The Living Years (10 page)

At the Revolution Club off Berkeley Square we’d have to play three sets an evening. The first set would generally go okay and we’d go out to the pub afterwards. The second set would usually go okay again and we’d return to the pub, by now feeling that life was pretty good. The third set would be at one in the morning and all the pubs would be shut. Because we couldn’t afford drinks in the nightclub – they cost more than we were getting paid – we’d bring in our own cider and beer and have that it in the dressing room. This meant that by the time we left the stage at 2.30 a.m. we’d be rather tired, very depressed and extremely drunk.

It was worse at the Blazes, a smartish nightclub on the Cromwell Road where we’d have to play to a crowd of guys looking for girls and a couple of dancers on stands, gyrating.

The Blazes’s stage was designed for a nightclub band with an upright piano, not a big organ. By the time we’d got all our gear on to it, the only place for me was on the floor by the side of the stage, which would have been fine except that I now had a cello, given to us by Brian Roberts’s granny, on which I would play a song called ‘Pacidy’. (I used to put paper frets on the neck, which always fell off and I would have to find them by torch in the dark. However, as a band our attitude was always that the more anyone could bring to the table musically, the better. Pete’s flute tuning was always a bit interesting but, still, it brought texture.)

You knew there was going to be a disaster eventually and, sure enough, one evening at Blazes I was playing ‘Pacidy’ and swept my bow straight between the legs of the girl at the nearest table. I think we got halfway through the song before there was a scream.

Not all the venues we were playing were so smart.

I’d seen the Cream play at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm in December 1966 when the floor was just rubble: you’d try to move and you’d fall over a brick. By the time Genesis played there in March 1970 they’d at least got rid of the bricks and put in temporary seating, but it still had a concrete floor and the sound was crap.

We performed there at the Atomic Sunrise Festival, on the same bill as David Bowie and Hawkwind. Bowie was a bit unapproachable (quiet, kept himself to himself) whereas Hawkwind would always make you feel at home. Especially if home was the Kasbah in Tangiers. The smell of joss-sticks and hashish backstage was overwhelming.

We hoped when we left the cottage that we were doing something special, that there was nothing else quite like us around. Genesis often got lumped together with Yes but they were more about virtuoso playing than we were. One night we all went to see them at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh – they were brilliant technically but the music didn’t move me. Jon Anderson’s lyrics sounded good but weren’t really about anything. Yes wouldn’t touch humour with a barge pole, whereas we always did have a sense of fun.

Steamhammer were more heavy rock than us; Carl Palmer and Atomic Rooster were darker. The Strawbs, Pentangle and Fairport Convention were a bit similar but they were playing traditional chords, whereas that was what Ant and I were trying to get away from. Without sounding too grand about it, Genesis were different: each song was a folky, fanciful story set to music. You had to listen and follow it. You couldn’t carry on drinking and chatting, and just drop in for a couple of bars.

This meant that, from an audience’s point of view, it was probably quite painful to understand. If we’d been playing more traditional music and they hadn’t liked it, at least they would have known what it was they didn’t like: soul or R & B or blues. We weren’t any of those things. As a result, our audiences in the early days tended to be of two sorts: those that loved us and those that didn’t know what the fuck was going on. Sometimes they didn’t know that there
was
anything going on. Drums rarely appeared for the first twenty minutes of our set, which is why half the time no one knew we were even playing.

One of the places that helped us to survive was the Friars in Aylesbury. The crowd there were always into music, open to seeing something different. Dave Stops, the guy who ran it, was a great supporter of ours. We also managed to get a residency at Ronnie Scott’s, which impressed my parents. I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell them that we were upstairs at Ronnies, i.e. in the dodgy bar-and-disco bit where we played to an average of six people, three of them usually friends or friends of friends. Those that didn’t know us personally often heckled in the intricate bits and during one particularly bad night Tony – who’s the kind of guy who takes it all until he suddenly blows – sprang up from behind his keyboard.

‘We are no ordinary rock band!’

Being a classically trained pianist, ‘rock band’ was a label that particularly used to annoy Tony. He’d even thought the organ was a bit heathen at first.

When we played at a pub in Hemel Hempstead, Tony refused to go back on to play an encore. He was miffed because he thought the audience didn’t appreciate us enough. The rest of us couldn’t believe we were being asked to play an encore in the first place – a few weeks earlier we’d played to an audience of one. Pete had carried on for a bit then asked if there were any requests.

‘Don’t be so bloody silly,’ I said to Tony as we walked back down the corridor from the stage to the dressing room, but Tony can be incredibly stubborn. Eventually I’d had enough. There were wooden chairs stacked all down the corridor so I picked one up and went for him. Then I kicked him all the way back to the stage. We all knew how to push each others’ buttons terribly but our fights were only one step up from the playground. When we supported Ginger Baker’s Air Force at the Revolution, Ant and I were standing outside the back door before the show when Ginger’s partner arrived. A few minutes later, Ginger kicked her out: ‘Don’t you fucking come in here when I’m rehearsing!’ This was a bit of an eye-opener.

* * *

Our breakthrough came in February 1970 when we first played the Marquee Club.

Backstage the Marquee could have been any other club: it smelled horrible – beer, cigarettes, sweat – and the dressing room was teeny. But it was such a figurehead of a venue and, for me, the realization of my dreams. Even going in the back entrance with the gear as opposed to queuing at the front was a buzz. And then to be getting up on the same stage as my heroes . . . suddenly it felt like we were the real thing.

It was also at the Marquee Club that Strat – Tony Stratton-Smith, the owner of Charisma Records – began to take notice of us. We were supporting another Charisma band, Rare Bird, who had two keyboard players, one of whom was Dave Kaffinetti (who later appeared in
Spinal Tap
) and no guitarist. Instead, Dave would play an electric piano through a fuzz box. They were so good that both Tony and I came away from watching them feeling completely deflated: we thought there was no way we could compete with that. For some reason, however, not only did Rare Bird like us but their producer, John Anthony, did too. John knew Strat well and managed to persuade him to come out of his drinking hole, Le Chasse, and round the corner to watch us at the Marquee Club.

It was one of our better nights – there must have been at least eleven people in the audience. Strat arrived in a suit, handkerchief in his breast pocket, wearing a tie and slightly sweaty round the collar.

Before going into the music business Strat used to be a sports journalist. He’d been booked on to the plane that crashed in Munich in 1958, killing the Manchester football team, but had survived because his plans had changed at the last minute. He was a larger-than-life character – jovial and a big drinker but able to handle his drink well – and he also loved music. When it came to Genesis, what he loved was the emotion and power of our classical chords. And, like Jonathan King, he was impressed by Pete.

Our early shows were tough for Pete: he had a voice but he didn’t know how to be a front man. At some point he’d got a bass drum, which he’d furiously bang in the instrumental sections and which acted as a safety barrier between him and the audience. It was out of time mostly but John Mayhew was louder so it didn’t bother me. Pete also had a tambourine and at the end of ‘The Knife’, a driving, dramatic song that we’d use to close the set, he’d thrash around and bang his drum. With a strobe light going as well he’d usually look a bit demonic. You’d often see his tongue sticking out of the side of his mouth, he’d be concentrating so hard on what he was doing.

The problem for Pete was that neither the drum nor the tambourine were any use to him in the gaps between the songs, and the gaps between the songs were as much a part of our set as the music: it used to take Ant and I forever to get our guitars in tune. Pete was never someone who could banter with the audience so, out of sheer desperation, he started telling stories.

He was always slightly not-of-this-world and the stories he’d tell were the same. He’d often take a character from a song and spin a mad, whacky, surreal tale about them, all completely deadpan. I’m sure they were great but, to be honest, I can’t say I ever paid attention. I only realized he was doing something different when I didn’t feel his panicked ‘What do I do now?’, rabbit-in-the-headlights look boring into my back as I was struggling to tune my guitar.

* * *

Charisma’s offices were above a dirty bookshop in Old Compton Street but the label had a classy feel, a family feel. As well as Rare Bird, they had the Nice, Van der Graaf Generator (an interesting, progressive, keyboard-based band) and Lindisfarne. Strat wasn’t in it for the money, either, although he must have been happy when, having signed us, we all went for a meeting to discuss our wages and John Mayhew argued him down to £10 a week from an opening offer of £15. I think John was always a bit less enamoured of Genesis than the rest of us were.

Our first proper album,
Trespass
, was recorded at Trident Studios in July 1970. Trident was in St Anne’s Court, a seedy, narrow street that always smelled of urine because that’s where all the drunks ended up, and there’d often be the odd, rather dodgy hooker knocking around as well. Queen were signed to Trident and because of that got free studio hours in the downtime; they’d go in at midnight and work until eight in the morning.

We’d been playing
Trespass
live for a long time before we went into the studio and as a result it felt like performing, not creating. The feeling of freedom on every album since has been wonderful by comparison.

The real problem, however, was the material itself. Because none of us really knew how to write a song, we’d each write bits. We’d then go and fight the others about which bits we should use, always arguing that our own bit was ‘for the good of the band’ (we were still just devious schoolboys at heart). One for all and all for one, but mostly every man for himself.

This was one of the reasons why our early songs were so long: we’d just keep adding bits. Long songs might appear clever and hard to write but for us they were easy. We’d just take bit A and bit D and segue them together. What we didn’t realize was that it was generally better if you didn’t try to use the whole alphabet every time.

A prime example was the opening track on the album, ‘Looking for Someone’. It started with Pete’s idea and began with just simple piano chords and voice – such a Pete thing. If I had it now, it’d be a fabulous song as I could make something out of just the first couple of bits. Back then we rambled on with another eight minutes, throwing in bits and pieces. We were determined to prove ourselves and, while Pete always realized that space in a track was important, the idea that less is more was completely alien to the rest of us.

‘Stagnation’ was another example: we should have limited ourselves to two guitars but instead we used about ten. The result was that they all ended up cancelling each other out on record and the final thing sounded so muted you couldn’t hear anything properly.

It would be a long time before we sounded any good on record. For years the sound would be a bit wishy-washy. John Anthony, who produced
Trespass
, had an infectious, cheerful aura and did a good job of lightening us up. The infuriating thing about him was that if you wanted to re-do a part, he’d insist that you sat through the whole song waiting for the right moment. You couldn’t simply fast forward to it and drop it in as John thought that it would cause a click on the recording. I thought that was absolute crap. Given that some of our songs were nine minutes long, it made for some rather long days.

* * *

‘Have you got a minute, Mike?’

Lines like that have always worried me. In 1974 Adam Faith would make a film,
Stardust
, in which he’d play a music manager and whenever he wanted to fire someone, his character would say, ‘Fancy a pint?’ When Rich came up to me one night before a gig at Richmond Rugby Club and said, ‘Have you got a minute, Mike?’ I knew it wasn’t going to be good news.

Rich, Ant and I got into the van and drove out to the middle of the rugby pitch and that’s when Ant told me that he wanted to leave the band. I can still picture the lights of the rugby club hall in the rear view mirror: it was dusk and the hall had big glass windows. We’d set up our stuff and were just having a break until showtime.

You know when your heart drops when you’re on a plane that’s taking off? It was that feeling. The blood drained.

Ant had told me before about his stage fright but it hadn’t really gone in. I was so busy doing what I was doing I just didn’t have the time and energy to worry about other people. It wouldn’t be the last time I made that mistake.

‘Fine, Ant, whatever you want to do,’ I said. ‘I understand.’

I didn’t understand, if I’m honest. We all got nervous, but I also thought that stage fright was a luxury we couldn’t afford. But the truth was also that I wasn’t as close to Ant as I had been. I didn’t really understand what had been happening in his life.

After leaving the cottage, Josie and I, together with our cocker spaniel, had moved into a flat in Hampton Wick. It was the coldest, dampest flat I’ve ever known. In the bedroom we had a mattress on the floor and a paraffin heater, which stank, and we’d have to walk the dog in Bushey Park to warm up. If I’d have been single, I probably would have taken more notice of Ant – not just his stage fright but also his break-up with Lucy and the bronchitis he’d had over the winter. Ant was quite fragile and, when I thought about it, I realized he’d often been ill while we were making
Trespass
.