Genesis are ready to split into three and once more go their separate ways. Will we see them again? At the end of a record-breaking year, they spoke to Vox. By Paul Colbert.
To hear Phil Collins say the word 'nice' is to hear red hot pokers make contact with sizzling flesh.
"Well, its the way its done, isn't it," says the Genesis front man, above the distance screams of tortured souls. "You're 'nice' so what you're doing is worthless, isn't it? Middle of the road, and not worth the vinyl it's printed on. Isn't that right?
"*I* happen to think I'm *not* very 'nice', and not particularly worthless, therefore it's bound to irritate me, but that's kind of the way it is."
This has been one of the best years Genesis have ever enjoyed. An odd one, though. We Can't Dance, their first album for five years, outsold some heavy and strongly touted opposition - U2's Achtung Baby among them. The single I Can't Dance, an atypically stripped-down and bluesy song, went to #7, and a new generation of fans bought the CD - fans who, when the last LP was released, would have been saving their money for sweets. Genesis continue to sustain the holy grail of established rock acts - retaining followers of 20 years while still attracting a new audience.
Yet the world's press still don't know how to describe them (ed: at least not nicely :) ). Since the mid-'80s rock chroniclers have despaired of finding a handle for an essentially imageless act. Instead, they fixed upon the easiest candidate, Phil Collins, and cursed him the 'nice man of rock'. Overuse took the tiny pebble of a word, and set it rattling irritatingly in the comfy slipper of Collins' thoughts.
"I've come round to the fact," he admits. "My mum said, what's *wrong* with being nice, and I can't really argue." There's a conundrum: 41 years old, in the rock business, and still listening to his mum.
But we're not at Genesis' Surrey studio to discuss mums; more important topics call for investigation. Like their plans - following a few more big gigs, a set of provincial dates and a live album - to call it all off for 3 years, 4, 5, maybe for good (but they doubt it).
This may be the last Genesis interview until almost the end of the century. So how was 1992?
"Looking back, it was a very adventurous thing we did," says Rutherford of their three months on the road. The most reflective of the three - not that any one of them is given to wild outbursts - Rutherford is said to be the skilled manager, gently nudging events along. He's said to boast the talent for turning the engineers and technicians into yesses and leaving them with the impression it was their idea in the first place. He also says, almost sadly that despite telling every journalist who has ever interviewed him that "it's amazing we're still able to enjoy the music and get excited about it," he's never seen it in print. "Doesn't make good copy, I suppose," he shrugs. Yet even Rutherford's skills were tested by their most recent tour. "We tried something new this time. There was a lot of 'who knows?' about the tour: having a big roof, all the lights, the screens... whenever you start something different, the people who are working with you get so caught up in it, they don't really tell you quite how guinea pig-ish you are until you get there.
"I think one of the things you learn over the years - a good lesson for life, I suppose - is that something *will* happen."
The spectacle of the 1992 Genesis dates had its advent in a policy decision at the end of 1991 - to do a shorter tour, but reach the same number of people. The only solution was for most gigs to be big ones, and that meant open air.
They took with them a portable plastic roof, but in hot weather it stretched and went slack, and in cold weather it shrank and split.
They knew the huge TV screens and canopy were rainproof once in place, but, as Phil Collins explains, "what we didn't know was that putting it *together* in the rain was lethal." Or that the screens, once exposed to the damp, wouldn't function when slotted into place. "In Philadelphia we actually had someone going out and buying every available hairdryer from all the local shops to get everybody at the back of the screens drying them out."
After 20 years of working together, its natural that the trio should each have adopted particular roles. Banks and Rutherford most often collaberate on the stage show, especially the lights. Collins is less fascinated, but will sit down with sound engineers for hours. Yet a rigprously adhered to democracy will always have all three taking final decisions. But with the long gaps of recent albums, did they ever suppose there would be a day when they didn't have much in common?
"We always have to accept that our long term fans in particular will worry if we keep going. I've felt it anyway. If you go in to write a new album, is it going to work? Will it happen? Are you going to get excited about the writing process? This time I found it surpisingly easy; the lengthy gap didn't seem to make that much difference," says Rutherford.
But are they growing closer together musically, or further apart? "I think," begins Collins cautiously, "that there have been periods for each of us, and also for members who aren't with us anymore, when you wonder if this is really what you still want to do. I mean... hmm... yes, there are going to be those periods."
However firm in their conviction that they will decide when it happens - or rather when it doesn't - a long gap similar to the last one could be significantly different. As Collins explains: "In another four or five years, you're talking about it being nearly the turn of the century, and do you want to go out at the age of 46?"
"It's okay as long as you don't look like you're trying to be younger than you are," determines Banks. "You should definitely look your age. There's no reason why musicians who are older can't do stuff that's valid for young people. Nobody protests about all the books written by older authors, which are read by people of all ages."
If statistics were needed to back the argument, they exist in Genesis' sales figures. The band have consistently suceeded in re-inventing their audience, retaining old fans while drawing in new ones. Numbers do not lie - We Can't Dance has sold well over 6 million copies in Europe so far.
"I've said this loads of times," recalls Collins, "but even when punk started up, and still today, you could go to our provincial dates and see people with AC/DC badges, Megadeth, or whatever... Nazareth.. er, no, not Nazareth... ha ha, that dates me. I said Nazareth to a journalist - that'll haunt me." They break off to grin at Collins' discomfort.
"It's like this name thing," he perseveres. "People expect certain things from 'Genesis', and when they get something different, they're surprised by it. But really its just a name we happen to be lumbered with as a group of writers.. er, I'm right aren't I?"
He looks at the other two, who hum and cough agreement, though not entirely sure where his line of reasoning is running. "Next time," proposes Rutherford helpfully, "we could change our name to Nazareth."
What is it that people get the most wrong about them? Banks weighs in first, implying that, ironically, the situation has changed over the years. They were originally considered deadly serious and any attempt to be tongue in cheek was missed. This year, with songs trimmed to four or five minutes and stripped of the self-confessed over-arrangement of former eras, they occasionally get clobbered for being lightweight.
"So much of it is perception," begins Collins, before plunging into uncharted territory with an argument he soon begins to regret. "Someone like Peter (Gabriel) who's just had another album out, the guy's in an enviable position because he has credibility. But it's like reading a letter or article and you're looking for a negative slant in it, and if you don't have that slant, you can find something else."
Somewhere in front of Collins, a bottomless pit begins to open up. "I don't want to sound like we're not taken seriously, no I can't explain this." And he gives up.
What he's maybe trying to convey is that credibility is a strange and wilful beast. It can be denied because you are too serious and musicianly, and it can be withheld because you write nice pop songs, but it can be granted, almost in perpetua, because what you are doing is viewed as 'worthy' in some arbitrary sense. If you chase it, the arbiters of credibility place it further out of your reach, but if you say it doesn't matter, that somehow insults fans who take you seriously. Although I could be wrong...
"When you read articles about the group and you know what it's really like, what I read is not what goes on," states Rutherford, but he is met with an unexpectedly contrite response from Collins. "I think that's our fault," he says, quietly.
"I think that's our problem, really, when people come down to meet us and go away with the wrong impression," Collins continues. "For example, we sat in a room where we were rehearsing, with someone doing an article for You magazine. And he asked us: 'What are your plans?' and Mike replied: 'There are no plans - we do the album, we do the tour and then we see what happens, which is the way we always work.' But he just couldn't believe that, so he wrote it as if we were pulling the wool over his eyes. But it's the truth. If somebody asks what we are doing next, WE DON'T KNOW... We have a few more dates, and then we're finished, we don't know when we'll start again. We have no contractual obligations other than record companies, but they wait and get what they're given."
Right. So what are your plans?
They have the good grace to laugh. So, hypothetically, what would happen if one of you finally said, 'it's been great, but I've had enough.' So long?
After a moment's collective pondering, Banks eventually breaks cover. "I think the chances are that would be it, we wouldn't try another incarnation. But I don't know, it really would depend on the situation and how bloody-minded you are. The fact is that we are all doing things outside the band - to varying degrees I must admit, but we all do have alternatives."
Collins, who certainly has the highest profile outside the band, is quick to field the implications. "Any pressure that I would have felt, or any desire, would have surfaced by now, so it's really a question of us getting into the studio next time, and if it doesn't work, fine. That would be the point when we would most likely knock it on the head. Anyway, I always thought it would last for a couple of months, and then I could open a hairdressing salon."
But even at the end of such a successful year, are there unfulfilled ambitions?
"Well, it would be good to have a number 1 album in America," says Banks. "And it'd be quite fun to have a number 1 single in England, but these are silly things."
Surely not, if they mean that much to you. "Well, when I was at school the most important thing was the number 1 single, and we never had that, but it's virtually impossible these days, the way the charts are."
And if, after all this time, you could do it all again, would you do it differently?
Collins has a more personal angle, but with some sorrow, reaches the same conclusion. "I always wonder whether, if I had known that the tour of '77/'78 was going to break up my first marriage, I would still have gone through with it. If that hadn't happened I wouldn't have started writing songs; definitely wouldn't have. So, suddenly, the whole thing is turned around, but the casualties, were my kids.
"I wouldn't have wanted to change, but if I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have my daughter now."
And finally there is the question of how the world, or rather, one tiny bit of it - the critic - views Genesis. Yes, says Tony Banks, reviews still count. "I remember the first review we ever had," he reveals, "for 'Silent Sun', and it was actually excellent. In fact, I think it was the last good review we had."
But I Can't Dance went down well. In fact, it caught reviewers by surprise. "That was because it was more bluesy, if you like," Collins nips in. "More 'Keef Chords' - that surprised people because they didn't think that was the sort of thing we would do. But we've always said that in Genesis anything is possible - really, anything is fucking possible."
And to prove it, they finally got banned. 'Jesus, He Knows Me' was the band's attack on America's morally bankrupt, but fiscally bloated, televangelists.
At the time the BBC banned the video, you could almost sense the excitement among the band - 'Stone me, we've finally done it!'. Now, the decision rankles a little more. "The BBC thought it was offensive. I can't believe they got totally the wrong end of the stick, because there was nothing in there that was offensive other than to those people who *should* have been offended by it."
To conclude, Collins relates a story of a meeting in an LA restaurant which illustrates just how at odds Genesis still are with that show business scene.
"A group of musicians came in and said, 'Oh Phil Collins, you won't remember us but we're Colour Me Badd and we reviewed 'No Son of Mine'.'
"And I said, 'Yes, I do, you *liked* it, you *liked* it..' And they thought I was pulling their legs, but I remembered it specifically. You do remember things. Paul Morely and Julie Burchill have all etched their way into my mind... ha ha!" VOX (end of article)
Photos in the article included a large full-page+ colour photo of the band in the storage room of the Farm, sitting/standing around their touring equipment boxes, fire exstinguishers and a grandfather clock. Phil is holding a saw, most likely why the article was entitled 'Cut Loose'. A second colour photo shows Genesis in concerts, featuring the jumbotrons with Daryl and Mike on-screen. There are also b/w portaits of each member scattered around the text. The front page of Vox has a b/w photo of the three of them, the headline reading: "GENESIS Will we ever see them again?"