The Living Years (11 page)

But it was only now that I saw just how much he’d changed.

The summer before we went to Christmas Cottage, Ant and I had driven all over the country looking for somewhere for the band to rehearse. We’d find places advertised for rent in the
Lady
and then rock up with a yarn about needing a place to study for exams. (It was when we found out what a week in Wales would have cost us that we began to appreciate the use of our parents’ homes a bit more.)

Back then, Ant had always been laughing, sitting in the front seat of my Ford Anglia strumming his acoustic guitar and wearing his pith helmet. We’d be in the middle of Herefordshire, miles from anywhere on a grey, wet day, and he’d get out of the car at a petrol station still wearing his helmet, his school scarf wrapped round him, his jeans semi-tucked into his thick-soled boots and he wouldn’t be in the least bit self-conscious. He was an extrovert but he wasn’t really worried about being part of a cool set. He just wanted to achieve stuff.

Now I could see that he’d lost weight and was in a terrible way. The stage fright was more than just fear, it was terror. He was upset about letting us down, too, although none of us were angry. You could see he really couldn’t do it anymore.

It now seems incredible that the option never arose to wait for Ant to recover, but we were all ambitious: we were just starting to get somewhere and the thought that we could last three months without things falling to pieces was inconceivable. It was my first real insight into how tough you needed to be get anywhere. It was also the most traumatic split of my professional career. There would be other partings of the ways but none would ever affect me as much as losing Ant.

Our last gig together was in Haywards Heath: we played to twenty-five people. Not bad. I got into Pete’s Hillman Imp to go home, feeling that at least we’d least bowed out on a high.

In my mind, I had no doubt that Genesis without Ant were finished. Pete and Tony were irreplaceable members of the band, but Ant to me was more irreplaceable than anyone. From the start he’d been the musical inspiration, the creative driving force. Without Ant’s drive I’m sure Pete would have gone off to film school, and without him in the band now I wasn’t sure that I wanted to carry on. We had been such a close unit.

However, there were fifty miles of country lanes between Haywards Heath and Pete’s house in Chobham. It might have been around Leatherhead that I started to reconsider. By the time we got to Chobham, and Pete and I had finished talking, we’d both realized that if we wanted to make it work, we could. It wasn’t that we didn’t still believe in ‘One for all and all for one’. It was more that we were developing a new philosophy to go with it: ‘Let’s try it and see.’

In 1970 Phil Collins was a face on the scene in Soho: a friend of Strat, a regular at Le Chasse and the drummer in a band called Flaming Youth. Given that we were in Surrey not Soho, that didn’t really mean a lot to us.

Phil didn’t know much about Genesis either, although when he’d seen our adverts for a drummer in
Melody Maker
he’d tried to fast-track his way into the band via Strat. However, Strat had told him that we were pretty fussy and he’d have to go down to Chobham for an audition, so that’s what happened. Phil arrived from Hounslow and Mrs Gabriel – we called her Mrs G – served tea.

It was summer so we’d pulled back the rug in the living room, set up on the parquet floor and opened the French windows to let the breeze in. Phil always reckoned that I was wearing a dressing gown when he first saw me and I might well have been: I don’t think I was trying to be ostentatious but we were all in relaxed mode. Anyway, Phil had arrived a bit early so while the drummer before him was finishing, we sent him off for a swim in the pool.

By the time it came to Phil’s turn, he’d already heard and memorized the part we were using for the audition and, when he sat down at the kit, you just knew. He had confidence. All the other guys had fiddled around, moved the cymbals, shifted their seat about a bit, but Phil simply changed the snare round because he was left-handed and got on with it.

You never felt anything was a big deal with Phil. Because most drummers don’t write, they live to play. As a breed, they’re never into the intense, emotional stuff: they just want to get a good groove. Being very much English folk-rock at this point, a groove wasn’t something Genesis had until Phil came along. For a start, apart from Pete, we all played sitting down.

In theory we were a very democratic band but really it was whoever shouted loudest that usually got their own way. The rows would be exhausting sometimes: you’d be right in the middle of one and suddenly realize you’d stopped caring half an hour ago but the thing was, because you were committed, you couldn’t just stop. You had to carry on.

Tony was the worst (or the best, depending on how you looked at it). He’d go on so long that in the end he’d just wear you down. Eventually, in later years, I found out that if you let him go on long enough he’d suddenly say, ‘But then again, you may be right . . .’ and start arguing the other way. You had to catch him at just the right moment.

My mind was on the guitarist who’d come to audition with Phil, Ronnie Caryl, his friend from Flaming Youth. The thing about Ronnie was that he was a blues guitarist. I could tell he didn’t have a feel for our folky, harmony, tinkly guitar stuff, so if I had any reservations that day it was probably because I was worried that Ronnie and Phil might come as a job lot.

Fortunately, they didn’t.

* * *

It had been Ant’s leaving that had made us decide that as well as a new guitarist, we really needed a new drummer to replace John Mayhew. But although we’d now solved one part of the problem, we were still a man down. That summer Genesis played quite a few shows as a four-piece, Tony playing lead lines on his Hohner Pianet that he put through a fuzz box and me playing guitar and bass pedals. It’s a forgotten era now but it was an important time for the band: the moment when Tony and I began to get closer together musically. We were the chords in the middle, Tony and I, the core of the Genesis sound. Even on
From Genesis to Revelation
you can hear it: the repeating riff with the changing chords laid over the top, and Tony responding to me or vice versa.

This didn’t mean that things within the band were all that harmonious. Soon after Phil joined in August 1970 we moved into The Maltings in Farnham to rehearse and row full time.

The Maltings was a vast building, a huge expanse of dusty wooden floorboards that had once been a maltworks but now only had pigeons in it. And pigeon shit. We would set up in one corner of the place on some rugs and in the morning our gear would be completely covered. It was always a surprise to find Rich, who stayed there and slept on the floor as security, had escaped the bird droppings untouched.

Perhaps it was because Tony and I had effectively found our workload doubled that it was such a tense period. We were also all driven not so much to succeed in terms of fame, but to achieve what we wanted to achieve musically. The arguing was a terrible waste of time, but we were worried about getting it right, making our ideas work. It must have been violent, though, because the first few times we started rowing, I could see Phil thought we were breaking up, it was all over. Then after a few days he got over the shock and I could see him thinking: ‘It really doesn’t matter, guys!’

We weren’t quite on the same planet as Phil. He always had a bloke-next-door, happy-go-lucky demeanour about him: let’s have a drink in the pub, crack a joke, smoke a cigarette or a joint. Life is good. I think that’s one of the things Pete liked about Phil: the fact that Phil wasn’t from the same background, hadn’t come from the same rather narrow world as us. Pete was always less stiff than Tony and me, much more in touch with emotions and feelings, much more interested in the wider world.

There was a musical bond between Pete and Phil too: because of Pete’s sense of rhythm, he and Phil seemed to lock in from day one. They were both intuitive about music in the same way. It wasn’t cerebral, as it was with Tony – with Pete and Phil it came from the gut. Plus Phil, having joined later, wasn’t part of our old playground dynamic, which was why there was often a bit more respect for his opinion. And why he was often left twiddling his drumsticks while the rest of us fought.

Among the songs we were working on at The Maltings was ‘Musical Box’, which to me was ‘Stagnation’ one stage on. It was a quirky, fantasy fairytale story that started quietly, built up and, at the end, had a huge dramatic finish that would be one of our best bits for a long time to come. Even today when I hear Pete sing ‘Now, now, now, now, now’ it raises the hairs on the back of my neck. It’s almost annoying: as I’m not a singer, I could never do something so simple that would sound so emotional.

Maybe that’s not quite true.

The Maltings had a terrific echo and I found that, if I left my guitar plugged in when I slammed it down in the middle of a row, it made a tremendous noise. And Tony would make sure his keyboards were turned up to full volume when he whacked them and stormed out.

The Maltings wasn’t far from Hill Cottage so Phil and I stayed there while Tony stayed with Pete. It felt good, like a new beginning, to have Phil around and my parents liked him, too. I think they always found Pete a bit of a mystery, but they could relate to Phil more.

They moved the dining table out in to the hall where there was more space and then Mum did what most mothers do and tried to stuff us. The more we ate, the better job she’d done, so there’d often be starters and a main. I didn’t really see much of Dad in that period – he’d pass through and he was glad we were there, but he’d quickly take himself off to read the newspaper. I think my parents were pleased to see how hard we worked and how obsessed and committed we were, and they were happy to support us in any way they could. I had thought taking me to my first gig aged ten was as it good as it was ever going to get.

Phil stayed at Hill Cottage, in my sister’s old bedroom, for a week or so and then we swapped over and Tony came to stay with me while Phil went to stay with Pete. The idea was that it would allow Pete to get to know Phil better, but no one ever told Phil that. He always thought it was because I didn’t like him and had rung up Pete to complain: ‘Oh for God’s sake, Pete, you have him for a while, he’s a right pain in the arse.’

It didn’t matter to Mum who she had staying, and both my parents thought Tony was very polite. Tony and I did miss a meal one evening when Mum nearly set fire to the house.

We were sitting chatting when we heard a voice from the kitchen.

‘Um, fire. Fire, Mikey, fire.’

This was in her normal voice. Then it got a little bit louder.

‘Um, Mikey, fire? Fire, Mikey?’ she said again as though there still might be some doubt about it. I went into the kitchen and flames had completely engulfed a saucepan, licking up the sides of the thing. I had to rush it out to the garden and dump it in a flowerbed while Tony watched. (He’s never been one for the front line of the action.)

* * *

Before the Second World War, the Navy was the largest public relations organization in the world. The idea was that trade followed the flag, which meant my father was often part of what were called ‘hurrah cruises’, meant to win hearts and minds and show taxpaying members of the Commonwealth that they were getting value for money. It was a social whirl, as Dad discovered in South Africa in 1929:

Ball suppers were held in basements where at trestle tables on wooden chairs we washed down ham, tongue, jellies and blancmange with South Africa’s more light-hearted and acidulated wines.

The stay always included a ship’s dance, children’s party and being open to visitors who wandered all over the place, and I found a family one afternoon standing raptly at the wardroom door gazing at the not-very-attractive picture of one of the watch-keeping officers taking a post-luncheon forty winks in an armchair.

Mother was saying, ‘I say the poor boy is tired but your father says he’s drunk like all sailors. But we can’t have a bet on it as it wouldn’t be right to wake him up and find out.’

To be fair, it was an exhausting schedule:

I still have the programme of a four-day visit to Accra where all not on duty lived ashore each with a suitcase packed according to a list like a new boy at school. We moved from function to function, the only stable element being where we slept the night, provided that we could remember where it was.

In 1970, Genesis played over a hundred gigs. We moved from pub to club to college and the only stable element was Rich’s food, although it was less ham and tongue, more sausages and baked potatoes. At the cottage he’d always pack some food before we set off in the bread van because we simply couldn’t to afford to eat out – and anyway, where else would you put a hard-boiled egg if not a hamper? But that didn’t stop other bands from expecting a scene from Henley regatta whenever we rocked up.

If anything, I felt Charterhouse had actually given us a better grounding than most for life on the road. We’d been beaten down and got used to living quite basically in a tough environment without home comforts. What’s more, while our peers who had gone on to university were continuing to live a rather bubble-like, privileged existence, we were learning about life in the real world, where everyone seemed to be against us because of our background. In our case it felt like everyone was doubly against us because our music was so odd.

We had to pay our dues like every other band, lugging our equipment around, earning the respect of roadies and crew. Where things got a bit strange for us was when paying our dues also meant entertaining our contemporaries at their Oxbridge May Balls.

It seemed weird to be back in a world of arches, cloisters and stone pillars again in such different circumstances, but if the setting brought back memories of Charterhouse, then there was absolutely no comparison in terms of the audience. At Charterhouse, you’d always be cheered – not so much because of what you were playing but because the masters obviously hated it. Putting them through pain made it all the more pleasurable. May Balls were just painful for everyone: us and the audience. The big act would be on at midnight so by three or four in the morning when we were on we’d be fighting to stay awake – it was so late that we would have got pissed, got over the hangover and got sober again. Those left in the audience that weren’t comatose on the floor, throwing-up drunk or acid-ed out were very, very few.