For Fans of Peter Gabriel

The soundtrack to Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ is not a film score in any conventional sense. Gabriel spent months immersed in Middle Eastern and North African field recordings, then rebuilt them into something that has no genre: part liturgy, part trance, part electronic sculpture. The album stands entirely on its own as listening, without a single frame of the film. It is the record that made Real World Studios necessary and that defined what the label would stand for: music from everywhere, belonging to no one country.

The commercial success of So is easy to misread as a compromise. It is the opposite. Gabriel made a record that put Youssou N'Dour on a rock LP, that used processed African percussion as the backbone of radio singles, and that ran a spoken-word descent into mental illness alongside stadium anthems -- all without blinking. That it also sold millions of copies is a structural argument that the mainstream was not where the limits were.

The World of Music, Arts and Dance festival Gabriel co-founded in 1980 was not simply a booking exercise. It was an argument: that audiences would travel to hear music whose languages they did not speak, that cultural exchange did not require translation, that the stage was a democratic space. Decades of imitators have proved him right, but WOMAD was there first, and it was founded on the conviction that curiosity is a form of respect.

Most concert films are documents. Secret World Live is a production: a set designed by Robert Lepage, two stages connected by a catwalk, a narrative arc running across the whole show. Gabriel and collaborator Paula Cole circle each other like characters in a play that the music is writing in real time. It belongs in a conversation with Stop Making Sense as one of the handful of concert films where the staging is inseparable from the songs.