The Living Years (22 page)

* * *

1977 was turning out to be a rather important year. I had become a father. When Kate was born I’d never held a baby before and, like many a new father, I was convinced that she was going to break. When they’re that small, that’s what you believe: you look at them and wonder how on earth they’re going to last the night. Amongst all the turmoil with Genesis, though, I didn’t have much time to enjoy those first moments of fatherhood. Angie had been home from hospital for just two days when I flew to the Netherlands to make a new album.

* * *

‘So, tell me: why’s the album called . . .
And Then There Were Three
. . .?’ I could tell it was going to be a long haul. This was in March 1978 and we were in a radio studio in New York at the start of almost a year of touring. Tony, Phil and I. The three of us. Maybe the DJ had a problem counting.

We’d gone back to the Netherlands and Relight Studios to record . . .
And Then There Were Three
. . . There was always the question when we went in to make a new album: could we do it? We never took it for granted that we’d make another album, ever, but this time it wasn’t really the writing of the songs that was the question for me, just the playing. I wasn’t in a hurry to play lead guitar and I knew I couldn’t play like Steve, but by the time he left we also knew it would have been wrong to bring anyone else into the band to write. There would have been too much history for anyone new to catch up on. In the early days we couldn’t paint enough pictures on our own: we needed more of a colour palette, which Steve had brought. But just as a band with four people in it was more agile than a five-piece, so there was a freedom and an ease writing as a three-piece, which was liberating. We could jam together and if someone shot off in one direction, there wouldn’t be four others trying to pull him back to somewhere else.

By nature musicians are always going to be frustrated because there’s always something better that you haven’t done yet – a better song to write. That’s why I’ve never felt that I’ve arrived. But, with
A Trick of the Tail
,
Wind & Wuthering
and . . .
And Then There Were Three. . .
, I felt that the ship we’d been trying to launch finally made it down the slipway.

Having said which, . . .
And Then There Three . . .
is a funny album. Because we’d written so much material for
Wind & Wuthering
that we didn’t have space for, we decided that on this new album we’d have no long songs. The record suffered for it. Every time we gave Tony Smith an album to play to the record label he’d start smoking again, or drinking again, and with . . .
And Then There Were Three . . .
, I had some sympathy for him.

What saved the album was ‘Follow You, Follow Me’. I had always found it difficult to put my emotions on paper. Angie, however, had encouraged me to be more open. The song captured how I felt. I was pleased when Pete Townshend said that he liked it: that meant a lot to me, coming from him. It’s an up, happy song that makes you smile without being sweet – not an easy thing to achieve – and the lyrics flowed so fast when I wrote them I thought that it can’t be that easy. But there’s something genuine about them. What’s more, it was a song that girls liked as well as boys, which was a first for us. Prog rock was not something that most girls ever really got. Now boys were bringing their girlfriends to the shows: ‘You know Genesis: they’re the ones who did that song you like!’ Finding ourselves with a female audience was almost as big a novelty as finding ourselves in the Top 10 for the first time: ‘Follow You, Follow Me’ got to number 7 in the UK and number 23 in America. It was by far our biggest hit to date.

* * *

After leaving the band Ant had gone to music college and become a pianist. I’d worked with him on his first solo album,
The Geese and the Ghost
, which came out in 1977, but even though we still saw each other quite regularly, we never spoke about his decision to leave Genesis. As I had feared, once he’d left he just wasn’t part of my life in the same way anymore, which is something I’ll always feel sadness about.

I now decided to explore music theory, but soon realized that not knowing anything can make you more adventurous as a writer. When the band were jamming together it was those sonic moments of collision – wrong notes, I think they’re known as – which led to our most original and interesting ideas. You write by making mistakes. That’s the reason why Daryl Stuermer, our new touring guitarist, wasn’t a writer: he couldn’t play a wrong note if you paid him. But because we were paying him not to, it worked out pretty well.

Daryl is positive and enthusiastic, and even though he’s American, he has an understanding of English music. He shouldn’t drink coffee though: it gives him the verbals. He had an attack at his audition in New York and suddenly it was all pedals and fuzz boxes and footwork . . .

Daryl’s guitar playing was just what I’d gone to America hoping to find. There was a level of musicianship in the States that didn’t exist in the UK: the Americans just had better technique. I felt that it made them less original and innovative as songwriters (the Clash could never have come from America, for example) but the proficiency was definitely greater.

Daryl wasn’t the first guitarist I auditioned. Chester had recommended Alphonso Johnson from Weather Report who was a lovely guy and a great bass player, but just not good enough on lead guitar. I’d also tried out Elliott Randall from Steely Dan but he was too much of a session guy: when he came in to play ‘Squonk’ he’d asked me how I wanted it. ‘Do you want it rock, do you want it country, do you want it choppy, do you want it jazz?’

What Daryl got and Elliott didn’t was that there was only one way to play ‘Squonk’: you had to play it straight, you couldn’t lilt the chords.

The next question was whether Daryl could also play bass: with a bassist, I could finally get rid of the doubleneck. The answer was no, not really, but any guitarist can pick up a bass and play the notes to a song well enough to make it work, whereas that’s not true the other way round.

I had always loved bass, the only problem with it being that’s it dead boring to play on its own. And with Daryl in the band I often gave Steve’s part to him when we played live, while I continued to play bass, although on our newer songs I would tend to play lead. I felt closer to the new songs, they felt more part of me. It took Daryl about five years to become a very good bass player: for the first four he was playing the right notes but he didn’t have the groove.

Neither Daryl nor Chester ever could understand what I was saying. Being Americans they had a problem with all of our English accents but I might as well have been speaking another language as far as Daryl and Chester were concerned.

My father always had very proper pronunciation but at some point I’d developed a mumble that seemed to get gradually worse by the year. I still have it: I think if I talk fast, I can fit more in. It doesn’t work that way, obviously, because I usually then have to spend another five minutes repeating myself.

* * *

We were on tour virtually non-stop from February to December 1978, although we only played one show in the UK: it was at Knebworth on 24 June to 120,000 people. Looking back it seems unbelievable, slightly mind-blowing. I was only twenty-eight and this wasn’t just a festival, with a range of big names to draw such a huge crowd. This was our gig, our people coming to see us. But if you were on a roll, as we were then, you rather took it in your stride.

Flying in the day before by helicopter for a sound check, however, I could not help but be struck by the size of the stage. It was a huge black thing, the biggest stage in the world at the time, and looked a bit like a fort in the westerns, with the grassy gully of the park leading down to it.

Sadly that was a view that Tony never saw, because Tony didn’t do helicopters. As we soared overhead, he was stuck in traffic on the single tiny road that went in and out of the place. He only just made it in time for the concert, but at least he got there, unlike the singer for our support act, Jefferson Starship. Grace Slick had already been misbehaving in Europe and ended up going AWOL just in time for their Knebworth slot. And poor Talk Talk were heckled: I always did feel that was very unfair.

Knebworth was a big gig in every way and we wanted to make a big impression visually. Instead of just using simple follow spotlights, we’d had the idea to direct beams of light up from the stage into the lighting rig, where they would then be reflected back down via huge, moving, hexagonal mirrors. It was much more interesting and innovative than your average light show at the time, but it was still a bit clumsy and a bit awkward. What we needed was to get the lights themselves to move; it would be even better if they moved and varied their colour too. But who would ever think to invent something like that . . .?

Knebworth wasn’t our only big gig that year. In November we played in front of 100,000 people at La Fête de l’Humanité in Paris, another crowd so huge it was slightly shocking. From the stage all we could see were people, with just a glimpse of the funfairs on the horizon beyond. We hadn’t been prepared for that, but we were even more perplexed when we realized that it wasn’t a festival we were playing at. It was actually a Communist Party rally.

* * *

Tony Smith’s heart was in live work and he was quite good at realizing that if things were going well and you pressed on a bit, it would pay off. Like my mum when I was at prep school, he also tended to get a bit creative with time when he was talking to me about it. He would pretend to us that every month was only four weeks really, so we’d agree to tour in July and August because that was only eight weeks. Then we’d find out we were playing ten weeks of shows. ‘But we don’t count June because we’re in June at the moment.’ We’d always fall for it.

That summer of 1978 in America, most of the venues we’d been playing were ‘sheds’: indoor/outdoor places with 5,000 people under cover and another 15,000 spread out behind in the open air, usually in very picturesque settings. The crowds would bring their picnics with them and backstage we’d often have a barbeque. As the evening came on, it’d be incredibly atmospheric. (The only place for which this wasn’t true was Saratoga Springs where it always pissed with rain. Either they didn’t have any other type of weather in Saratoga Springs or they just saved it up for us.)

But while selling out huge venues, we were selling comparatively few albums. Our success as a live band was becoming out of all proportion to our commercial success.

Part of the problem was Jerry Greenberg, the CEO of Atlantic – he had a lot of words, Jerry, but he’d never got our music. Finally Tony Smith told Ahmet Ertegün, the founder and President of Atlantic, that we were going to try and buy ourselves out with some money that Phonogram had offered us.

Ahmet was the smart, elegant son of a Turkish diplomat and, like Strat, he was in the music business because he loved it. He didn’t have rules – he’d been one of the first record execs to pay royalties to black artists, much to the irritation of the other labels. He also believed in giving artists creative freedom, which was why he’d done so well and become so revered. Ahmet was like a god in America.

He’d also got our music from day one. As soon as he heard we were considering leaving Atlantic he got straight on a plane from New York.

‘Listen guys,’ Ahmet said over dinner, ‘I take your point. But I’m going to make sure we do this next album right. Please give me one more try.’

We’d always loved Strat’s fighting talk in the early days of our career but even at the time, deep down, we knew he was just saying some of those things to make us feel better. But Ahmet’s talk was convincing, and Ahmet
was
Atlantic. In those days the head of a record label could go back and inspire everyone else on the label: and if Ahmet was behind you, the whole label would jump. He was also a man of his word. If Ahmet promised that he was going to push a record hard, you knew he would do.

‘I love you guys. Please give me one more try,’ he said. Put like that, what could you do?

* * *

‘Mr Rutherford, wanker? Wanker, Mr Banks?’

By 1978 I had got married, had a child and felt that all of us in the band had grown up a bit. Which didn’t mean that we didn’t enjoy making Mr Udo, the extremely polite promoter of our first Japanese tour, yell the word ‘wanker’.

What would happen was this: after a show, some of us would want to have a shower, change clothes or have a bite to eat backstage, while some of us would want to get back to our hotel. If you wanted to get away quickly you’d ask to be in the first car, car number one, but in Japan this ended up as ‘one car’. Which, of course, came out ‘wanker.’

‘Who wants wanker? Mr Rutherford, wanker?’

For obvious reasons, the phrase stuck.

* * *

By the time we toured Japan in the late 1980s, Japanese audiences had learned how to do the rock thing – they couldn’t get enough of cat-suited, hair-on-the-chest-type heavy metal. But in November 1978, at our first Japanese show, they hadn’t quite learned how to react. The show was at a theatre in Tokyo, but it had the feel of a grand opera house: all the men wore dark suits and white shirts, and at the end of each song there’d be discreet applause.

My father had visited Japan in 1952 when he was commander of the
Newcastle
, which was based at Hong Kong. He was impressed by:

The national characteristics of discipline, passive face, austerity and economy . . . nothing was wasted and not a piece of string or empty cigarette package was allowed just to lie around.

Dad always thought that you should try and glean something from other people. He believed that it was important to keep an open mind, to consider everything that might be put to you and learn what you could. And this must have rubbed off on me because one of the places I particularly wanted to visit while I was in Japan was the Roland music factory in Tokyo. They made some nice guitar effects pedals and I wanted to see what else they had.