At We Out Here festival in Dorset in August, thousands of people could be heard singing a trumpet melody as if it was a giant brass-band karaoke session. On stage was Peven Everett, performing a rendition of Gabriel, one of the most celebrated anthems in dance-music history. Co-created with producer Roy Davis Jr, the best-known version, which blew up in UK clubs in the mid-90s, is a spiritual garage-house track about the “archangel of love” that can bring both punters and DJs to tears.
But Everett is much more than one song. Damon Albarn of Gorillaz tells me that “Peven has a once-in-a-generation voice … he’s a great inspiration to us all.” We Out Here founder, Gilles Peterson says that the Chicagoan is, alongside Detroit’s Moodymann and Amp Fiddler, “the closest thing dance music has to a Prince-type figure”. A prolific multi-instrumentalist and one-man cottage industry, Everett’s catalogue spans more than 500 tracks, across house, neo-soul, hip-hop, samba and more.
As with Prince, Everett’s audience can expect something different with each performance; they’re often improvised and don’t have strict setlists. He claims the Prince-fluence goes both ways after the latter attended one of his shows in the mid-to-late 2000s. It’ll be the first time he’s been on stage with them since 2022, having contributed to their 2017 album Humanz.
When he was 21, a 1995 New York Times article asked whether Everett was the next Miles Davis. But Everett returned to Chicago to look after his ailing mother, where he teamed up with the producer Roy Davis Jr. Out of those mid-90s sessions came 1999 deep house staple Watch Them Come, as well as Gabriel.
The original version of Gabriel has more of a typical four-to-the-floor beat but it was its Live Garage Mix that resonated in the UK as DJs found that its swung drums matched the pace of the nascent UK garage scene. It was rereleased in 1997, reaching No 22 in the charts. At the time, US dance music was often associated with a big “diva” vocal; in the documentary, producer Marc Cary claims that Everett “brought a richness to house music” that previously didn’t exist.
Peterson says the song has become a dance-music standard, while Everett recalls dancing at Chicago’s Red Dog club in the early 2000s, when he claims that Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk and vocalist Benjamin Diamond approached him. Two years earlier, they had a huge hit with Music Sounds Better With You under the name Stardust. They were like, ‘Yo, we made Stardust because of Gabriel, we used that as a template.’ I guess it’s kind of a compliment.
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