Song of the Day 1/9: Peter Gabriel, “Games Without Frontiers”

Peter Gabriel’s anti-war song was released on his third self-titled album, an effort rejected by his record company as “commercial suicide.” Atlantic rued the decision when Gabriel took the album to Mercury and this became a U.K. hit as a single.

The song’s framework — the phrase “Jeux Sans Frontières,” so often misheard by Americans as “she’s so popular” — is taken from a European game show that started in the ’60s. According to Wikipedia, “Teams representing a town or city in one of the participating countries would compete in games of skill, often while dressed in bizarre costumes.” The show was licensed to several different countries; the British version was called “It’s a Knockout,” also name-checked in the lyrics.

“I just began playing in a somewhat light-hearted fashion – ‘Hans and Lottie …’ – so it looked, on the surface, as just kids, Gabriel has said. “The names themselves are meaningless, but they do have certain associations with them. So it’s almost like a little kids’ activity room. Underneath that, you have the TV programme [and the] sort of nationalism, territorialism, competitiveness that underlies all that assembly of jolly people.”

This was the original video for the song.

This now-official version was produced because the BBC wouldn’t play the original, objecting to the use of the children seated around the dinner table