It's a good year to revisit Gabriel's commercial breakthrough, with the high, delightfully constipated voice of Gotye all over the airwaves. Like him, Gabriel had been tinkering with groundbreaking production techniques for a decade post-Genesis, before some really big radio tunes – Red Rain, In Your Eyes, Sledgehammer – piqued the interest of the wider public. So still sounds powerful because its political messages were either large and timeless (Don't Give Up, with Kate Bush) or sharp enough to look the era in the eye (the loadsamoney-themed Big Time). And the "world" sounds, such as that shakuhachi flute, make it a classy, far-sighted vision of 1986. The famous stop-motion video for Sledgehammer represented a serious 1970s musician cheerfully repackaging himself for the MTV age; Gabriel recently admitted the simple black-and-white cover came about when his record company warned him his usual artwork – with his face always partially obscured – was "offputting to women".