"Here Comes the Flood" is a song by British pop-rock musician Peter Gabriel from 1977. It appeared on his first solo album, Peter Gabriel (Car).

The song has been played on several Peter Gabriel tours, often forgoing the orchestral arrangement found on his 1977 eponymous release in favor of a more stripped down arrangement. Sparser re-recordings of Here Comes the Flood have been included on Robert Fripp’s 1979 Exposure album and Gabriel’s 1990 compilation album, Shaking the Tree: Sixteen Golden Greats. Gabriel has performed the song in both English and German both live and in the studio. A German recording of Here Comes the Flood was included on the 12" single of "Biko".

Background

Gabriel wrote "Here Comes the Flood" soon after his departure from Genesis in 1975.^[1] He recalled that the song was written during a warm summer evening while on the hillside above his cottage. As an experiment, Gabriel made a habit of running down the hillside one hundred paces with his eyes closed. During one of those excursions, Gabriel recalled that he felt "an energy point on the hillside and after a burst of meditation stormed down the hill to write."^[2] The song centered around a fictional character conceived by Gabriel known as Mozo, an individual loosely based on Moses and the alchemical treatise Aurora consurgens. Gabriel dispersed several songs related to Mozo on his albums up through So in 1986, with "Here Comes the Flood" and "Down the Dolce Vita" being the first to reference the character.^[1] He considered the idea of using "Here Comes the Flood" in a multi-media rock opera based on the character of Mozo, but the idea never came to fruition.^[3]

Gabriel’s interest in shortwave radio served as a catalyst for the creation of "Here Comes the Flood".^[4] He observed that radio signals were stronger as daylight faded and believed that this correlated with an increase in psychic energy at night. During one of his dreams, Gabriel envisioned a scenario where the psychic barriers that safeguard ones thoughts would erode and thus manifest in a collective consciousness.^[2] In an interview with Sounds magazine, he said that the lyrics pertained to the concept of a mental flood where the collective thoughts of other individuals would be made publicly available and accessible to others through telepathy. He posited that extroverted people would tolerate the situation but believed that those who wished to conceal their thoughts would be unable to adapt.^[4]

Gabriel rehearsed "Here Comes the Flood" on a few occasions with Anthony Phillips, Mike Rutherford, and Phil Collins his former bandmates from Genesis. During his first meeting with producer Bob Ezrin, Gabriel presented him with a demo of "Here Comes the Flood" in the producer's living room. Ezrin approved of the song and went to bed singing its melody, later commenting that "there's not many songs I've heard fresh from the artist's mouth that are that great".^[5] Rutherford recalled that the version used on Gabriel's first studio album was hardly recognizable from his original sessions with Gabriel.^[3]

Other versions

Prior to its official release, the song appeared on an entertainment show on Thames Television in the summer of 1976.^[6]

Gabriel believed that the recording found on his 1977 eponymous release was overproduced and not faithful to his original demo.^[2] In 1979, Gabriel reworked the song with Robert Fripp on his Exposure album. Unlike the original recording found on Gabriel’s 1977 eponymous release, this version only featured vocals, piano, and Frippertronics, a recording technique using two reel-to-reel tape machines.^[7] Gabriel commented that this version was more in-line with the arrangement he originally intended.^[2] That same year, Gabriel performed the song on a BBC Two TV special, which was prefaced by a choir trio featuring Kate Bush. A German recording, titled "Jetzt Kommt Die Flut", was included on the 12" single of "Biko".^[6] Gabriel performed "Jetzt Kommt Die Flut" during the German and Switzerland shows of his i/o tour.^[8]

In 1990, Gabriel re-recorded "Here Comes the Flood" for his 1990 compilation album, Shaking the Tree: Sixteen Golden Greats. Gabriel commented that it gave him "another chance to do another version. We'd done one on the first album, which was a grand thing with an orchestra, which I think had some beautiful textures in the verse that I liked a lot, but the chorus ended up a little too bombastic. I'd done a demo prior to that with Robert Fripp, and he then did a version which was more like the demo. I wanted to take a simpler, more emotional sketch version of it and do it with voice and piano."^[6]

Critical reception

Classic Rock Review complimented the instrumentation and lyrics of "Here Comes the Flood" and said that Dick Wagner’s lead guitar work cemented the song as an effective album closer.^[9] Stewart Mason of AllMusic wrote that the song's lyrics "are the most depressing and paranoid ones on this relatively upbeat album, foreshadowing the increasing darkness of the next two albums, this is also the only song on the album that explicitly sounds like Genesis, right down to Steve Hunter's Steve Hackett-like guitar solos and the orchestral arrangement."^[10]

Alan Jones of Melody Maker thought that the acoustic guitars and orchestration aptly underpinned Gabriel's conviction in his vocal delivery, adding that the lyrics were articulate enough to convey a sense of hope in enduring an apocalyptic future.^[11] They further stated that the lyrics surrounding apocalypticism were unpretentious and demonstrated admirable restraint.^[12] Uncut believed that the "Here Comes the Flood" sounded "a little overcooked" in its studio form, but that Gabriel would later effectively incorporate the song into his live performances.^[13]