Peter Gabriel has been one of the biggest influences on my music. His approach to drumming resonated with all that I was inspired by in experiencing indigenous music of South Africa. With every drummer I used; I would tell them to study the "Games Without Frontiers" album of Peter Gabriel as it was the perfect an example of what I was wanting in my music in trying to blend African rhythms with heavy rock – the cutting back on using cymbols to drive a song was the most important part to me – rather I would tell the drummer to use a floor tom instead. On Peters album "Games Without Frontiers" – was the only example I had to play for my drummers.

Then I began work on a putting spiritual channeled works to music. It was then that Peter released the "Passion" soundtrack – it was right on the money with what I was doing – i.e. combining the Egyptian ambience with African rhythms – the piece I was working on (Chapter 3) was an Egyptian based scripture. This one piece took me 5 years to complete. The "Passion" soundtrack is still often played in my house. A journalist just wrote about the new Tribe album although it is a heavy rock album that it sounds like "the outtakes of the stellar passion sessions".

I have a firm belief that one of the problems in modern society is the way we treat old people. In ancient times the old people were revered for their experience and their wisdom. They would tell us their stories around the fire place and thus a food of their experience would enter our bodies and we knew what it meant to be a member of a community. These days we put the old folk away – young rockers judge the older ones harshly etc etc. Now the psychologists have taken the place of the elder. When the elders of old passed on their stories the stories could cover many many generations of stories. This would give the young mans mind a reference and an ability to think into the stream of generations. When you ask the child to protect the world for generations to come he can mentally comprehend the concept of future generations. Now in modern society we can hardly remember the names of people we were in school with never mind 500 generations back. So I have longed for this concept of the elder.

Peter Gabriel has been a musical elder to me, Klaus Schulze is another one and so is Jeff Beck – they are not just heroes – they are elders because they have consistently had the truth of being to always do things the way their own spirit led them. This has inspired and encouraged me to be true to myself and not to be pressured by the star maker machinery to do it in a different way.

Yes now it is true that the world is becoming as a global village albeit still tearing itself apart with dogma and fundamentalist poisons and capitalist greed. But in the midst of this crazy world we can still seek out the elders. Now I just discovered that Peter has set up an website called the www.theelders.org.

I would encourage you all to visit this website and see if it resonates with your own innate will to serve.

Shine on
Robbi