When Peter Gabriel made the transition from left-field art rock to mainstream pop with Sledgehammer he did it entirely on his own terms, combining meticulous studio craft, world-class musicians and a highly experimental approach to sound. Sledgehammer sits at the heart of his fifth solo album So, recorded largely in a converted cowshed at Ashcombe House, Gabriel’s home near Bath in Somerset. The long, rectangular building housed a control room with views over the valley and a live room behind it, separated by a small technical area and without direct sight lines. It was a home-spun environment, basic in terms of acoustic treatment but, in Kevin Killen’s words, “true” enough to let decisions translate. So was tracked and shaped over many months during 1985, with horn overdubs and backing vocals for Sledgehammer completed later at the Power Station in New York, and the album finally mastered by Ian Cooper at the Townhouse in February 1986.
By the time Killen joined the project he already knew producer Daniel Lanois from his work on U2’s The Unforgettable Fire at Slane Castle and Windmill Lane. Peter Gabriel and Lanois had just come off the Birdy soundtrack, which had given them a taste for re-purposing existing material and building new pieces from treated sources. For So, Gabriel wanted to write what he called “proper pop songs” but retain the rhythmic focus, world-music influences and sonic experimentation that had defined his earlier work. Engineer Dave Bascombe had recorded the basic tracks at Ashcombe House, and when he left to work with Tears for Fears, Killen was brought in to oversee final overdubs and mixing. He arrived expecting a four to six week engagement; Gabriel’s assistant calmly told him he would be there until the following March, and that prediction proved accurate.
The studio’s technical centrepiece was a 56-input SSL 4000 E Series console feeding two Studer A80 24-track machines. One Studer was stock, the other carried customised Colin Broad Audio cards, and an Adam Smith synchroniser was installed the day before tracking began to lock the two machines together. Gabriel’s demos for the material on So were built around Linn 9000 drum patterns and chord progressions on Prophet 5 or Yamaha CP70, and these guide parts were played from the B machine while the A machine captured the band and a rough mix of the demo for reference. As a result, most of the basic tracks existed in long, exploratory forms when Killen arrived. Sledgehammer, for example, ran close to ten minutes in its early incarnation, with extended vamps and jammed sections designed to let the musicians explore ideas while Gabriel continued to refine melodies and “Gabrielese” placeholder lyrics.
The Ashcombe outboard rack reflected a deliberate mix of classic analogue and contemporary digital tools. Reverb and ambience came from an EMT plate, AMS DMX 15-80 delay, AMS RMX16, Delta Labs DL2, Lexicon 224 and a Quantec Room Simulator, supplemented by a Revox B77 quarter-inch and an Ampex ATR half-inch for tape effects. Decca compressors handled dynamics, while a PA system in the live room doubled as a makeshift echo chamber when needed. Gabriel’s keyboard rig lived in the control room and included an Emulator, Fairlight, Prophet 5 and CP70. For many parts Lanois encouraged the band to play simultaneously and print blended sounds rather than discrete sources: for example, Lanois on 12-string electric guitar, David Rhodes on Steinberger or Strat, and Gabriel on keys would all feed a single mono or stereo track, with the part and the processing treated as a unified sound rather than separate elements. This approach produced composite tones that felt familiar yet were difficult to trace to any one instrument.
When Killen first heard Sledgehammer, the track consisted of Manu Katché’s drums, a basic bass part, guitars and guide keyboards, with Gabriel still working on the lyric and melody. Even in this extended form the groove stood out. Manu’s soulful, elastic feel and Tony Levin’s bass line gave the song a natural push and pull, despite the musicians locking to a Linn 9000 pattern. The drum sound was built around a close-miked kit: an Electro-voice RE20 and AKG D112 on the kick, a Shure SM57 on snare, Sennheiser MD 421s on toms, an AKG C451 on hi-hat and Neumann U87s as overheads.
A distinctive AMS-based treatment was printed to the snare, combining non-linear and ambience programs with a touch of plate, which became a key part of the song’s identity. Levin’s bass was later recut with a Boss octave pedal, tightening and deepening the part once the direction of the song was clearer. Guitars were tracked through a Roland JC-120 and a Fender Deluxe, with SM57s as the workhorse microphones and occasional use of a Sony C500. Some of Gabriel’s keys were DI’d, while others were blasted through the PA stack in the live room and captured with room mics to add air and movement.
Because the early takes for Sledgehammer and other songs lived across several reels, and because of a mismatch between the FM sync card in the stock Studer and the DC card in the modified machine, Killen and Lanois ran into sync drift whenever they tried to combine material. On top of that, the A80’s inherent speed instability at the head and tail of reels made things worse. Daniel Lanois kept meticulous notes marking where strong ideas lived, but when reels were aligned they would slip out of time as the song progressed. To solve this, Killen suggested bringing in a Mitsubishi 32-track digital machine, inspired by his experience with Bob Clearmountain in New York. The Mitsubishi was flown over from New York because it was significantly cheaper to rent there than in London.
With console tech Mike Large’s help, they changed a setting deep in the Adam Smith synchroniser that told it to ignore sudden timecode jumps across physical edits. This allowed them to cut the multitracks on both master and slave reels without losing lock, provided they avoided copying rhythmic material across the edits. Using the Linn drum machine pattern as an absolute timing reference, they built a new digital master for Sledgehammer on the Mitsubishi, trimming the extended structure down to a tighter, musically coherent form that could work as a single while still retaining the feel of the long jam.
In early September, Gabriel and Lanois travelled to New York to record the Memphis Horns at the Power Station. When they returned with the horn parts and laid them into the newly edited structure, everyone could hear that Sledgehammer was becoming something special. The track still lacked a finished lead vocal, organ parts and backing vocals, but the core feel was in place. Through the autumn of 1985, Gabriel continued to refine the lyric, gradually replacing his nonsense syllables with fully formed lines, while the team added targeted overdubs: extra groove guitars, organ stabs, tambourine hits, Fairlight shakuhachi figures and the distinctive “Sledge! Sledge! Sledgehammer!” interjections. Those were created by recording Gabriel singing “sledgehammer”, then sampling and truncating the word with the AMS 15-80 to produce a more mechanical, chopped articulation that could be rhythmically inserted into the arrangement.
Lead vocals for Sledgehammer were recorded in the control room. Gabriel preferred to sing there rather than in a separate booth, using small NS10s and Tannoys at moderate level. Before committing to a chain, Killen and Lanois set up a blind test with around six microphones, including Gabriel’s usual SM57. With gains matched and Peter blindfolded so he could not see or touch the mics, he sang through each in turn. He chose a Neumann U47 that happened to have an unusually airy top end but slightly less low frequency weight than expected. Just as they were ready to proceed, tech Neil Perry fixed a short in the cable between the mic and its power supply, which changed the tonality and brought back the missing bottom. Killen and Lanois liked both versions, so Perry devised a workaround: remove the shield from a patch cable and split the U47 output across two console channels, one with a standard cable and one with the modified cable. This gave them two complementary versions of the same mic on separate faders, allowing them to balance between body and brightness for the ideal vocal tone.
Because Gabriel sang in the control room with open monitors, they used phase cancellation to minimise spill. After recording a pass with vocals, Killen would record a separate pass of just the backing track at the same monitor level and then bring it back out of phase against the vocal track to cancel as much of the bleed as possible. Gabriel typically needed three to five full takes once the lyric was settled. Killen then comped the final performance from these, occasionally dropping in new lines when words changed. For backing vocals, PP Arnold, Coral Lewis and Dee Gordon were recorded facing each other onto a single track, using a U47 and a U67, then doubled to thicken the blend.
Once the core of Sledgehammer was complete, Gabriel’s labels in the UK and US visited Ashcombe to hear rough mixes of several So tracks. Those roughs became reference points for the final mixes; the team were careful not to lose the immediacy and balance of those early passes. Final mix work respected the existing feel rather than reinventing the track. Much of the character of Sledgehammer lay in the interplay of Manu Katché’s drums, Tony Levin’s bass, the printed snare treatment, the composite keyboard and guitar textures, and the newly added Memphis Horns parts. The mix focused on balancing these elements, reinforcing groove transitions and using the existing ambience from the plate, AMS and Quantec to maintain a punchy yet spacious sound.
When So was released in 1986 it became the biggest selling album of Peter Gabriel’s career, going triple platinum in the UK and five times platinum in the US. Sledgehammer reached number one on the American singles chart and number four in the UK, propelled not only by its groove, horns and innuendo-laden lyric but also by a visually striking stop-motion video that became an MTV landmark. Behind the hit, though, sat a long, technically demanding and highly collaborative studio process. The combination of a modest home studio, a large SSL console, dual Studer A80s, carefully chosen outboard, a flown-in Mitsubishi digital multitrack and the patience to edit, comp and refine every element allowed Gabriel, Lanois, Killen and the musicians to deliver a track that was both experimental and utterly accessible. Sledgehammer stands as a textbook example of how meticulous production, inventive use of technology and strong songwriting can meet in the middle to create a genuine pop classic.