Genesis: Turn It On Again
By Steven P. Wheeler
With last week’s surprising announcement that Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks were joining forces again for a Genesis reunion concert trek, I was immediately taken back nearly 30 years when I sat down with the trio at the time of what turned out to be their final studio album together, We Can’t Dance.
Has it really been 29 freakin’ years? Fortunately for me, certain events in our lives aren’t swallowed up by the mists of time. That day I spent with the Genesis trio was one such memory, lodged in my mental vault and as crisp as yesterday. But more on that later.
The big news today is that 13 years after their last “reunion,” Collins, Rutherford and Banks are hitting the road for a brief U.K. tour. No stateside trek has been announced or is even expected at this point. And while some early Genesis fans are outraged that this reunion—like the previous one in 2007—will not include original singer Peter Gabriel or guitarist Steve Hackett, the rest of us hold out hope that the most popular and successful lineup of Genesis will come visit us yanks.
Looking back, the success of this Genesis line-up is truly astounding. In little more than a decade, between 1978-1992, Genesis and the solo projects of these three members sold more than 50 million albums in America, and a staggering 300 million internationally.
During those dozen years, they combined for 24 Top Ten Singles (including EIGHT Number Ones). By the mid-80s, you literally couldn’t turn on MTV or listen to any radio station for any length of time without seeing or hear a Genesis song, a Phil Collins smash, or any of the trio of mega-hits from Rutherford’s Mike + The Mechanics. Along with their stadium-sized global tours, this Genesis threesome truly dominated the music world like no other in that era, with the unlikely drummer-turned-superstar Phil Collins as its face.
Of course, much has happened since my time with the guys nearly 30 years ago. A time when all three musicians were excited about discussing their new album, We Can’t Dance, which would go on to sell another four million copies. We talked about how they managed to keep their solo careers and Genesis going concurrently as well as the inevitable media backlash that hits all bands when they reach such massive popularity.
At the time, there was no hint that Collins would announce his departure from Genesis five years later in order to focus on his solo career while trying to have a bit more of a personal life. In typical Genesis fashion the announcement was made with humor and civility between the members.
Rutherford and Banks recruited vocalist Ray Wilson for the underrated Calling All Stations album in 1997, which remains the final studio album ever recorded by any lineup of the group.
A decade later, in 2007, Collins returned to his two old bandmates for the Turn It On Again Tour in which they played for more than one million fans over 46 nights. Collins then released a Motown tribute album in 2009, Rutherford would release three more Mike + The Mechanics albums (including last year’s Out of the Blue), while Banks recorded two further solo efforts and last year released a compilation from his eight solo projects.
But let’s first go back to a simpler time. Before viruses and the media sent people into hysteria, before toilet paper became a major commodity and before politics somehow ventured into every single aspect of our lives.
Meeting Genesis
It was a Saturday. December 14, 1991, to be exact, and it was one of those brutal winter days in Los Angeles, where the temperature reached a chilly 80 degrees. I arrived at the Sunset Marquis Hotel in Hollywood just before noon to meet and have a chat with pop music’s then-biggest superstar Phil Collins, as well as guitarist Mike Rutherford and keyboardist Tony Banks, collectively known as Genesis, which just happened to be the biggest selling rock group of that era as well.
The band had just released their latest album, We Can’t Dance, which would go on to continue their phenomenal multi-platinum streak that began more than a decade before. Little did anyone know at the time that it would also become the final studio album Genesis would ever release with their longtime drummer-turned-frontman-turned-international superstar, Phil Collins.
After parking down the street and walking into the lobby, I checked in with the desk to get the room number of where the three musicians were gathered. After a quick call, the desk captain said: “They’ll be right out, Mr. Wheeler.”
No sooner had I sat down in one of those heavily flowered upholstered chairs in the corner of the crowded lobby that I saw the band’s instantly recognizable frontman, followed by his much taller bandmates Rutherford and Banks. Slightly confused as to what the location for our interview would be at this point, after shaking hands, it quickly became evident that some cabin fever may have set in with the three guys.
Collins asked, “Do you mind if we do this outside? This day is too gorgeous.” Telling this to a born and bred SoCal beach boy didn’t even need an affirmation as I grabbed my trusty travel bag with tape recorder and other tools of the trade. As we stepped out to the pool area, it was obvious that the rest of the guests had thought the same as it was filling up fast with out of towners pleasantly surprised by the winter weekend sunshine.
As we stood for a moment surveying the scene, Banks pointing off past the pool area, saying: “Let’s do it in the garden out there.” Without a word, the four of us trudged off through an external little archway and were rewarded with a sweeping garden of zen, complete with a soothing waterfall next to a wrought-iron round table and a handful of chairs surrounding it. We had found our spot.
As we got settled, I asked if they enjoyed doing these promotional interviews or whether it was more of a necessary evil after all their years of fame, to which Collins replied: “People are going to make up their own minds about the new album and the band no matter what, so if we don’t tell them what things are about, they’ll draw their own conclusions.” Then with his impish smile, he added, “and we can’t have that now, can we?”
Combatting the Critics
As birds chirped overhead and the waterfall trickled its tranquility, I asked the guys if they had read the recent review of their album in the Los Angeles Times, which was anything but flattering. Not having seen the article, Collins asked me who the writer of the review was. When I replied, “Chris Willman,” he rolled his eyes and said sarcastically, “Oh yeah, an old friend of mine,” before adding: “I hate him. Maybe I don’t hate him as much as [veteran Times critic] Robert Hilburn, but he’s ridiculous.”
After digging through my bag, I pulled out a copy of the article in question and presented it to the band. Collins seemed surprised but asked to see it, as Banks addressed his own thoughts about critics in general. “I don’t even want to read it,” the band’s keyboardist said. “I tend to not read our reviews because I find it depressing. It always touches me. Phil reads them and writes letters, and Mike reads them and probably gets ulcers [laughs].”
Collins hands the article to Rutherford, shaking his head, before saying: “This is the same guy [Chris Willman] who reviewed my concert last year and I wrote a letter to the Times saying that I thought it was a grossly unfair review because of the things he didn’t mention and because of the things he did mention that he got wrong. And I got a letter back from Charles Champlin, the editor of the entertainment section, who went back and read the review himself and said, ‘I agree with you, Mr. Collins. I think the guy was well off the mark and I do apologize.’
“So that was nice of him to say, but, here again, this guy [Willman], who obviously hates me, is the one writing the review of the new Genesis album. It’s ridiculous. They’re basically assholes in search of some sort of street cred, whatever that is. And quite honestly,” pop’s biggest superstar continued, “we have never ever gotten a good review from the L.A. Times. I think Robert Hilburn may have sort of liked us back in the Pete days [a reference to the early Genesis days when Peter Gabriel was the band’s charismatic frontman], but he has written some crazy things about us since then. It is what it is.”
In that concert review, Willman antagonistically started the “review” by stating that Collins’ songs only lead to “mass narcosis.” Effectively proving Collins’ point as to WHY such a “journalist” would bother attending, much less be allowed to review it. Remember, this was long before social media, which now allows millions of similar haters to chime in with their nasty biases on an hourly basis on any topic. But I digress.
Rutherford hands the article back to me while pointing out the obvious as well: “Basically these journalists can make a bit of a reputation for themselves by finding established artists like us and nailing them. It’s a strange thing because you can find journalists who like us and those who don’t, so it’s purely editorial which irritates me more than anything. It has nothing to do with the music or the songs. It’s purely a personal slant and with people like this guy, it’s merely about telling the world that they should hate our record because they do. It’s very strange and not very pleasant to have to deal with.”
Banks echoes my own personal sentiments as a journalist, in which I decided early on in my career to spend my time writing about music I like and hopefully turning people on to it, rather than writing about music I personally detest. What’s the fuckin’ point? But mainstream journalists have always tended to have a fascination with ridiculing bands and artists who have become insanely popular. They act as if the success of certain artists is a personal affront to them.
“I think it would be more fun for a writer to find unknown bands that they love and tell people about them, rather than reviewing an album by a band that you hate,” said Banks. “Don’t even mention us if you don’t like us or we’re not your cup of tea. I’ll never really understand that. It would be like me writing a review of LL Cool J, because I don’t get it. What would be the use of such an article? Find someone who appreciates Rap, and have them do it, right?
“I just don’t understand the point of all this negative reviewing stuff. It doesn’t help anyone. There’s no point of reference,” Banks continued. “I mean, we’ve had so many bad reviews in our career, especially in England.” Rutherford puts it all into perspective when he jokes: “I don’t believe the good reviews either.” And Collins laughs, saying, “Yeah, you start thinking that they got it wrong to.”
“The music press in England is especially vicious,” Banks explained. “And we’ve gotten to the stage now in England where we haven’t gotten a good review since maybe 1976. We don’t fit in to any of the categories they like. We don’t fit in with the teenybop crowd and we don’t fit in with any of the so-called ‘street cred’ types, and yet we sell millions of albums and sell out stadium tours, so I really don’t understand any of it.”
“There are a few magazines that have surfaced in England over the past several years that tend to say less-negative things about us,” Collins explained. “But what they do in Melody Maker and New Musical Express is just humorous now. It bothered me a lot for a while, but now I just know that any mention of us is going to be a string of abuse.
“Some of them do have a good sense of humor when they’re slagging us off,” Collins says with a smile. “There’s a guy named Danny Baker who has a radio show now, and he was making fun of me when I was doing a charity thing with Peter Gabriel for WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance), and I was like, ‘I’m even getting verbally abused by this guy for doing charity work.’ So, one day, I rang him up and discovered that he’s a really funny guy. But you tend not to find the humor when you see something nasty in print and it’s about you.”
The Break Between Albums
Moving on to other topics, after mentioning that I played their new album, We Can’t Dance, the night before at a party and people were loving it, they all three exclaimed: “At a party!!” Followed by Rutherford joking, “Drinks. That’s often the best way to get a positive response.”
When I mention that musicians tend to think that their most recent album is their best, Rutherford stated emphatically: “I really do think it’s our best album, but we also accept the fact that we might not feel that way in a year or two, but we’re all really happy with it. I see what you’re saying about musicians not always being genuine when they say they think their new album is their best, but that’s honestly how I feel at this point. I think this one will stand the test of time more than some of our other albums.”
As for the five-year break between We Can’t Dance and the biggest selling album of their career, Invisible Touch, the trio makes clear that it wasn’t intended to be that long of a hiatus. Although the massive international success of their previous album, which contained an incredible FIVE Top Ten hits (“Land of Confusion,” “Throwing It All Away,” “Tonight Tonight Tonight,” “In Too Deep,” and the title track), did allow for a lengthy band sabbatical. Although release dates can make things seem longer than they actually were in terms of working together.
“While it’s been five years between album releases, we actually didn’t finish the Invisible Touch Tour until July of ’87 and we began writing for this new album in March of ’91, so it’s actually been three-and-a-half years,” explained Rutherford. “The writing aspect took about two months, which is pretty good for us.”
The Process
When it comes to that two-month writing process, Collins jumped back in to say: “And, just to be clear, that’s writing from absolutely nothing. Literally getting together with nothing prepared; no lyrical ideas, no musical ideas, nothing. Just coming together and improvising our way around with each other.”
The band’s keyboardist Tony Banks chimes in that this is the modus operandi; coming up with material from scratch. “That’s pretty much how we’ve done it over the last three albums, and now, because of our solo careers, we’ve made that way of working a policy, really,” Banks continued. “It’s important to us to make our band material totally distinguishable from the material in our solo careers. And if we start allowing each other to bring in ideas that we have had before we get together as Genesis, then it tends to allow for that person to lead things and that produces something different.
“We are able to do that in our solo careers,” the keyboardist and founding member told me. “So, we like to keep that out of our work together in Genesis. It works for us and it truly justifies the group’s existence. Otherwise it’s just three solo projects under the Genesis banner, and that’s not what this group has ever been about.”
When it comes to the band’s creative process after having been recording and touring in their own solo projects, Collins notes that the trio’s rekindling of creativity is “like riding a bike.” Part of this has to do with the personal as much as the artistic. “We do see each other during our time away from the band, so it’s not like we haven’t been in contact with each other. We’re all quite close and we have things to talk about. We own our own studio [The Farm], so there’s the running of that, just various things, like in any other business. Our business just happens to be music.
“Don’t get me wrong,” continued the former child actor, “there is a little awkwardness whenever we start work again together. There’s just a general hub-bub of each of us plugging in our equipment and getting things set up and while that’s going on, I might be fooling around in a corner with a drum machine and I’ll play around with different beats; fast, slow, medium, whatever.
“The thing about a drum machine is that you can control the volume, so it’s not like there’s a drummer obnoxiously thrashing about while everyone is trying to think,” Collins explained. “And then the mood of that drum machine starts to infiltrate and then someone will start playing and you know when something good is happening from that. And after a half-hour of that or when boredom sets in, I’ll program something else. Or Mike or Tony will start off playing something, there’s just something ebbing and flowing all the time, and we’re recording everything throughout.”
Rutherford adds, “If Phil is playing around with the drum machine, he’s obviously free to sing something along with it, but the final lyric usually comes later.” Banks agrees, noting that “we’ve virtually never done a song where the lyrics came first. After two months, we had all the music written and if there were any lyrics at that point, they would have been just little lines here and there.”
“We wrote and recorded 14 songs for the album [“Hearts on Fire” and “On the Shoreline” did not make the final album but were released as B-sides],” Collins said, concurring with Banks’ assessment. “When we had finished with the music for all the songs, there were three that had absolutely no lyrical ideas at all; ‘Never A Time,’ ‘Living Forever’ and ‘Fading Lights.’ The other songs had some lyrical ideas or what I call ‘pointers’ as to where to possibly go with the lyrics.”
Oops!
And, as is the case with talking to musical superstars out in public, we have to take a quick break as a gaggle of fans walk by our little huddle in the garden, stop, and yell out: “That’s Phil fuckin’ Collins!” To which Phil quietly jokes to us: “And Mike fuckin’ Rutherford” and “Tony fuckin’ Banks.”
Thankfully a quick-thinking hotel employee who happened to be passing by kindly asks the fans to please continue on to the pool, and we resume our chat.
The Genesis of Genesis
Formed in 1967 by five teenage boarding house students—keyboardist Tony Banks, guitarist/bassist Mike Rutherford, vocalist Peter Gabriel, guitarist Anthony Phillips and drummer Chris Stewart—at Surrey’s Charterhouse School, Genesis recorded their first album, From Genesis to Revelation, the following year, with new drummer John Silver finishing the album in place of Stewart. The album died a death at the time and the five focused on their studies for the time being.
In late summer of ’69, Banks, Rutherford, Gabriel, Phillips and Silver began recording demos in search of another record deal that never came. Silver left and was replaced with Genesis drummer number three John Mayhew. The band gigged throughout the rest of ’69 and began to attract some record label attention.
By March of 1970, during a month-and-a-half residency at the now-famous Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, Genesis was inked to their second record contract and they began work on their sophomore effort Trespass in June. Following the recording, Phillips quit the band, and Banks was only keen to continue if they also found a more formidable drummer to replace Mayhew.
Enter a former child actor by the name of Phil Collins. “I joined the band on August 4, 1970,” he told me during our interview, something that was a bit of a surprise to his bandmates, who blurted out in unison: “You know the exact date?” Collins just smiled and laughed, “I found it in one of my diaries not too long ago. It was August 4, and I had written, ‘Got the gig today.’”
Later the band hired guitarist Mick Barnard for a short period before replacing him with Steve Hackett, and that lineup of Gabriel, Hackett, Banks, Rutherford and Collins would remain in place over the next five years, resulting in four albums—Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, Selling England by the Pound and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway—each adding a step up in popularity across England, with the last two releases finally scoring Gold (500,000 albums sold) in America.
Gabriel Departs
But just as Genesis was hitting higher spheres of acceptance, Peter Gabriel, the band’s charismatic lead singer, announced he was quitting the band following the tour of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. It was devastating news, but, in retrospect, the remaining four band members had no intention of ending the Genesis journey.
“When Peter left Genesis, we didn’t feel like stopping,” maintained Rutherford, “because we knew that we still had a strong writing team among the four of us. The thing is, on the musical side, the writing involved the three of us and Steve [Hackett], more than Pete. We wanted to tell our fans that Peter was a part of it, but there’s a lot of good stuff left in Genesis.”
“That’s especially true with The Lamb [Lies Down on Broadway] album,” interjected Collins. “We all lived in a house together during the making of that record. Pete was in a room with a piano and writing lyrics, and the four of us were in another room playing. So, by the time he announced that he was leaving, it had become much more pronounced that the four of us were really a group together. And, in some respects, the four of us were much more responsible for the music on The Lamb. Of course, some of them were Pete’s songs, but Mike, Steve, Tony and I were much more responsible for the music on that one than on maybe some of the earlier ones, so we felt much more determined to carry on.”
Banks, on the other hand, did have initial reservations telling me: “When all five people in a group are equally involved with creating the music and what Genesis was, and if one of them leaves, you lose one-fifth, not the whole thing. But there were two problems that arose for me and that was that, number one, Peter was my closest friend. And, number two, he was the lead singer and the face of the group by that time. So, I feared that we were losing the group identity and how is the audience going to react to the fact that we’ve lost the group’s personality, because Peter had obviously created this powerful personality onstage.”
The search for a replacement for their lead singer was quickly underway and hundreds of audition tapes were listened to with no result. In October, the band decided to begin recording the music they had been writing and then start auditioning possible vocalists as they went along with the sessions. At one point, Collins, who had been serving admirably as an excellent backing vocalist during the band’s live shows, was asked to sing their new song, “Squonk,” and the decision was made.
Drummer to Singer
It was quickly decided that their longtime drummer was now also the lead singer of Genesis. “I think we were incredibly lucky that we were able to make the transition from inside the group,” Banks explained. “I think our audience was prepared to give Phil much more time and more of a chance than if we had brought in a new singer from the outside, because they liked Phil as he was already part of the group and they really wanted him to succeed. Obviously, he more than succeeded in that role and things turned out really well.”
In 1976 alone, the revamped Genesis lineup released two albums—A Trick of the Tail and Wind & Wuthering—that became their two most successful releases to that point, charting in America at #31 and #26, respectively. Despite the press initially saying that Genesis was dead following Gabriel’s departure, the band would soon hit the stratosphere, but one last lineup change was still to come.
Hackett left the group for his own solo career following the band’s successful 1977 tour, which resulted in the live album Seconds Out. Rutherford took on the lead guitarist role left vacant by Hackett’s hasty departure, and the remaining trio would release the aptly titled 1978 album …And Then There Were Three, which featured their very first hit single in America, “Follow You Follow Me,” as the album became their first million-seller and set the course for a journey that would make Genesis one of the most successful rock bands in music history.
Superstardom
“Our success in America, in terms of album sales, didn’t come until our ninth album [1978’s …And Then There Were Three],” explained Rutherford, “which was our first one to ever go platinum here. Up until that point we were a bigger live band than an album band.”
“’Follow You Follow Me’ was our first big hit in America in ‘78,” Collins points out, but Banks believes it wasn’t 1980 that the band felt they had finally made it in the States: “…And Then There Were Three did okay, but the Duke album was the quantum leap for us.”
“There were times when I wish [success] had come sooner,” joked Rutherford, “but, in retrospect, I think it was better the way it happened. There’s something to be said for building a core audience and slowly building and building and building from there.”
“We did have Top Ten albums in England starting in ‘73,” Banks noted, “so it was about six or seven long years before that kind of success happened over here. It wasn’t until we had hit singles that we started to have success in America. And the hit singles did make the album sales go up and up and up over in England as well.”
When it comes to their astonishing string of hits—both with Genesis as well as member solo projects—it can change the dynamic of concert setlists and how the songs are ultimately performed in the live setting. “I think that because we’re playing stadiums this time around that eliminates a certain area of our music,” admits Collins, “because ballads don’t necessarily translate well to that kind of venue. But I think you also have to extend the hit singles onstage. For example, ‘Invisible Touch’ became a good song live after we worked on it a bit. You can’t expect people to applaud three minutes after they just applauded the previous song, ya know. You have to take them somewhere.”
Banks added: “There are artists who go out and play their string of hits, exactly like the record, but there’s nothing to really get your teeth into when they do that…” Although Collins points out there are some exceptions to that rule: “There are some people who can get away with it, like Paul McCartney who can play ‘Yesterday’ for two-and-a-half minutes, because that song is so much a part of all our lives.”
The Balancing Act
I steer the conversation over to the balancing act of three solo careers and one of the world’s biggest bands. Rutherford takes the first crack at it, noting that there is a loose timeframe of “intention” that the three take to heart. “When we finished our last tour in ’87, we knew that we all had solo project obligations and we knew that we would make another Genesis album, but we didn’t sit down and really fix the time of when that would be. I think that’s important to all three of us because you don’t get that feeling that there’s something hanging over you, which makes it difficult to focus on your solo ventures.”
What makes it all work is being adaptive to each other’s solo situations, as Banks explained, saying: “Mike was doing a solo record before this Genesis album [the third album from Mike + The Mechanics] and I was working on my solo album, but Mike’s overran by about six months because he ran into producer problems. So, there are always things that come up and the solo careers can’t ever completely go away. We just adjust and find the block of time we need to do Genesis properly, as it deserves since none of us would even have solo careers if it wasn’t for Genesis.”
Collins, whose solo career eventually eclipsed the commercial success of Genesis, adds: “It’s not like the solo careers are a threat to the group’s existence. We’ve known each other forever, so it’s not like we’re going to be offended about what each of us is doing or start bullshitting each other.”
“Genesis doesn’t suffer from our solo careers,” quips Rutherford. “We, the three of us, suffer by having to work longer days and nights and weekends, but it’s worth it because Genesis is worth it.”
“The first thing that I’d say is that the music that we have always made together pleases us and we get excited about it as musicians,” states Banks. “That’s the most important thing but coupled with the fact that we’ve always gotten along as people. And we have a natural empathy as players, and a respect for each other’s talents and we plug each other’s gaps a bit.”
The group’s chatty keyboardist went on to say: “There’s also a discipline in staying together and probably because the ‘ego’ thing has never been a factor in this group. In some groups, people eventually say, ‘Well, I can do without you guys’ and it ends. I think that by all of us allowing each other room for our solo work helped with that ego thing.”
Of course, Collins was the first member of Genesis to carve out a formidable solo career when he released Face Value in 1980, featuring the iconic “In The Air Tonight,” which still has everyone in the world playing air-drums whenever that legendary drum break comes in.
Rutherford, scratching his beard, explained his own personal feelings about that timeframe by saying: “There wasn’t a fear when Phil had his first solo success. You can’t worry about that kind of thing. It’s like, if it happens, it happens. There’s obviously more of a reason for Phil not to come back to Genesis because he has done so amazingly well in his solo career…”
Picking up on that point, Banks notes that the timing of the band’s follow-up to their 1980 Duke album played a part in alleviating those fears: “When Phil’s first solo album, Face Value, was becoming a big hit, we were actually already working on the Abacab album, so we were busy working as Genesis when Phil’s album was growing in popularity. Perhaps if it had happened during a downtime with Genesis, Mike and I may have felt funny about it. Maybe, I don’t know.”
Collins agreed that the recording of Abacab was a major step forward for Genesis and laid the groundwork for their astounding series of multi-platinum albums: “During that Abacab period, we had Hugh [Padgham] producing us for the first time, we were in our own new studio [The Farm], and we sounded different. So, there was so much excitement within the group with that album that there wasn’t time to for me or the guys to really think about what my solo album was doing.”
Rutherford concurs: “Abacab was really an important album for us because we really sounded like we did in rehearsals. And before that album, you lose a little of that sound when you go into a recording studio. So that album marked a major turning point for Genesis.”
When it comes to The Farm, the one-time dairy farm turned recording studio, owned collectively by the band members, and where the four biggest-selling Genesis albums from Abacab to We Can’t Dance were recorded (as well as some of the solo projects of the remaining Genesis trio), Rutherford said: “Our studio is like an extension of our home, really. There’s not the hustle and bustle of a commercial studio, where you have to worry about when someone’s coming in or whatever. And we can work how we want without the pressure of hourly rates and that kind of thing. It brings us even closer together. It’s our playhouse and laboratory.”
Another factor that has played a behind-the-scenes role in the three musicians staying together all these years, despite their own solo careers, has to do with management, as the band’s guitarist pointed out: “When you asked us about how we’ve managed to stay together for so long,” Rutherford said, “one of the things is that we have one manager for everything. One manager for the group and the same guy for all our solo things. That’s been very important. Imagine if Phil had his own manager aside from Genesis. I just couldn’t see this working very well, because there would be different agendas.”
What could have been a problem is illustrated by Banks, who moved to another record company for his then-current solo effort. “I made a request to do my solo career on a different record label than Atlantic who is our label with Genesis,” explained the keyboardist. “I think when you’re in a successful group with one company that you tend to get defined as one-third of that group, rather than what you’re doing with your solo project. They maybe think of me in a particular role, and I felt that I was never going to rise out of that position. That’s why my new album, Still, is out on Giant Records. This is my fourth solo record as well as a couple of soundtrack albums.”
We Can’t Dance
When I bring the discussion back to the band’s latest album, I ask about the changing of the guard in regards to replacing their longtime producer Hugh Padgham with Nick Davis. Rutherford takes the question and answers: “We just thought it was time for change. There was no dissatisfaction with Hugh, who had produced the previous three Genesis albums [as well as Collins’ four solo albums]. But when you bring in a new guy, suddenly there’s a little edge to the sessions and you end up with a slightly different sound. The thing is with Nick and Hugh, we have more than an engineer but not really a producer per se because we’re all three so involved with the process and the production.
“And because we write by improvising in the studio, we are taking care of the arrangements. So, very often, the sound and the texture of a song is there from Tony and I. We don’t really have a producer then saying: ‘But how are we gonna make it sound?’ Because it’s really all there already.”
Banks agreed with his bandmate, saying: “You get some producers who come in and say, ‘Chop this section out, shorten that, add this,” but that doesn’t happen with us. Or as Collins adds: “We’ve already done that between the three of us.”
“When I’ve produced an artist like Eric [Clapton],” Collins continued, “you accumulate the songs and you might decide to add strings to something or whatever. That’s never something to discuss with us in Genesis because we’ve written it and arranged it all as we go.”
Despite the band’s ginormous success with hit singles, especially with five Top Tens on their previous album, Invisible Touch, the question arises as to whether the band has consciously forgotten their early progressive rock roots.
“We’ve never left our early progressive roots,” Banks argues, “in the sense that even our last album, Invisible Touch, which was our most commercially successful album, had things like ‘Domino’ which is like a 12-minute track, and ‘Tonight Tonight Tonight’ is a fairly ambitious eight-minute song, and there’s a weird instrumental with ‘The Brazilian,’ and that’s 50 percent of the album right there. All those things are traditional Genesis.
“It’s just that some of the other songs got a higher profile,” the keyboardist continued. “So, I think people got a slightly different impression because things like ‘Invisible Touch,’ ‘Throwing It All Away’ and ‘Land of Confusion’ became big hits, and we’re very proud of those songs as well so it doesn’t worry us.”
“You don’t really have any choice,” said Rutherford, in terms of the band’s musical direction. “You can either go back to what you’ve done before or do something totally weird and strange. It’s either one or the other, so there’s no escaping your roots.”
Another factor with the new album is that the changing of the medium itself allowed for a more lengthy and sprawling adventure this time out. “This new album is our first with the new CD length, so we were able to expand things a bit more,” Banks explained. “We were able to include two ten-minute tracks [“Driving the Last Spike” and “Fading Lights”] as well ‘Dreaming While You Sleep’ which is about seven minutes long. Even the single ‘No Son of Mine’ is over six minutes.
“So, we were able to broaden the scope of our writing and the performance because we are not restricted by the time constraints of a vinyl album, which are generally maxed out at 24 minutes per side. So with the new single-CD’s 72-minute length, We Can’t Dance would have been a hefty double-album in the old licorice pizza days.
“I think that the people who liked Invisible Touch will like this album, but I think there’s more material that also harkens back to the earlier Genesis work,” Banks believes, “and hopefully we can drag some of those older fans, who may have preferred us back at the time of the Duke album, back into the fold because we were able to include more material this time around.”
Collins jumped back in to point out that We Can’t Dance was written in the same way that the previous two hugely successful Genesis albums were. “Like I said before, we come back together with nothing written. We just improvise our way around each other and write as we go, so this one is probably closer to the two previous albums because of the way we tend to write with each other, although we did write like that a bit in the earlier days as well.”
Tracking the New Album
“No Son of Mine”
With the album’s first single, “No Son of Mine,” which was another smash hit, despite it’s six-minute length, there was no initial concept of it being a tale of an abusive family relationship, as Rutherford explained: “We had the music completed and Phil was singing something, just making up words.”
“It was just the syllable-phrasing,” Collins answers, “and then Mike said, ‘It sounds like you’re saying, ‘No Son of Mine’.” Rutherford picks up the narrative: “And suddenly you have the idea for a lyric.”
“I Can’t Dance”
The album’s second single was another Top Ten hit for the band, and grew out of a jam with an infectious riff, as Collins explained: “The first verse of that is just the words I improvised over the course of the first two times we ever played it. Mike was playing the riff on guitar and Tony was playing the drums on the synthesizer, so it was a different approach. And I thought it was very bluesy, so I just started singing in a bluesy vocal and we thought it was fun, but we also knew that if we played with it too much, it’d get smothered with ideas.
“So, we decided to just leave it for later and just approach it at some point for a bit of fun during the sessions. And that’s what we did. It was literally the last thing we recorded for the album.”
“When we were recording the track,” the band’s singer continued. “I was writing down some lyrics and we were all bouncing ideas around. We record in our own studio [The Farm], and I think it was the first time where we used the studio like that. Where we really had a very small musical idea and just mucked about.”
Banks agreed: “We really didn’t have the format of the song. I don’t think we even had those little turnarounds in the middle section. We literally worked it out as we went along, like when it takes you away from that guitar riff, that was just a spontaneous thing.” Rutherford added: “And Tony took over during that little break. There was really no laboring of thought going on.”
“Driving the Last Spike”
For those who think Genesis totally abandoned the lengthy musical mosaics that were the essence of their progressive rock early days, the ten-minute epic “Driving the Last Spike” put those thoughts to rest. After the track was completed, Collins put his well-known interest in railways to good use.
“We’ve always like doing the long songs,” says Collins. “because it’s always an interesting avenue to go down. Sometimes you write little musical bits that normally you would take back to a chorus or a verse, but with that song we just kept exploring. Most of the bits were based around one drum machine pattern, and the lyrics came a lot later.
“The working title of that was ‘Irish,’ because of the feel of the music and the instrumental theme of it all, and also because of some of the words I was improvising near the end of it sort of implied having a lot of pride in your work. But the final lyrics came much later for that song.
“I had a book at home about the early railways built in the U.K. during the 19th Century, which someone had sent to me as an idea for a screenplay. And it’s really an interesting subject once you start looking into it and you realize the horrible work conditions these Irish navvies dealt with, and how we totally take that for granted now.
“It’s like the trains in Chicago where it goes around the big loop above the street level,” he continued. “They were built at some point and we all take them for granted. And the song is written from the point of view of someone who was leaving home and going to work on the railways, not knowing if he was ever going to come back.”
When I mention that it’s like the freeways here in Los Angeles, Collins laughs and says: “Exactly. It’s like we think God just put them there one day.”
“Jesus He Knows Me”
Another Top 40 hit from the album was this satirical look at the televangelists who had fallen from grace in the Eighties and the early Nineties. Of course, some reviewers gave the band hell for addressing a topic that they felt had been done to death by others. Fans didn’t care and sent the song up the charts.
“Unfortunately, we apparently did that topic five years after every other rocker did it,” laughs Collins, pointing to the L.A. Times article I had earlier provided him. “It really goes to show that we really don’t have our ears to the ground. I didn’t know that Dire Straits had done it [“Ticket to Heaven” from On Every Street] or that U2 had done it [“Desire” from Rattle and Hum] or anyone else had done it. So, it obviously became a sitting target for critics at the Times, but I had no idea other artists had written about it.
“But that just goes to show that we really don’t have our ear to the ground,” Collins added, “and in some respects that’s why we sound like what we sound like. We’re not really influenced by other people and we’re not so besotten by music that we go out and listen to what all the other artists out there are doing. I haven’t heard the new Dire Straits album yet and I’m equally as interested in hearing the U2 album.”
“Consequently, the lyric of that song came from another improvisation. As the guys were playing, I started singing: ‘Jesus he knows me, he knows I’m right.’ It sounded good and it also sounded like something we had never written before and eventually it implied to me a look at the television evangelists. Ironically, within a few weeks of us writing that song, Jimmy Swaggart was was arrested for being with a hooker three years after the first time he was caught, so it seemed timely even though it wasn’t obviously intended to be about that [incident].
“But it’s funny about someone knocking that song because they say the topic has been done before by other artists,” Collins went on to say. “I mean, when you write a ‘relationship’ song, nobody ever says: ‘Hey, that’s been done before, man.’ Of course, I may not have written the first song about the homeless or the first song about a televangelist or whatever, but what difference does it fuckin’ make, ya know what I mean? You’re just trying to hammer a nail in a bit squarer and trying to get it right, but we’re not trying to jump on some bandwagon of televangelist songs, it’s all so strange.”
Banks added: “It’s a funny thing because we have sort of dealt with [social issues] over the years, but I think why it comes up more these days is that perhaps people didn’t pay as much attention to the lyrics in our early days, so when we had songs like ‘Get ‘Em Out by Friday’ [from 1972’s Foxtrot album], which was about evicting people from their homes, no one said, ‘This is a social comment song.’ And there were other songs with similar ideas that were also dressed up and written in a more poetic way, so people may have not seen them for what they were.
“I think people do pay more attention to lyrics nowadays,” the keyboardist continued, “and our lyrics are much more direct so people know what we’re on about. We don’t dress them up as much and that’s why people take them more seriously perhaps. But, for critics, I think the thing is it’s easier to talk about lyrics than music, but, for us, the lyric is only one side of the song. There’s so much more to a song than just the lyric.”
“Since I Lost You”
Another song of note from the We Can’t Dance sessions is this little known track that was never released as a single. Collins wrote the song for his good friend Eric Clapton after Clapton’s five-year-old son, Conor, tragically died after falling from an apartment window while Genesis was recording the album. Clapton’s heartbreaking ode to his son, “Tears in Heaven,” is an iconic song of course, but Collins created this masterful heartfelt ballad for his friend as well. In fact, some of the lyrics were direct lines that the despondent Clapton said to Collins during a consolidatory conversation the two men had.
Touring
“We’re doing a little less touring for this album,” Collins answered to my questions about life on the road, “because we don’t want it to become a grind and get fed up with it. We want to do it while we’re still enjoying it, but with families and personal stuff your priorities change a bit over the years.”
Banks agreed, “I think you reach a certain age where you think, what have I got, maybe 20 or 30 more years of life, and you wonder, do I want to spend one full year of that traveling around the world playing concerts. And I think the answer becomes ‘no,’ because you’ve had ten years of that, where it’s just been solid touring. Yes, of course, it’s fun, and we’re lucky to be in a position to do that, but you reach a point where you want to have a more varied life.”
“It’ll be interesting to see how this tour goes,” Rutherford said, “because we’ve never had 60 shows over three months. We gave our manager a start and end date, but we had no idea that he was going to fill pretty much every day with a concert [laughs].”
Stadium Concerts
“I think our music in Genesis translates much better to stadiums than my solo music does,” explained Collins. “I did do a few solo stadium shows in Germany and I had a great time, but I don’t know if that would work everywhere. Genesis, on the other hand, translates to ‘bigness’ much easier.
“So, I don’t think there’s any problem with how well our music sounds in stadiums, and we make sure that it sounds good in those bigger venues. Some people say stadium concerts sound like shit, but I honestly think we sound good in a stadium because we take the time to make sure we do. And, with this tour, we’re going to try and make it all look different so that when people walk in to those stadiums and when they come through those doors and come down into the ‘pitch’ they won’t see what they usually see.”
Future Plans, circa 1992
As our time together winds down, I asked what the immediate plans are following the tour. Rutherford answered: “I think we’ll all move back to our solo projects for a while, although Phil has a movie to do…”
Collins points out that it’s more than just one acting assignment: “It’s actually two movie projects. One right before the tour and one right after the tour. These movie things have to be scheduled so far in advance that it blocks off all other projects once you sign on for them.”
The two films in question were both released in 1993; the powerful television docu-drama about the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On, in which he played a San Francisco bathhouse owner, and his starring role in the critically-acclaimed Australian dark comedy Frauds, for which he received rave reviews.
And when it comes to their lengthy career, the veterans point out that thinking about a decades-long career in music when they were teens starting out in the Sixties would have been folly. “No one could have predicted what happened,” Rutherford said. “When the pop music scene or the rock scene started, what, 25-30 years ago, no one saw it going very far…”
“The whole business has changed so radically,” Banks interjects. “It’s extraordinary what a big thing it has become over the years. Like Mike said, no one could have predicted what has happened.”
As for business matters, Collins explained: “We don’t really get involved with the business side of things too much, because we’re not interested in the business side, per se. Of course, we’re very involved with the ultimate and final decisions, but we don’t get bogged down in the minutiae, and I think that’s why it works so well for us.
“There’s a thin line there though,” he clarified, “because anything that involves us, like if it’s merchandising, we want to see the t-shirts, we want to see the new logo or whatever, and we’ll make that final decision amongst ourselves, because it is a representation of us. We don’t want anyone looking at something and saying, ‘Those guys said ‘yes’ to THIS?’ [laughs]. At least, you can say, ‘I’m to blame, right?”
Peering Eyes
As I pack up and hand a copy of their latest CD to them, asking if they’ll sign it for our magazine’s secretary who is a major fan, all three are happy to oblige, and then while the other two decided to stay and get a bit of sun, Collins decided to walk out with me. Little did I know he would walk with me all the way to my car.
And I must say that I have never felt the force of human eyeballs coming from the now-crowded pool area as when I walked alongside one of the biggest and most recognizable music superstars of that or any other era. It was an actual physical reaction and I muttered to Collins, “How do you deal with that?” He just gave me a “whaddya gonna do” grin and then asked about me as we walked, where I live, and just some small talk. Let me just say that I make a much better interviewer than interviewee, but it all made for a most memorable day.
The Aftermath
In the nearly 30 years since our time together, Genesis was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. And over the past ten years, Collins has suffered from a variety of physical ailments, the worst following a neck surgery which resulted in him no longer able to play the drums. His 18-year-old son, Nicholas, will be playing drums on the upcoming Last Domino tour. In fact, during last year’s solo Still Not Dead Yet Tour, Collins was seen walking onstage with a cane and having to sit throughout the performance, focusing on his trademark vocals. The sold-out audiences didn’t seem to mind as he sang his iconic hits. And if you’re up for a good read, Collins also published his candid and tell-all autobiography, Not Dead Yet, in 2016.
