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Typed up for Paperlate by Adrian Catchpole.
It's strange. We have known Genesis for many moons, and yet there is something daunting about probing the innermost thoughts of three eminently self-sufficient people who have achieved so much. Why, only the other night we were watching Phil on TV, starring in his hit movie 'Buster'. Mike and Tony have a string of solo albums and singles behind them, as well as the vast musical achievements of a band who have been part of our rock lives for over twenty years. In their presence we feel respect - and no small amount of awe.
Mercifully, they remain essentially the same team of down to earth musos who made '...And Then There Were Three' back in 1977. Joking, relaxed and patient, they fended off a giant spider that suddenly emerged from the studio woodwork, Phil had a quick bash on his drum kit, and e all ate sausage rolls.
SPEED Genesis charged into making 'We Can't Dance' with the sort of speed normally expected from a hardcore thrash band. Mike Rutherford, however, remains his usual calm and insouciant self when debating such arcane matters.
"It only took two months to write, out of which two weeks were lost for solo stuff and promotion, so really it was done in about six weeks."
To many Genesis watchers, it seems only a short while since their last album, the hit packed 'Invisible Touch'. Said Tony Banks:
"As you get older, distant events seem more recent. A lot of people have been born and died since the last album was made!"
The next step, of course, is their world tour which is planned for the middle of 1992. Explained Phil: "We start rehearsals in April and the first gig is on May 16th. We'll be going out with Chester Thompson on drums and Daryl Stuermer on guitar but nobody else. A lot of bands like Dire Straits go out with extra musicians to try and make the show sound like the album, which is great for them. But rather than go that way, it's best if we keep it nice and tight. We have talked about this and the songs sounded great before the extra percussion and harmonies went onto the album tracks. It will sound good enough without it. Anyway, we do more instrumental stuff than we do on my solo tours. We will be doing the 'Turn It On Again' medley in some shape or form, and then we normally do an 'In The Cage' medley for 'The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway'. I think we'll do a really good medley that encompasses the whole history of the band. We still get a lot of grief from old fans. They aren't satisfied with how much we play of the old stuff."
Says Tony: "The trouble is you can't please everybody, so we just try and keep ourseleves happy and we get more pleasure out of playing more recent stuff because that's what we are into at the moment."
Phil: "There's a couple of young Liverpudlian guys we met aged about 17, who would just like us to play 'One For The Vine' (from 'Wind And Wuthering' January 1977). If we didn't play anything else, they want to hear that. They can only have been about ten when that came out!"
Tony: "Quite honestly, even when we played it when it was contemporary, it used to get shouted down."
Phil: "Even in arenas it's not so bad, but if you are playing football stadiums, which is what we'll be doing, with 50,000 people there, you just need an element of that audience to be mumbling or talking to each other and you've got an awful lot of ambient noise floating about. The stadiums will be Europe and the States. We have tried to elminate fields. Roundhay Park, Leeds is one place we'll play and that is actually a field, and Knebworth is a field. After the stadiums, we are thinking of doing another tour of theatres."
Tony: "That's a nice idea, and if we do it, we could consider doing some of the quieter songs. It would be a different sort of show if we did that, but on the main show we will be concentrating heavily on more recent stuff. We have been shooting a video for 'No Son Of Mine', the first single off the new album."
MOVIE
Phil revealed that he is making to follow up his successful role in 'Buster', recently screened on ITV. Had he watched himself on TV? Phil winced and shook his head.
"I'm doing the new film at the beginning of the year. It's been four years already since 'Buster'. It's funny, I went to a restaurant the other night, and as we walked in a couple were leaving and they said: 'We're just going home to watch you!' which was rather weird. But I wouldn't have watched it - I couldn't have faced it. It was good fun to make, but it had its flaws. Half the fun was giving it that Sixties feel and making Jubblies. We were all trying to rack out brains to figure out what a Jubbly container looked like. They were triangular shaped frozen orange juice containers - remember you used to squeeze at the botttom and your lips used to go orange? The idea for a new movie has been at the back of my mind for about a year now. I've not been having acting lessons, but I have been going to a voice coach who I saw when I did 'Buster'.
"She's very good at helping me to slow down and think about what I'm doing. I have to think about what's being said and why. Even Meryl Streep goes to her! The new film will be made in Australia, but there won't be an Austalian accent in it. It's a bit of a surreal, zany story."
FIRE
Apart from Phil's phenomenal success as a solo artist, the other two Genesites have been busy with different projects. Tony Banks brought out his excellent album 'Still' earlier in the year, which featured singers Nik Kershaw, Fish, Jayney Klimek and Andy Taylor, and Mike Rutherford produced a new Mike & The Mechanics album 'Word Of Mouth' with his brace of vocalists Paul Carrack and Paul Young. Tony was rather disappointed about the slow response to his album.
"It's been out a few months and didn't exactly set the world on fire. We are going to try with one more single, and if Genesis are back again, and things go okay for us, people may remember who I am - briefly!"
Genesis are fortunate they can go off and lead quite different musical lives. "We're very lucky we can do that" said Phil. "There is no other band like us. Others in the same situation would have just split up after a world tour. And then maybe they'd decide to come back together again and reform after doing other thingd. I am sure some people think that's what we do. 'Oh you're getting back together again are you?' But we have never actually stopped. It's only in people's minds. They can't seem to relate to the fact that you can actaually do more than one thing!"
Mike: "We have been doing stuff outside the band now since 1974, and people are still worried that it's going to cause the break-up of the band."
Tony: "Yet it has the opposite effect, because if you can work outside the band, you don't have that frustration about trying something different. Back in the early days when Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett left Genesis, it was for that reason. They wanted to do things without being tied down by the rest of us. Later we felt we could all do different things but still keep Genesis together. It certainly hasn't affected our career. Phil couldn't be any more successful if he hadn't been with us..."
In effect there was now a Genesis school of talent?
"You can't get away from it, although people try!" smiled Phil.
Meanwhile Genesis are itching to get back onto the road. Added Phil: "I heard our old record of 'Carpet Crawlers' the other day. For a moment there I got all choked up and emotional about it. I thought it would be nice for us to do that again, and audiences would like it. But we mustn't get too excited about it yet, becuase it will be another five months before we go on the road!"
CHRIS WELCH
'No Son Of Mine'
Tony: "This is the first single off the album. It's a bit long at six and a half minutes but we have got away with it before. The track was built up in the same process as all the others. The elephant sound we got on an Emulator, which we combined with the chord and vocal melody and the whole song developed from there."
Phil: "Because we use machines to write to, I end up singing all the time. If you just free your mind - that sounds very cosmic - but if you just open your mouth and sing words, sometimes they make sense and sometimes they don't. I didn't know what I was singing at one point but Mike said 'it sounds like you're singing No Son Of Mine' In fact I hadn't been singing that, but that's what it sounded like. Straight away there was a thread, a handle to hang a song on."
'Jesus He Knows Me'
Tony: "It gets more and more confusing to know exactly who is playing what on an album these days, but that's me playing the keyboards and it's not the guitar at the beginning and the voice - well that's obvious! This is pretty fast with a lot of energy, and the chorus is one of the strongest on the album."
Phil: "The main gist of the words in the chorus is 'Jesus, he knows me and he knows I'm right'. It's another chorus that has written itself and we went back and developed the songs from there. I have become deeply religious now y'know! Nah, there's two ways you can take it. Some people on first listening will think I have gone Born Again, but it's actually about TV evangelists.
'Driving The Last Spike'
Phil: "It's about driving railways across England. The original working title of the main melody part was 'Irish' and that kind of set the tone for the whole thing. The lyrics went on to talk about navvies and the railways."
'I Can't Dance'
Tony: "Mike had been trying out this riff for quite a few days, and wouldn't stop! We tried it a few ways and it wouldn't happen, then I started playing keyboard drums which gave it character and Phil started to sing and instead of being a heavy song it became a little lighter."
Phil: "Mike played the guitar and in case there is any doubt about it, Tony played the drums. I play the real drums at the end, but the machine starts it! While we were recording I was writing the words, and it literally all happened in about an hour. The voice is very close up because we used a different mike. It is unlike anything that people would expect from Genesis."
'Dreaming While You Sleep'
Phil: "No - that's not keyboards - it's a drum machine this time! There are real drums too and there's even a bass xylophone which I've had for years. It makes it sound very mysterious."
'Tell Me Why'
Phil: "Musically this is a pop song, and quite Sixties-ish. The working title was 'Rickenbacker' which summed up the energetic Sixties protest thing. It has overtones of The Beatles and The Byrds. In fact it is a Nineties protest song about bad news on TV."
'Living Forever'
Phil: "Those wire brushes at the beginning? No, they are not real brushes, it's a machine! I couldn't play that well. I just got some new discs for the SP1200, and one of them was Jazz Kit Brushes. We just wrote this little pattern using the sample, and they are quite sophisticated."
'Hold On My Heart'
Phil: "This is very restrained with lots of space in it."
Tony: "I managed to creep in a few more chords than I'm normally allowed to on this song, so it has a sort of Burt Bacharach feel. It's a song that at one point in the recording seemed like it might be ditched, then it came right back up again and became a really strong track. It's very much a one o'clock in the morning song."
Phil: "The original lyric was 'Hold On To My Heart' which we thought sounded like a medical song, so we changed it!"
'Way Of The World'
Mike: "I had the lyric but Phil just sang the line 'When the blue sky meets the red sky' It just came out!"
Phil: "In amongst all the la, la, las, and all the rubbish I was making up, that line sounded really good. Suddenly it worked well and Mike wrote the rest of the lyrics. It's all about balance in life."
'Since I Lost You'
Tony: "This had a more Sixties' orchestral approach in one of those six-eight rhythms. It was very Phil Spector-ish, a bit like 'To Know Him Is To Love Him', that kind of thing. I just played chords in that rhythm, originally as a joke, and didn't like it much, until Mike said it sounded great. We kept it as an idea to try later and it turned out really well."
Phil: "I brought in my old Phil Spector boxed set of albums to check out the echoing drum sound!"
'Fading Light[s]'
Tony: "This is a sad song, that lyrically reflects back on times past. It's the age thing, when you realise you are not going to so a certain thing again or see that person again. It's one number on the album with an extended instrumental section where we let ourselves go a bit with more drama"
Also in the magazine:
Peter Gabriel, celebrated singer, composer and world musicaian is slowly moving towards the completion of a new album. Recording is taking place at his Real World studios near Bath, with U2 producer Daniel Lanois. Peter began writing material last July and it is hoped that his label, Virgin, will see new Gabriel product early in 1992. It will be Peter's first since his hugely successful 'So' way back in 1986, which yielded such hits as 'Don't Give Up' a duet with Kate Bush, and the powerhouse 'Sledgehammer', accompanied by an award-winning video. The single was a million seller in the States and consolidated the success of Gabriel's solo career, begun when he left Genesis in 1975.
Since then, Gabriel recorded music for the 'Last Temptation Of Christ' soundtrack, and in 1991 he organised a unique 'World Party' at his studio, recording musicians from all over the globe in a week long series of sessions to produce live albums for his own label. Guest stars Sinead O'Connor and Van Morrison were involved with Korean dumming troupes and artists for Africa and Pakistan.
It is hoped Peter will perform live next year after the new album is released.
And an article about John Kalodner, currently A&R man at Geffen records:
During his six-year career with Atlantic, Kalodner brought a host of other acts to the label, including Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins, both of whom he persuaded to follow their solo instincts:
"Phil always said that he wanted to record a solo album and I kept encouraging him to do so. But the company were sceptical about a drummer making it as a solo artist. But I still kept on at Phil, and the company, telling everyone he was going to be a superstar. And, well, he is!"
