Peter Gabriel's Ovo at 25
Originally Released 12th June, 2000, and reissued on vinyl for Record Store Day. Has the music used in the original experience held up as well as the Millennium Dome itself?
Click/press the album cover above to listen on the streaming service of your choice. OVO is issued on vinyl for the first time as a Record Store Day release, available from your friendly local record shop (the nearest to me is also the charity record shop associated with RSD - Off the Record in Central Milton Keynes.)
“OVO is the Peter Gabriel-authored soundtrack to the Millennium Dome Show, the 160-artist extravaganza that underwent 999 performances during the 365 days in 2000 that the Dome was open.” - Electronic Press Kit
Peter Gabriel followed his 1992 studio album Us with the collaborative soundtrack - OVO. This was part of the Millennium Experience, intended to be a showcase of the best of Britain as we sped towards the 21st century, housed in a specially constructed Dome.
Most of the specially created zones and exhibits received less than glowing reviews, and, according to the U.K. press (never a reliable source) the whole thing, both the innovative giant yurt style building and its contents, was a colossal waste of money.
In 2025, the Dome - now officially the O2 Arena - is one of London’s biggest spaces, regularly hosting indoor audiences of up to 20,000 in the main arena, including the London stop of Gabriel’s Back to Front gig in 2013.
I visited the Dome some time in the year 2000 (which still sounds like a date in the future), wandered around the ’experience’ for a bit, most of which I don’t remember, can’t recall - only that Lord Puttnam was showing some young people around just ahead of me (coincidentally, David Puttnam also features in a recent post by
, in connection with Keith Moon/That'll Be the Day). Of course, I was really only there for the music and the show, which consisted of gymnastic contemporary dance, possibly influenced by Cirque du Soleil.
The performance repeated hourly, so I was able to watch it several times. It was a brilliant experience hearing a Gabriel album, repeatedly, on a concert specification sound system.
I’ve also selected OVO for this post to remind myself of my original intent for these LP posts. I’m interested in albums as a complete experience. Music that connects, no matter what our background, culture, or language.
“Music is the universal language. There is nothing more powerful, more moving.” - Peter Gabriel
It’s important to be in the moment with music when we have fun singing along to a power chorus, become lost in psychedelia, or wallow in a pleasant memory triggered by a song on the radio. All that matters enourmously. BUT - music represents something deeper about the human spirit, communication, and connection.The trick is to keep the fun while also exploring the philosophy, telling stories and engaging the emotions. How does music move you?
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OVO tells a story, exploring the past, present and future of humanity.
Gabriel and the creative team had room to play when developing OVO because the purpose of the Millennium Experience was never very clear, other than to be an experience in itself. Musically, we hear:
past rural Celtic Britain, in the opening vocal by Iarla Ó Lionáird, and later in the Celtic folk of ‘The Weaver’s Reel’;
multi-cultural modern Britain is heard, with contributions from The Dhol Foundation (Dhol is a traditional double-headed Indian drum), heard clearly during ‘The Man Who Loved the Earth’/’The Hand That Sold Shadows’;
and ‘futuristic’ industrial sounds (yet also harking back to the industrial revolution) in tracks such as ‘The Tower That Ate People’.
The story shaped the music across three generations of one family: The music serves the story and the story serves the music.
An ideal project for Gabriel, then, with his deep interest in multicultural music - ‘world music’, and more. There was a risk in engaging Peter Gabriel for this project. He is easily distracted. He’ll dive down a rabbit hole and emerge with a grand plan (in the press kit interview for the Dome he mentions his idea for a theme park, while acknowledging such a venture is hard to bring to reality), thus delaying the album he’s working on, sometimes by years. At least this project had a hard deadline: 31 December 1999, even if the 21st century really began in 2001.
OVO was also issued in a 2CD version, using the image above as an alternative cover. ‘The Story of Ovo’ rap and a time lapse video were on the second CD. Streaming services now feature the rap as the opening track.
Stories have characters, so here was an opportunity to bring in guest vocalists - Elizabeth Frazer from the Cocteau Twins on ‘Downside Up’; Richie Havens bringing soul and grit to ‘The Time of the Turning’ and, alongside Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile, to ‘Make Tomorrow’.
Gabriel features strongly on a song he had written prior to the OVO project and which fitted the theme: ‘Father, Son’. This also features the The Black Dyke Band on brass (they add tone elsewhere too, and a brass band will always evoke a northern industrial past).
If all this makes the album sound incoherent - it isn’t. All the different genres, cultures, and artists are blended into an album with a consistent feel from the beginning to end. The one exception to this is the rap track but that was always intended to be something different. It’s not on the single album and doesn’t interupt the flow on the double.
The ways in which this cross-genre project succeeds forms another slither of an argument for music as a universal language. Perhaps global connection should have been the theme for the Millennium Experience all along?
OVO is an oddity in PG’s discography, but it was an unusual project. To my ears, the album holds up 25 years later. Projects such as the Millennium Experience can sometimes be of their time, and rapidly consigned to the history books. OVO, the music survived - Gabriel still performs songs such as ‘Downside Up’ and ‘The Tower That Ate People’. The Dome continues to resonate to the sound of all kinds of music, as perhaps it was always destined to do.
Dive into OVO and let the rhythms from across history, from across the globe, resonate with you.
I’ve previously reviewed other Peter Gabriel albums: 3/Melt, Us, and i/o - with more examinations of his work to come.
LP returns with a new playlist in a few days. LP>Playlist #043 remains available via Spotify and Apple Music.