Peter Gabriel

Peter Gabriel is best known as a musician. He started his solo work in 1975 after leaving his old school group: Genesis. He has released eleven solo albums and written soundtracks for three films. In 1980 he founded WOMAD which has presented 170 festivals in over 30 countries. The festival became the inspiration for Real World Records, which he launched in 1989 with the aim of providing talented artists from around the world with access to state-of-the-art recording facilities, and help get their music better known around the world. Artists released by the label includes Hukwe Zawose, Ayub Ogada, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Papa Wemba, Totó La Momposina, Sheila Chandra and more recently The Gloaming and Loney dear. Actively involved in human rights campaigning he has participated in many benefit concerts, notably Amnesty International’s 1988 Human Rights Now! Tour. It was on this tour he saw first hand how video can transform a human rights activist’s chances of achieving justice and change, and in 1992 proposed the creation of an organization to pioneer the use of video in human rights work, Witness.org. Around 2000 he co-founded the Elders.og, with Richard Branson, to bring together a small group of highly respected global leaders, launched with Nelson Mandela in July 2007, and currently chaired by Kofi Annan. Peter is now writing and recording, and working on a plan to create a streaming service for digital medicine and an Interspecies Internet.