Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer (12" Dance Mix)

Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer (Dance Mix) / 12 Inch Extended Remix (HQ Audio)

Sledgehammer wasn't intended for Peter Gabriel's album So.

"The record was done. Drummer Manu Katché was about to pack up, and Peter said he had an idea for the next album and wanted to do a take," explains bass player Tony Levin.

"Manu and I did two takes. It was getting late at night. We didn't have the usual back and forth about our parts. So I was surprised a year later when I heard the finished track. Often your part is changed or replaced, but they were there, just as we'd played them."

The intervening year had seen Sledgehammer go on a journey to becoming the finished article it is.

Gabriel had wanted this to be a more fun track than he might usually release, and wanted to fuse it with the essence of 1960s soul music — in particular, the sounds of Otis Redding, his favourite singer from the period.

To achieve this, he hired in the Memphis Horns, led by Wayne Jackson, who had worked with Redding. While there are cutting-edge synth sounds throughout (including a synthesized shakuhachi flute from an E-mu Emulator II sampler, and a "cheap organ sound" produced by a Prophet-5), he wanted real horns to accompany the real drums and bass too.

Backing vocals were added by PP Arnold, Coral Gordon and Dee Lewis, while Gabriel's long-time collaborator David Rhodes and producer Daniel Lanois added a guitar groove as a bed for everything else to sit upon.

Sledgehammer is more fun than your typical Peter Gabriel track — in more ways than one.

Lyrically, there's plenty of sexual innuendo: "It does have one or two references to sexual matters, I would say," says Gabriel. "And maybe one or two other ideas too, as did a lot of R&B stuff of that time. I was trying to stay in that genre but maybe take it a little wackier."

Lanois feels there's a benefit in keeping recording sessions fun too.

"If you're on a fixed time track, add a few minutes on the end for people to improvise," he says. "The song was done and we carried on, with Peter improvising 'I kicked the habit, shed my skin' and 'this is the new stuff, I go dancing in'. We were able to take those improvs and bring them to earlier points in the song. If we hadn't had that looseness we wouldn't have had the same song."

Despite being a last-minute addition to the album, Sledgehammer became Peter Gabriel's best-selling single, which in turn helped So become his best-selling album. It made the top 10 across Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and reached number 1 in the US.

It was backed by one of the most groundbreaking and successful music videos in history, which made use of stop-motion animation, claymation, puppets and models. “I had to lie underneath a sheet of glass for 16 hours while they filmed me one frame at a time. It was very uncomfortable. But it was a great team of people, and the video took the song to another level,” says Gabriel.

The video won nine MTV VMAs and became the most played video in MTV history at the time.

Two twelve-inch singles were issued to support the release.

The first is a 5'37" extended version, and the second, featured here, is a "limited edition dance version" which contains more breakdowns and emphasises the drums and horns more.

This 12-inch single contains four tracks, including an extended mix of Gabriel's 1980 protest anthem Biko, and this mix by John Potoker, who in the same year remixed tracks for Heaven 17, Fine Young Cannibals, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark and Gabriel's former band, Genesis.

Year: 1986 Label: Virgin Cat no: PGS 113