The Living Years (25 page)

And when they did – and they really did – their sound was unique. But it was a lot of work – a
lot
of work – partly because they were all such characters. Don Myrick, the saxophonist, was eventually killed in a drug bust in 1993. Louis Satterfield, the trombone player, hurt his lip at one point and while he couldn’t play, locked himself in a hotel room and went room-service mad to the tune of $5,000 in a single night.

* * *

I’ve often thought that the reason why British bands tend to last longer than American ones is that in America it’s easy to find yourself surrounded by people who believe your hype. In Britain you can go into a pub and people will fall over themselves not to notice you.

This was one of the nice things about moving to the country, although when the band bought Fisher Lane Farm in Chiddingfold, Surrey, with the idea of turning it into a residential recording studios, the locals weren’t best pleased. Chiddingfold is a quiet English village and the idea of a rock band descending caused a bit of a stir. However, the roadies soon ingratiated themselves at Chiddingfold Working Men’s Club – especially after they’d discovered the beer was subsidized. After that the policy generally seemed to be to turn a blind eye. The only person who ever caused any bother in Chiddingfold was a guy who thought he’d used his powers of telepathy to write all our songs. Having then communicated them to us subliminally, he’d got a bit annoyed when we started passing them off as our own and now he was after his royalties. He wrote to us quite regularly and occasionally he’d appear at ‘The Farm’, as the studios became known. One of the roadies would drive him back down the road, plonk him in the middle of the village green and off he’d go until the next time.

The Farm was perfect for what we wanted. It began as quite a funky old building with a barn in which we stowed the gear, and a milking shed that we used as a garage. As time went on we developed the accommodation for crew and engineers and built a stone-clad drum room based on the one at Virgin’s Townhouse Studios. Hugh was involved in designing it – drums and voice were Hugh’s forte – and that drum room was another reason why we began to sound on record like we really did as musicians.

The process of finding The Farm hadn’t been easy, though. Just like back in the days when we had needed to negotiate drop-offs on our way back to London after gigs, delicate logistical negotiations had been involved.

After I’d moved out to the country, I often felt that I’d started an exodus: Tony and Margaret came down soon after, then Tony Smith and then Phil. Phil was just down the road from me: I’d always been touched by the way he rang me before buying his house to check that I didn’t mind his being next door.

Phil’s house, Tony Banks’s house and my house now formed a triangle, but the problem was that it was unequal, meaning that one person’s house would always be nearer than the other two to the studio we were considering. The aim, obviously, was for our own to be the nearest, but none of us would ever say that when we were being shown somewhere further away. ‘It’s very nice but I’m not sure about the acoustics. I think maybe we should keep on looking a bit longer . . . ’

We even considered a four-sided farmhouse set round a courtyard with a galleried hall – but it was so nice that the idea of filling it with roadies just didn’t seem right.

Not that the roadies ever had any complaints about The Farm, despite its remoteness from London: on sunny days they’d even sit outside on the lawn in front of the studio in deckchairs. Being in a studio with a window was a big plus for us as a band. Prior to this, we’d always been locked away in basements – but there were downsides and watching the roadies tanning upevery summer wasone of them. I know they did it to annoy us.

* * *

Most of our crew had been with us for years by this point: Bison, Pud, Little Geoff and Dale (no one knows how Dale escaped having a nickname: he was Noodlemier for a while but it never took hold). Pud was Welsh and called Steve Jones but there were four other Steve Jones in his class at school so, being small and round, he ended up as Pud. Bison was stocky with thick black hair.

Bison had been part of Genesis legend since the last night of
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
tour when he appeared naked on stage as Rael’s body-double. Normally, at the climactic moment, Pete would appear on one side of the stage and a mannequin dressed in Rael’s leather jacket would appear on the other. On this particular night Bison decided he’d take the place of the mannequin, not only without the leather jacket, but without anything else on either. Full frontal. There was a strobe going and I remember very clearly how every part of his body was an odd grey-blue.

Bison had a fantastically quick sense of humour but you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of him. A few years after he joined us we were playing a gig in Germany and there was a drunken heckler in the front row. ‘Can you have a word?’ I said to Bison. I then watched as he walked calmly down to the front of the stage, made his way towards to the troublemaker, and Bap! knocked him out cold. I was trying to play but for the next song and a half all I could think about was whether Bison had actually killed the guy. The man’s body was now hanging over the aluminium safety fence, waving slightly like seaweed as the barriers heaved.

The crew worked all hours. I’ve always said that if there was a roadie’s union, touring would be impossible, although the work was a matter of pride for them, too. But it was no secret that the only way they could keep it up was with chemical help, and that was where Howie came in.

Howie was from the Bronx. We first met him when he was selling illegal merchandise at the back of a venue. He looked exactly like the kind of guy you’d imagine would do that: a skinny face and you never knew how old he was. He had a bad shoulder, too: he claimed he’d been hit by a stray bullet but you suspected that it might not have gone that wide.

Howie supplied the road crew with the various substances they needed to keep them awake but no one ever mentioned that was his official role. His official position was court jester and he was so good at it that occasionally you’d just have to turn him off. We would all enjoy the patter for a while but then he just wouldn’t shut up. Mostly, though, everyone loved Howie. He would interact effortlessly with anyone – fans, crew, the band, the record companies – and then when he’d finished a tour with us, he’d join the Pink Floyd road crew and carry on in the same vein.

Nick Mason, the drummer with Pink Floyd, once told me that when the band were invited to Cape Canaveral to meet some astronauts, Howie was somehow in tow, and he was greeted by everyone there like a long lost friend. And when Genesis played at Atlantic’s fortieth anniversary party in Madison Square Garden, an event hosted by Michael Douglas, as soon as we walked into the dressing room it was Howie who was greeted with a load of high fives. Even Michael Douglas seemed to know who he was.

He got everywhere. At the end of one American tour we said our goodbyes and left for England, only to see him a few days later looking very at home at The Farm for the first time. He soon became a regular fixture. Not only that, he went on to play himself in with the locals so well that he even became Chairman of the Chiddingfold Working Men’s Club. I’m not sure he was selling his wares to the local OAPs but they always looked very pleased to see him.

Eventually, Howie had to leave us. He was obviously a guy who was used to flying close to the wind and eventually he got a bit too close. Nevertheless, undeterred, he managed to find a job as a postman at the post office in Woking – which, bearing in mind his line of delivery work, I thought showed great initiative.

* * *

We never intended to own a brothel. I wonder how Dad would have felt.

One of my ploys at the places we visited was to have an outing with the local Provost Marshal to see the types of evening entertainment available to ship’s companies – bars, beer halls and the brothels. As regards the brothels, those at places like Singapore were beyond description, Hong Kong better but in Japan they followed the French system.

The houses were properly run and supervised by the police; they were pleasantly set out and presented, the girls in Japanese or western dress were attractive enough and face was much in evidence in that for a client to be robbed or done over would be an unforgivable stain on the house’s reputation and most shaming.

Also, in the case of seafaring men, it would mean loss of face for their clients to be late on board so it was quite a usual sight in the morning to see girls urging their clients along to the ships, occasionally looking at the man’s wrist watch.

As I did my rounds of several houses it occurred to me that while it was one thing to be an ageing Captain, accompanied by a Provost Marshal, making an official inspection, had I been the young officer of a few years ago with a few quid in my pocket and a few drinks under my belt, it was a moot point whether my researches might not have been a bit deeper.

* * *

The brothel was in Dallas, which in the early eighties was like lots of American cities – blighted, full of crime and drugs. But Dallas was also home to Showco, the tour production company we used, and so that’s where we’d spend several weeks rehearsing at the start of each tour.

At some point someone in governmental office had come up with a plan for a new rail transport system in an attempt to rejuvenate parts of the city and increase land prices. One of the directors of Showco, spotting an investment opportunity, persuaded us to go in with him and so that’s how we ended up owning a car park in Dallas and a small hotel run by a guy called The Chinaman. Thinking about it, his name should probably have been a clue, but The Chinaman always paid his rent on time and in cash so no questions got asked. He had a good run of five years or so before anyone got wise to the fact that he was running a whorehouse.

Since we’d started working with Showco, the days of Les Adey and his shaking hands were well and truly over. We’d always tried to paint a picture on stage and as the venues we played got bigger, production got more important. We wanted to engage every single person who came to see us, even if they were in the highest row of a 20,000-seat arena.

Special effects until this point had still been quite primitive. They also had a fatal flaw in that they were operated by people. One of our early laser operators spent ages lying on his stomach above a laser only to realize he was facing the wrong way and his beam had been burning a hole in the wall behind him. The laser geeks didn’t integrate very well either: the roadies never did like them and they once left one at an airport tied to a pillar by his own rucksack straps.

We felt that we’d been on to something with the mirrors we’d had back in 1978 for Knebworth (as the
Daily Express
loved pointing out, they each weighed twenty tons, cost £50,000, and contributed significantly to our £25,000 a day running costs – like the TV documentaries, the newspapers couldn’t get enough of the figures). But the problem with the mirrors was that the light that we shone up at them from follow spots got dissipated on the way back down. Once again, we would have to rely on operators to direct the spots themselves. When we had played at local halls in America with union guys at the controls, this meant we’d inevitably end up with Tony brilliantly lit for my solos and vice versa.

Lights that moved automatically and changed colour were the dream, and one that Rusty Brutsché of Showco shared. Until now coloured lights relied on gel filters, which burnt out with the heat from the bulbs behind them. The dichroic filters that Jim Bornhorst invented for his new VARI*LITE lighting kept cool, which was not only a technical breakthrough but also a bonus for us, standing under them. It wasn’t too bad for me but Chester was bald and sat on a drum riser at the back of the stage: he’d often complain that he was starting to feel a little bubble going on up top.

VARI*LITE lighting may have stayed cold but they weren’t climate-proof: when Rusty came over to The Farm in December 1981 to demonstrate them to us it was a freezing cold day. We were out in the old wooden barn and the lights took forever to fire up – but when they did start to work, they were fantastic.

The visuals and lighting had always been something that Tony and I loved. At some point, the two of us even discussed making an office version of the VARI*LITE. (The idea was that because VARI*LITE lighting didn’t generate extra heat, companies would be able to save on air-conditioning costs – this being an era when empty offices in Dallas still left their lights burning all night.)

Tony and I would often have our differences musically but when it came to visuals, never: we both shared the same strong sense of what we wanted and what would work. Because Phil was less interested in that side of things, it always made for a natural division of labour when we were rehearsing. We would go back to our hotel each night and Tony and I would work with our lighting director, Alan Owen, on new looks; meanwhile, Phil went to his room to listen to the day’s tapes and make notes on the sound mix.

With VARI*LITE, however, all of us saw the potential. We put up a few hundred thousand dollars for research and development, and then spent the next few years as guinea pigs at the mercy of lights that would suddenly start smoking or spinning round like they were possessed. During the whole of the
Abacab
tour, I would be aware of crew padding backwards and forwards across the truss above me to deal with a light that was freaking out: the technicians would either unplug it or take a hammer to it. The funny thing was that both methods seemed to work equally as well.

But as the problems got ironed out, other bands started to see that we were setting the standard.VARI*LITE lighting had revolutionized the industry and because they weren’t commercially available, the only option was to rent them from us. By the early eighties the Stones were hiring ourVARI*LITE rigs for their world tours. I’m sure that a lot of cheques made payable to Genesis were written through gritted teeth.