Big Blue Ball
Big Blue Ball
In the summer of 1991, Peter Gabriel invited scores of musicians, songwriters and poets from around the world to his Real World Studios in Wiltshire, England to write, perform and record new music for one week. He repeated the exercise the following summer, and again in the summer of 1995, culminating a large collection of recordings from 75 participants who represented 20 nations – so many recordings that the studio began to run out of room to store them all.
The list of participants includes Billy Cobham, Papa Wemba, Hossam Ramzy and The Egyptian String Ensemble, Sinead O'Connor, Natacha Atlas, flamenco guitarist Juan Canizares, American singer Joseph Arthur, Afro Celts James McNally and Iarla Ó Lionáird, Japanese percussionist Joji Hirota, Jah Wobble, gospel group The Holmes Brothers, Justin Adams, Francis Bebey, Tim Finn, Marta Sebestyen, guitarist Vernon Reid, Chinese flute player Guo Yue.
Several years later, producer Steven Hague was called in to help sort through the recordings and finalize an album’s worth of material. The selected songs were released under the name Big Blue Ball. Not all artists who visited during the recording weeks are represented on the final album, but “each artist’s input was invaluable to the spirit of the enterprise,” according to the project’s promotional materials.