I Knew Them When They Were NOBODY
Today, mighty rock oak trees; yesterday, tiny, Woolworth's guitar-wielding acorns. U2, Nirvana, The Cure, Genesis, Suede, Pulp, Def Leppard: Martin Aston retraces their first tentative steps and names the key players, who, with convenient hindsight, can claim, "I always knew they'd be big..." [Sections on U2, Pulp, The Cure omitted]
"I told Tony Banks to cut his rather self-indulgent keyboard solos by three-quarters, which he resented."
Jonathan King
"I was so much the very first to discover them that they didn't exist as such before me," says Jonathan King, with characteristic self-effacement. The small matter of exactly how the band that would become Genesis managed to send a demo to King without existing in the first place is of course, less fulsomely addressed.
<-Genesis in 1968: (from left) Anthony Phillips, Mike Rutherford, Tony Banks, Peter Gabriel, John Silver.
As founder member Anthony Phillips says, the Charterhouse schoolboys were more of composing troupe than a performing concern, he and Mike Rutherford having recently asked an older member of their house, Tony Banks, to lend an instrumental hand. Banks brought along his mate Peter Gabriel, and a four-track demo was subsequently fashioned.
Fresh from singles success with It's Good News Week (recorded as Hedgehoppers Anonymous), the prolific, precocious King had returned to his old school, "in triumph, when some grubby little schoolboy asked if I'd listen to his tape". In truth, it was a go-between who handled the transaction: "We were all too frightened to approach King, so we gave the tape to a friend who just went up to King and pressed it into his hand," Phillips admits.
King was surprised to find he was smitten by the tape, especially by Gabriel's voice: "That was the key. It was a smoky, soulful, *interesting* voice, very different from most other singers around. Their songs were really interesting too: for the '60s, they were pop songs."
King was keen to push the project along, and offered a publishing deal: 10 pounds each to the members. A few problems stood in the way. The boys were too young to negotiate alone, so parents had to be involved; they lacked a name, but after fortunately nixing Champagne Meadows and Gabriel's Angels, they accepted King's alternative of Genesis ("I saw them as the start of my producing career," he explains).
Musical ruffles needed ironing too, and in doing so, King claims to have helped invent "theatrical rock", by pushing a painfully shy Gabriel "into using his imagination and inventiveness rather than buy effects that we couldn't afford. I also thought they should work on simplified acoustic instruments, which were miles cheaper, and you can hear your mistakes more easily that way. They were only 16 and made lot [sic] of mistakes."
Stern advice was singularly administered to Tony Banks - "I told him to cut his rather self-indulgent keyboard solos by three-quarters, which he resented" - and Anthony Phillips - "his guitar solos were too flowery. My brief was 'simplify, simplify', because their desires were more complex tham their abilities. You've got to make the basics right. I'd like to think that was my most valuable contribution because then they could build everything on that."
But first, a record deal. King happened to have an "in" with Decca Head Of Album A&R Hugh Mendl (his partner, Head Of Singles A&R Dick Roe, had infamously turned down The Beatles), and that's where he started.
"Hugh believed in me and the vision of the band," King vouches, but he still ended up paying for the recordings himself. For that reason and "because he naturally wanted to make money out of us" (Phillips), King encouraged Genesis to write some tighter pop songs. In February 1968, before they'd even played a concert, Genesis made their single debut with the aforementioned Silent Sun.
The single was part of the weekly batch facing Melody Maker reviewer Chris Welch, a man of developing prog rock tastes, and thus open to the song's pastoral prettiness. Again, Gabriel stood out: "I thought it was intriguing because of his voice," remembers Welch. "But it also seemed an original song to me. there was a lot of heavy progressive rock around and this was moving away from that to something melodic and romantic too. Put it this way - there were signs of human intelligence at work."
Human intelligence had yet to find favour with the paying pop public, and Silent Sun died a death, as did the follow-up A Winter's Tale. "In my opinion, those singles were pretty naff, and unoriginal," says Phillips. "We were being streamlined into pop, like all the other King bands, and we could have gone down the tube there and then, but they all did the decent thing and let us record an album."
King The Interferer wasn't done yet: "Because I wanted their first album to be a concept album, I thought it should be called From Genesis To Revelation, and gave them instructions how to do it, as I'm that sort of producer."
Because an American band had already taken the name Genesis, Decca insisted they change their name, but King resisted. Instead, the debut album was released with just the album title evident on a black sleeve, and thus found its way more into religious sections of record shops than people's homes. The result? A despairing 500 sales, universally cold reviews (Welch: "It wasn't well produced, strings were everywhere and spoilt the songs and anyway, to launch an unknown band with a biblical epic was asking a lot of people") and subsequent withdrawal of interest from both King and Decca.
Once free of Decca, their svengali and of school, their nerves held and, on deciding to turn professional and hit the road, Charisma showed interest and the rest was, as we know, a revelation. Phillips endured illness and stage fright as a result of touring (today, he blames the band's public school-educated inhibitions for preventing them from discussing their collective worries), and left the band in 1971 (he returned to the musical fray in 1977). King was never to realise his producer's dreams, but retains fond memories of the "head start" he offered Genesis.
"If I hadn't listened to that demo tape," he reflects today, "Peter Gabriel would be an accountant today, Tony Banks a machinist, Phil Collins an actor and Mike Rutherford a lawyer."
[Suede, Def Leppard, and Nirvana sections of article omitted]
