genesis: still going and going... they're absurdly rich. they're critically despised. they're even successful solo. so why, then, does genesis continue to thrive? by ian parker.
In Chiddingfold, a commuter village forty miles south of London, the morning rush hour gets under way around 7:00 am. That's when wealthy middle-aged men get in their middle-of-the-range Audis, Saabs and Rovers, shove something middle-of-the-road into the tape deck and speed off toward the city's investment firms, merchant banks and real estate offices. At certain times of the year, however, there's another kind of rush hour in Chiddingfold. It also involves a sleek pack of rich middle-aged men. This group is *absurdly* rich, and it calls itself Genesis. Because this Surrey village is close to where the band members live, they often rent the hall behind the single-story Chiddingfold Club for rehearsals. "I used to drive up to London when I was doing my first two or three solo albums. I'd spend an hour and a half driving there and another hour driving back," says Phil Collins, who resides in nearby Loxwood with his second wife and three-year-old daughter. "It's fantastic to, sort of, drive just ten minutes from the house."
This is the world of commuter rock. This is the life of one of the world's most successful and longest-serving rock groups, and this is the England to which its members still claim attachment. It's a commuter England of ex-serviceman's halls, weekend cricket, gin-and-tonics and men in Rovers playing Genesis tapes. Gary Clifford, manager of the Chiddingfold Club, is a likable, friendly man who wears a bravely loud shirt and a medallion. What does he make of Genesis rehearsing in his back room, thudding that nice, plaintive music through the wall, rattling his framed cricket prints and disturbing his morning drinkers? "F---ing hell," he says. Later, he answers, "They all eat in here. They drink in here. They're not as bad as when we had Gary Brooker [of Procol Harum] in here. That was *noisy*."
Around back, Genesis is rehearsing in a maddeningly start-stop way. One is struck by the fact that this is a big room filled with bad hair - from Phil Collins to Tony Banks to Mike Rutherford to the roadies and electricians who'll support the group during its upcoming American tour. It's odd but somehow heartening that in this telegenic age forty-year-old men, who are either bald or have Spinal Tap hairdos, can still manage to have a hit album (_We Can't Dance_), a bigger hit single ("I Can't Dance") and the confidence to undertake an American stadium tour. But why on earth are they doing it? Why are these men still singing about "too many problems" (from "Land of Confusion") in a Surrey village hall? What more does Phil Collins *want*?
"What do I want? Power! Money!!" He laughs.
Tony Banks explains, jokingly: "He's a man driven. *Compelled!*"
But why bother with a tour? With Genesis? "I just want to see if I can do it," says Collins. "I don't think it's any more complicated than that."
"There's fun in it," Banks says. And Collins agrees, "We haven't done a tour since 1987, and that's five years ago. This stadium tour isn't anything like my 127-date solo tour. That is totally different. To me - to all of us - it's a totally natural thing to do. But we don't do it all of the time."
No, Genesis doesn't do it all of the time. In fact, the group is doing it less and less. _We Can't Dance_ was Genesis's seventeenth album in the band's twenty-six year history, though only four of those seventeen have been made in the last decade. Genesis meets now and again. Genesis makes a record. Genesis tours. Then Phil Collins makes an album, does a tour. It's not what we expect from our rock heroes.
"The whole *group* idea," says Mike Rutherford, the calmest, most cheerful and by far ;the tallest member of Genesis, "started just before we started, but this idea that you spend all your time with just three other guys is *damned* unhealthy. I can't imagine just doing Genesis. Yes, the first ten years, you've got to put your all into a group, obviously. But after a period of time, you loosen up."
Perhaps Genesis has loosened up just a bit too much. No band could have an image so unlike the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Monkees - you know, a fantasy family that hangs out together, has adventures together, *lives* together. Genesis doesn't surf together, doesn't barbecue together. Most of the time, Genesis doesn't even play together. And for those who missed the record, Genesis doesn't dance together. It might look as though the band doesn't care - doesn't *mean* it. It might look as if Collins, Rutherford and Banks merely turn up at their accountant's office twice a decade, patting their pockets for loose change, thinking, Let's be Genesis for a bit. One has to ask, Is Genesis a band or just a gentleman's agreement? A group or the rock equivalent of a commuter car pool?
"Maybe," argues Phil Collins, "the cynics think we don't mean it, and we just get together when we're a bit hard up - which is what the Stones, apparently, do. [But] we only get together now and then because there are other things we want to do. I'm forty-one. I have to do other things."
These other things have made Phil Collins even richer than his colleagues. He acts in films (there was "Buster", and he's expected to costar in "The Three Bears" with fellow short people Danny DeVito and Bob Hoskins); more importantly, he makes double- and triple-platinum solo records, which puts him up there with Madonna and Michael Jackson. It's Collins who gets the freak fans - like the French woman who thinks every song is written about her and has turned up at his door asking why he's taken out a contract to kill her. It's also Collins who gets the calls from his teenage son, Simon, who lives in Canada with Collins's first wife. A little while ago, Simon told his dad he was going out with a "fantastic, fantastic" girl. Some time later, he called to say he wasn't going out with her anymore. The girl had only wanted his father's autograph.
Meanwhile, Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford lead lives of relative anonymity. Like Collins, they both have wives and children, and live locally. And they both have solo careers of sorts, although Rutherford - as Mike + The Mechanics- outsells Banks, who had a solo album with the archetypical commuter rock title _Bankstatement_. According to Collins, Banks and Rutherford used to fight, and perhaps that has something to do with their similarity. Both have soft voices, affable manners and immaculate middle-class commuterland credentials, as suggested by Rutherford's flamboyant string of Christian names - Michael John Cloete Crawford - and by the fact that the pair met at Charterhouse, a well-known, old-fashioned and expensive private boys' school just a few miles from Chiddingfold.
Peter Gabriel was also a student at Charterhouse. Together, they wrote songs, thinking they would sell them to rock bands. They later realized they would have to play them, and eventually became a band. In 1969, soon after leaving school, they recorded their first album, _From Genesis to Revelation_. Phil Collins became their drummer in 1970. His background - his father worked in London's financial district, his mother was a theatrical agent - was as comfortable as that of the others, but he was a little taken aback by his band audition. "It was at Peter Gabriel's parents' house," he remembers, "out in the open air, out on the patio in the back. *He* [Collins points accusingly at Rutherford] came in a dressing gown, a red-satin dressing gown and slippers."
The band held a vote on Phil Collins's suitability. Banks and Gabriel voted yes, Rutherford may or may not have voted no - it's a difficult fact to establish. With a politician's caution, Rutherford will neither confirm nor deny the accusation. "I can see this story growing: how I fought to keep Phil Collins out of the group."
Whatever. Collins got the job. Album followed album and Genesis, gradually shedding band members (including Gabriel in 1975), shuffled through the Seventies in flares, cloaks and beards, with a cluttered English sound heavy on folksy woodwind and meandering keyboard. With a self-confidence born, perhaps, of private education, Genesis spurned pop's usual formula - songs about sex that are easy to dance to - in favor of long and unashamedly incomprehensible narratives presented in stage shows described, at the time, as "theatrical" (as if theater people shaved their heads, wore grotesque face masks and sang songs with lyrics like _Foxtrot_'s "We're happy as fish, and gorgeous as geese, and wonderfully clean in the morning.")
And then two things happened. One is that Genesis - by mid-1977, a three- piece group writing shorter, poppier songs - started having hit singles ("Follow You, Follow Me" went Top Thirty in 1978). The group kept its old fans, who were trading in their bell-bottoms and turning into commuters, while it acquired a new wave of teenage fans, in America especially - the MTV generation who were kind enough to fill bigger and bigger stadiums. Soon, commuter-bores sat next to computer-bores.
The other thing that happened was Phil Collins recorded his first solo album, _Face Value_, and became big - big enough to be the only person to play Live Aid on both sides of the Atlantic. It was an odd experience for the group, as Rutherford cautiously admits, remembering the success of Collins's first hit single, "In the Air Tonight". "We were surprised. I don't think we thought it would do that well." He laughs and teases Collins: "We couldn't believe it! We were [to use the London vernacular] *gobsmacked*!!"
And then he says seriously: "It took a little bit of getting used to. Nothing really changed, but things *do* change. It's quite hard to describe it."
Now Genesis is a part-time "song-writing collective" (Collins's phrase), which is what it was meant to be in the first place. They meet, bringing no tunes or words and compose as they record. All three share writing and producing credits. They release pleasing sentimental songs that are vaguely regretful but, cleverly, never really depressing. The sound has been stripped down, the keyboards eased out, and the lyrics have evolved - this is progress - into fourth-grade social commentaries: "People starving everywhere / There's too much food but none to spare / Tell Me Why."
With this, they have conquered the world. What they do next is uncertain. The group makes no promises to keep going. It may or may not do another album. It may or may not tour again. The band likes the supposed casualness of it all - the suggestion that they're just ordinary blokes who toss an occasional record out to an unknowing world. Malcolm Craggs, Genesis's longtime tour manager, says, "They live their own lives, do ordinary things. Tony loves his garden. Phil builds his model planes. Mike plays polo." Polo? Craggs checks himself. "If that's ordinary."
Genesis hates any "corporate rock" jibes, so even though Billboard reported on a sophisticated "mega-Genesis promo" for the album and tour that included banners at Thanksgiving weekend football games, deals to play the "No Son of Mine" video on TV sets in Sears department stores and sponsorship by Volkswagon - the band tries hard to project the official image of Genesis as a rural cottage industry. "Somewhere down the line," says Collins, "it may be a big business to somebody, but to us it's basically whether the three of us like it." Occasionally, this commercially innocent face seems to slip, as when Collins describes the horror of being forced to cancel a stadium date. The order in which he places the nuisances seems significant: "There's insurance," he sighs, "there's the disappointed fans."
The image is of ordinary family men living ordinary lives, in ordinary coats and jeans. In one way, this ordinariness is a defensive barrier against the press, which has always given them a hard time. Unlike many of its Seventies contemporaries, Genesis survived punk, which was intended to destroy commuter rock. In Britain, the band has never been quite forgiven for that; it's survival was thought ungracious. But survive it did, even expanding its audience. It outlasted punk, and now - a few years short of its thirtieth anniversary - the band intends to do the same to dance music. "Personally," says Mike Rutherford, explaining _We Can't Dance_, "We all think that there's too much dance music at the moment. We thought we'd make a statement, 'Hey, we don't do it.'"
Indeed, they don't do it. In the hall of the Chiddingfold ex-serviceman's club, there's no dancing. There's a fair amount of eating - big English fried breakfasts (eggs, baked beans, toast, tea) - but no dancing. They go through the songs, playing to the blank wall of the hall - it's the same blank wall that served as an ideally ordinary backdrop for the group photograph inside _We Can't Dance_. They stop and start. Between songs they do what all rehearsing bands have always done - slip briefly into R&B, smiling at each other - ordinary guys in commuter-land, ordinary millionaires.