writer Christine Penn said that the song helped her banish thoughts of self harm. “I felt like she [Kate Bush] was speaking directly to me telling me not to do it; don’t commit suicide,” she wrote. “I had given up and she was telling me not to do that.”
A warm embrace and a profoundly comforting voice for many, in recent weeks the song has been further revivified by people who recognise that in 2020 the world’s population is now experiencing its pain simultaneously. Aligning with comments that go back years, over the past month the clip has attracted scores of posts that celebrate its necessity in the face of a story that has left us all breathless.
“The whole world needs a hug,” writes one correspondent. “I’m sending love to everyone out there. Please don’t give up.” Another says that “I miss Kate. I miss Peter. Nothing is as it used to be.” A third viewer offers that people from “Italy, to Iran, to Spain and to the whole world – to everyone affected by the goings-on of these precarious times – hold fast and don’t give up… Stay safe and healthy.” Such responses are no small feat for a song ostensibly about the dislocating effects of poverty.
When Peter Gabriel was considering suitable partners with whom to duet on Don’t Give Up he had in mind a figure from the world of country music. In the first place, the track was inspired by the photographs of the Great Depression taken by the Hoboken-born photojournalist Dorothea Lange, whose black and white portraits of dirt-poor migrant workers in California lent themselves to the sound of American roots music.
A call was placed to the manager of Dolly Parton. As one of 12-children born into a single-room cabin in rural Tennessee, the Smoky Mountain Songbird knew much that was needed to be known about poverty. As well as this, in Coat Of Many Colors, from 1971, she had written about such dire straits in an artful and poignant manner. But there was only one problem: Dolly had never heard of Peter Gabriel.
Spurned by a woman oblivious to the progressive charms of albums such as The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, instead Gabriel turned to his friend Kate Bush. Describing her contribution to the recording of Don’t Give Up, engineer Kevin Killen said that “you could just hear the emotion dripping out of her performance. Literally every hair on my body was standing up.”
“[Kate Bush] was essentially brought in as an actor, really, to play a role and to represent that part of the song,” said Daniel Lanois, who co-produced the track. “And I can’t imagine that being [done] any better than that is. She was like an angel, and did it fantastically.”
Written at a time of high unemployment in Britain, and during the midst of the Miners’ Strike, Don’t Give Up tells a story of economic disenfranchisement from two points of view. In the song’s verse, taken by Peter Gabriel, a man describes being riven by joblessness; in its chorus, Kate Bush serves to provide a measure of reassurance that this too shall pass.
It is desolate stuff. Gabriel sings of moving from town to town in the hope of finding work – “for every job, so many men, so many men no one needs” – and of contemplating suicide while standing on a bridge and “[keeping] my eyes down below.” In response, Kate Bush tells him that “when times get rough, you can fall back on us, don’t give up, please don’t give up.” It is the word “please” that makes the track so dreadfully poignant.
“There was… quite a lot of unemployment going on [in Britain] so I thought I would try and roll that in,” said Peter Gabriel. “And in a way the Don’t Give Up message felt like an emotional focal point for the lyric.”
Repeated 13 times, it is these three words that resonate with the greatest clarity. Artfully positioned so as to dominate the track’s wider despondency – and sung by Bush in a beatific voice – it is this refrain that permits a feeling of hopefulness, as well as allowing the song to encapsulate more than its stated subject matter. It is the reason that Don’t Give Up is today a suitable balm for a global populace upended by a planetary pandemic.
The sense of all-encompassing comfort was explored in the video that accompanied the song. Directed by Kevin Godley and Lol Creme, the clip sees Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush singing while clinched in a powerful embrace, as if each were unable to stand without the other. Despite enduring difficulties in his marriage, Gabriel sought the permission of his wife, Jill, before filming began.
“I thought that five minutes groping Kate Bush in front of the world was not the best thing for a dodgy marriage,” he said. “At the time I felt I needed… a blessing.”
As well as much else, Don’t Give Up has proved as pliable as the lyric it conveys. Peter Gabriel himself has also performed the track with both Paula Cole and Ane Brun. Willie Nelson hoped to sing it with Dolly Parton – again, she turned down the offer – but opted instead to duet with Sinhead O’Connor. In a version issued for the charity Keep A Child Alive, the track was also recorded by Alicia Keys and Bono.
The song has also been interpreted, in markedly varied ways, by The Shadows, Sarah Brightman and Gregorian, The Midway State and Lady Gaga, Pink and John Legend, Jann Close and Annie Haslam, Shannon Noll and Natalie Bassingthwaighte, and more.
The track began life as a simple rhythm on Peter Gabriel’s Linndrum electronic drum machine. The synthesised tom-tom beat was then replicated organically and used as the foundation on which to build the rest of the song. In order to achieve a dampened sound for its fragile ending, bassist Tony Levine placed disposable nappies below the strings at the bridge of his guitar.
Recorded along with eight other tracks for the parent album So, Don’t Give up was tracked at Ashcombe House in Swainswick, Somerset. An idyll so rural that its closest neighbours were the cows that grazed in its 25-acres of land, the property was Peter Gabriel’s home for eight years. He converted the property’s cowshed for use as a studio in which he also made his self-titled 1982 LP – unhelpfully, his fourth eponymous release – as well as the soundtrack to the Alan Parker film Birdy, released two years later.
The facility also contained a library of demo tapes and snippets of musical ideas to which Daniel Lanois was permitted full access. Given the bounty of material at his disposal, the producer believed that So might be recorded in as little as six weeks. It was a miscalculation that he had cause, and time, to regret.
“It took us a year to finish So, almost to the day,” he recalled. “I later learned that that’s the fastest record Peter ever made.”
Gabriel himself said that “I’ve been very lucky musically. I never have any trouble generating new ideas. But lyrically, getting something that I think is okay – and as I get older, I get more critical – that’s hard work.”
This certainly proved to be the case during the recording of So. “I’m a master of distraction when I’ve got a deadline,” said the singer of the many hours he spent chatting on the telephone in preference to marrying pen to paper. So aggrieved was Lanois by this habit that he eventually smashed the Bakelite into which Gabriel spoke and threw it into the bushes outside.
It didn’t help. With lack of time fast becoming a matter of urgency, the producer ordered his charge to work on lyrics in the smaller of the studio’s two rooms. He then fastened shut its door with six inch nails; once Gabriel had freed himself by removing the door from its frame, the two men embarked on a full and frank exchange of views that cleared the air by turning it blue. So committed was Lanois to the notion of the studio as a working environment that he instructed everyone in it to wear hard hats. “We weren’t about to wait around for [Peter Gabriel],” he said. “We were there to get the job done.”
Finally, they did. Released in May 1986, So would go on to sell more than seven million copies across the globe. With five million of these bought in the United States alone, the success of the record transformed its author from a highly respected cult concern into a well-groomed pop star beloved of MTV.
Yet even in his moment of mainstream acceptance, Peter Gabriel had about him much that was different from the norm. Unveiled in the UK as the second single from So, Don’t Give Up spent 11-weeks on the chart, peaking at number nine. But it was not only hit of the year about a worker down on his luck; in terms of sales, Gabriel’s nuanced and well-judged master-class was blown out of the sky by Livin’ On A Prayer by Bon Jovi.
But for a song suited to soothing and sustaining the spirit through this strangest and most serious of seasons, and much else besides, Don’t Give Up is hard to beat.