The Living Years (17 page)

The
Selling England
tour had only been finished for two weeks when we all moved into Headley Grange. The tempo of the business was much faster back then and I personally liked the quicker turnover: it made starting on an album less of a big deal. You felt it wouldn’t be all over if you made one bad record. Having said which, making
The Lamb
was anything but fast – it often felt like pulling teeth.

Selling England
had been our longest album to date but that had made it sound quiet on record: the longer an album was, the more grooves there would be in the vinyl, making the volume lower. For this reason we’d decided to make our next album a double one; this also had the advantage of allowing us to spread out and get more musical variety on. If we were doing a single album then everything had to sound pretty strong, but with a double album we could experiment with moods and atmosphere. Even on our first album for Jonathan King we’d included short instrumental links between tracks – which, looking back, had been pretty adventurous. On
The Lamb
these evolved into atmospheric jams which we all loved, particularly Phil. Like all drummers he loved improvising and never quite got that the rest of still had to play A chords or E chords if A chords and E chords were what we’d written.

The idea of having a concept came later when we the thought we might as well give the double album a bit of a story. My idea was to use
The Little Prince
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a book I’d studied in French at school and which I have a fascination with even now. I loved the fact that it was a children’s story that was actually for grown-ups and quite profound. If we had a basic storyline, my thinking went, we could go to town elsewhere. I could see how it would work visually too, with the book’s simple graphic cover and illustrations. However, instead of a sensitive, otherworldly blond prince, we ended up with Pete’s idea, which involved a greasy Puerto Rican street kid called Rael.

Pete came up with many different versions of the storyline for
The Lamb
and I didn’t buy any of them, if I’m honest. It was a journey, really, not a concept, but it never did hang together in my mind. I read the principal version of the story all the way through without making much sense of it at all (as I told Pete). But what was so fantastic about it was the imagery: the lyrics gave you the freedom to jump to the most amazing places musically. The only issue then was whether we’d get to these amazing places and back in time for us to tour in the autumn.

We didn’t have huge, noisy rows at Headley Grange. From the start we realized we’d got a big job on our hands and knew we couldn’t waste a lot of time arguing. It also became clear very early on that we’d only get the album made if Pete was working on the lyrics full time while the rest of us were working on the music. This bothered Tony more than it bothered me, but Pete’s mind was elsewhere. His marriage had been in difficulties and Jill was also pregnant with their first child. This meant that Pete was coming and going a lot, and when he was around there was often a sense that there was something unresolved going on between him and Tony.

When Genesis had started out we’d been two pairs: two guitarists – myself and Ant – and two keyboard players, Tony and Pete. Pete wrote on piano but, because of Tony’s sensitivities, he wasn’t allowed to play it as part of the band – which seems a real shame. Pete wasn’t a fast, technical player, he was a feel man, so he and Tony would have complemented each other rather than the reverse.

In some ways, Pete grew up faster than we did. He’d got married very young, which was itself a strain. He and Jill had met as teenagers so they’d both had to go through the painful process of discovering who they were at the same time as being in a relationship. And then when Jill gave birth it was touch and go with the baby. Phil was a father too by now, but Tony and I were too selfish and wrapped up in our careers to understand what Pete was going through. Looking back we were horribly unsupportive – there was no hint of sympathy for Pete – and nearly losing his daughter must have put the band in perspective. I’m sure he felt then that something would have to change.

William Friedkin, the director of
The Exorcist
, called Pete while we were still working at Headley Grange. He’d read a quirky story that Pete had written, which had been on the back of the
Genesis Live
album (it had been about a woman on a tube train who unzips her skin) and he now wanted to engage Pete as a writer and ideas man in Hollywood.

Ever since Ant had left, we hadn’t been forced to consider a major factor that might disrupt us as a band. When Pete came to tell us about the offer, we were quite prickly. As with Ant, if this moment had happened later in our career I’m sure we could have found a way forward and allowed Pete a few months off. But we still weren’t at the stage where we realized that was really feasible and, what’s more, we knew we were committed to touring in the autumn.

Pete’s the most wonderful bumbler. It often looked like he would never decide on things – but for all his ‘ers’ and ‘ums’, he usually knows exactly what he really wants. Eventually, the rest of us began to get a bit fed up with his indecision and gave him an ultimatum, and at that point Pete left the band.

Afterwards, I drove Tony down to the red phone box in the village to discuss the situation with Strat. He always believed he could talk anyone round – ‘Pete, dear boy, come and talk to me’ – and he probably could have done too, but Pete wasn’t around to be talked to. And after that, strange as it may seem, the rest of us just carried on writing: it was a way of escaping from worrying, of not dealing with the elephant in the room.

We jammed for hours, recording everything we’d played – Phil was the keeper of the cassettes, being a collector by nature – and then listening back to what we’d done each evening. That was how we found the start of ‘Carpet Crawl’: I was sitting in the kitchen one night drinking beer, playing back one of the jam tapes of the day, and there it was – one of those bits that at the time we hadn’t really rated but, with renewed perspective, was potentially quite interesting.

I knew we’d got a great, strong-sounding album and Pete’s leaving had left me feeling completely deflated. The songs had such effective moods: ‘Back in New York City’, which was aggressive and crude; ‘In the Cage’, which was claustrophobic and suffocating; ‘Fly on a Windshield’, which had real size and power. To have written songs like that and then to have lost our singer felt like a real bummer – so when Pete came back three days later the feeling was mainly one of relief.

What had happened was that when Pete had told Friedkin he’d left the band – ‘I’m free now!’ – Friedkin had put the dampers on it. He liked Genesis and didn’t want to break us up, and his plans for a collaboration had also been much vaguer than Pete realized at the time.

But while Pete’s return wasn’t something that any of us gloated about, at the same time we knew it would never be the same again. For the first time we felt that someone wasn’t pulling in the same direction as the rest of us. It wasn’t ‘one for all’ anymore. We didn’t put it into words but there was a feeling that if Pete wasn’t into the group in the same way as we were, something fundamental had changed.

The most pressing issue, however, was that we were now incredibly behind schedule. The music was on course and we even had a recording date booked, but Pete’s lyrics were nowhere near ready. Things got so bad that Pete eventually had to ask Tony and me to write the lyrics to ‘The Light Dies Down on Broadway’. He gave us a brief so what we produced was much less flowery than our usual style and I felt it ended up being quite in keeping with the album. Obviously, it was a token contribution but at least we could feel we’d done a song and wouldn’t have to live with an album that had ‘All words by Peter Gabriel’ written on it.

Having finished writing the music, the next stage was to record, which we did in a converted barn in Wales, the idea being that we’d sound more real in a space like that than in a soundproofed studio. But while it should have been quite an idyllic country interlude, having to hang around for days waiting for Pete’s lyrics just left us irritated. By the time we came to mix the album in London, we were so far behind schedule that John Burns, the producer, had to work round the clock.

Island Studios was a converted church in All Saints Road in Notting Hill. There were two studios: a nice big one upstairs and a cheap, depressing one downstairs with chocolate-brown shagpile on the walls. We weren’t upstairs.

In those moments when you’re up against it, I think anything is allowed. For example, letting Steve doze off while he was holding a full polystyrene cup of coffee. Not very nice for Steve, but funny for us at the time.

When Pete finally got round to recording his vocals he brought in Brian Eno, who I’d seen at Roxy Music’s first ever gig, to work on them. Eno didn’t make a huge difference as far as I could tell – it was just a case of taking a few vocals and wobbling them around – but because he had a reputation for doing odd stuff on synthesizers people tend to think Eno did much of the keyboard work on
The Lamb
. That annoys Tony to this day. He’ll be asked about it and his face will drop.

It was now October 1974 and, somehow, we’d managed to finish the record in time to make our touring commitments. We couldn’t believe we’d actually done it, we were going to make it . . . and then Steve cut his hand and the tour was put back by a few weeks.

Steve said he’d crushed a glass in a fit of stress, which I never bought, but at that point I decided I needed some time out too . . .

* * *

The Surrendell commune near Bath was a bit of a scam. It was for people who wanted to say they were in a commune, getting back to nature, but couldn’t face going up to Findhorn in northern Scotland and dealing with that.

Rich had been to Findhorn and he’d also been the one responsible for an earlier macrobiotic phase I’d been through. I was mainly doing it to be part of the in-crowd, the peace-love-man brigade, but Rich was completely dedicated and would even bring a little primus stove on tour with him for the nights when we’d smoked a bit of grass and got the munchies. Without Rich I would probably have been ordering out for hamburgers but, given that he was my roommate and given that he seemed quite happy to start making brown rice and tahini at three in the morning, I wasn’t about to stop him. We’d be in a Holiday Inn somewhere in Texas and he’d unpack his rucksack, lay out his stove and supplies at the bottom of the bed, then start chopping carrots. As we’d both be stoned, it’d be a health and safety nightmare.

Being macrobiotic in America was reasonable enough and in California the macrobiotic restaurants were good – outdoors, with bamboo fences round the seating area so that you could look out at the ocean as you ate. But then back to England I found myself eating in basements off Ladbroke Grove. There’d always be a burning smell where the material hung over the lamps was starting to catch, and the food was so heavy I would have a job getting back up the stairs to the street afterwards.

I’m not a commune kind of guy, basically, but Surrendell wasn’t a commune kind of commune: Princess Margaret and Helen Mirren had stayed there and, although I never saw them, I did see Roddy Llewellyn, who had a pleasant aura. You drank elderflower wine, not beer, which says it all, really. There was a bit of digging in the garden, a bit of building log fires in the evenings, some nice vegetables to eat . . . It wasn’t a bad way of killing time, all things considered, but after a few days the cold began to get to me: the cold gets to you in the end in all these places. I stuck it out for a week and then went back to my flat in Weymouth Street, where the heat came free with the rent so it never went off.

* * *

The Lamb
has been viewed as one of our best albums. It’s interesting, but I prefer
Foxtrot
. On
The Lamb
the need to tell the story meant that we had to include some sections that worked less well live. Because it was a concept album, however, we couldn’t just ditch the weak bits when we took it on the road: we were stuck playing the whole thing. That in itself was a challenge; even more of a challenge was touring it round America before the album had been released.

Considering that we were breaking the number one rule of touring, the crowd reaction was pretty good – but God, it was uphill.

I think it was Tony Smith’s idea for us to save some money by touring
The Lamb
round the US in two beat-up limos. They were definitely back-end-of-the-fleeters: a bit knocked-around looking, the suspension a bit shot. They were also driven by two characters called Joe and Joe who’d only got half a sense of direction between them.

Joe and Joe were from Buffalo (honestly) and came via another character named Harvey Weinstein. Before founding Miramax and going into movies, Harvey and his brother Bob had a pretty successful business producing concerts, although how they’d managed that with Joe and Joe on their books is anyone’s guess. Joe and Joe knew Buffalo like the back of their hand – the rest of the United States was a mystery.

As a band, we didn’t do tour buses: we’d tried it once in Italy and nearly killed each other. Buses are defined by the slowest common denominator and, apart from Tony, time-keeping wasn’t a strong point, so we would always be late.

My father was the kind of man who would always be looking at his pocket watch even if he didn’t have anything planned. I think it gave him his bearings. After his retirement he’d go to London once a week, either to his club or for a consultancy meeting, and always on the 10.10 a.m. train. If he arrived at the station early, he’d let an earlier pass train pass, waiting for his scheduled train. My approach was a bit more . . . relaxed. I thought that being within half an hour of an agreed appointment was acceptable but, of course, that annoyed Tony who’d always be in the hotel lobby on the dot, pacing. And Pete would be nowhere to be seen: he’d be off, doing stuff.

Things would come into Pete’s life and he’d get drawn to them. It’s the same to this day. People would tell him to visit a certain place or see a certain thing while he was in town and instead of getting up early, he’d realize an hour before we were due to leave that he hadn’t done it yet, nip out and not be seen again for ages. Pete always went with the flow more than Tony or me. Even at the cottage in Dorking I’d recognized that and it was one of the things I admired most about him. He could change, he wasn’t stuck in a rut, he had an imaginative freedom. But it could be bloody annoying when you were sitting around waiting for him to materialize.