The Living Years (26 page)

For me, the first side of the album
Genesis
is pretty high on the list of the best things we’ve done.

Duke
had been a bit of a rebirth for us as a band in that although we’d each brought a couple of individually written songs into the studio, the strongest ones were the ones we’d written as a group. (Group written songs were always the favourites on an album too, simply because we’d all had a hand in them.)
Abacab
had proved to be a transitional album, but a necessary one. I always felt that one of our strengths as a band was to go a bit too far off in one direction, realize that we had, and then get back on course again. Looking back,
Abacab
was one of our off-piste moments, and maybe that’s because even on that album there had been some individually written songs.

All of the songs on
Genesis
were written as a group, hence the title. When we went into the studio in May 1983, none of the songs were already written.

We went in, plugged in, took a deep breath . . . and began to play. Although we didn’t know it at the time, this would be the start of a wonderful roll that would last for almost ten years.

The making of
Genesis
would set the pattern for the albums that followed it. We’d go into The Farm with nothing, sometimes having not worked together for a year or more, and plunge into the unknown. Compared to other bands it was a weird way of working and there’d always be a nice kind of fear about it. What were we going to do? Would it work? But always, even by the end of day one, it felt natural. Better than that, when we were making the next few albums the music flowed out so fast that we couldn’t keep up.

I’ve always felt that the only way to have any integrity in music is to do what inspires you and what you like, and to not worry about what’s going to happen when the record comes out. When we were touring
Abacab
, we’d been booed in Holland by a bunch of old hippies when we’d played ‘Who Dunnit?’. It was a sonically bizarre, angular song, which we loved and everybody else hated. But what people didn’t get was that we weren’t trying to be punk: that song was a punk pastiche. Also, from our point of view, our set was pretty intense and quite technically challenging, and ‘Who Dunnit?’ was simply a bit of a break. I played drums on it and Tony even wore a frogman’s mask. And yet those old Dutch hippies still couldn’t tell that they weren’t supposed to take the song seriously.

There would always be talk of ‘old fans’ and ‘new fans’, but in the studio there were no fans. We just went in and jammed and improvised, and the songs came out the way they came out. None of us were in control. Nevertheless, the way the songs came out on
Genesis
– long songs with long, long solos – meant that even at the time it felt like an album that the old fans would enjoy.

‘Home by the Sea’ was a dark, moody, two-part, eleven-minute thing (the second part was called ‘Second Home by the Sea’). It’d got size, it’d got grandeur, it’d got everything. We knew how to do pieces like this by now. It was like a classical piece and when we played it live the automatedVARI*LITE truss would break up into diamond-shaped pieces and descend on the stage, moving around and beaming down green light. This may not sound so special now thatVARI*LITE lights are everywhere, but at the time it was one of our most iconic looks.

‘Mama’, the best song on the album, was seven minutes long. The tune had begun with a drum loop I’d written in the soundproofed spare bedroom at home. I put it through my Boogie amplifier and distorted it so much that it nearly fell off the stand. That was something an American musician would never do, I always thought. Take a sound and really fuck it up.

We had got the drum pattern playing in the studio and Tony started with his dark, low sustained chords, and then we just jammed on it for half an hour, recording as we were playing. We had known that if we caught the song as it came into being we might catch some magic. This was why we had wanted a studio of our own – to catch that spontaneous magic – and with ‘Mama’ we succeeded. Quite a lot of the final song came from that first, original jam.

The evil laugh was Phil’s idea. He had said he wanted to do something like ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash. Phil was always more musically aware than Tony and me, and would get out and see bands much more than we did. Tony and I never really left the house musically in the same way as Phil (although our solo albums had cured the agoraphobia: we could at least now go past the front door). I saw our insularity as a strength: when we played and wrote together we realized how unique each one of us was musically, and how unique we sounded as a band.

‘Mama’ was too brave for American radio, but I was very gratified when it came out in the UK and went straight to number 4. It was such an uncommercial song, given its length, but it really caught the public.

With
Genesis
, I was now achieving what I wanted to achieve without having to try so hard. It was also the first album where I felt I’d got into decent lead playing, purely because I’d been doing it for so long. It was the same as had happened in the early years with Phil’s voice: you couldn’t go faster than you could go.

The slight shame was that I was now playing a Steinberger guitar, which looked odd on stage. It was tiny – just a bit of carbon fibre and some strings – and it had a small sound too, although that was why I had wanted to use it. If everything on a song is big – a big bass, a big bass drum, a big guitar sound – then you’re left with no space. For our music, the beauty of the Steinberger sound was because it was small enough to fit into the narrow band that was left, it sounded big as well.

It did make me look like I was playing a banjo, though. On stage I used to feel like George Formby. (That’s why I designed the MR1 Steinberger: the first to be shaped like a proper guitar.)

* * *

Genesis
went to number 1 in the UK, the same position as
Abacab
. That previous album
had been
our first official number 1, but unofficially we’d probably had several number 1s by this point. The problem was that previously we’d always fallen victim to the fact that sales were calculated according to the returns figures supplied by record shops. Because our cult following mostly raced out to buy our albums in the first week of release, the record shops would be overwhelmed and unable to register all the sales they were making. At least that’s what I believed. It was only as barcodes had come in at the start of the eighties that sales figures were beginning to be more accurate.

Between
Genesis
and
Abacab
we’d also released a live album,
Three Sides Live
, which had got to number 2. It was while we were touring this that we reformed with Pete and Steve at Milton Keynes. For one night only.

* * *

By 1982 Peter had made four solo albums and also started the WOMAD festival. It was a huge undertaking: very well intentioned but a financial nightmare. Pete always had innovative ideas – he was a brave character – but he wasn’t very realistic sometimes with the detail. After WOMAD he had ended up so far in debt that he was even getting death threats (although I didn’t know about them at the time).

Being honourable, Pete had promised to pay everyone back, personally if necessary, and so when the idea of helping him with a fundraising reunion show came up there was no deliberation. We decided straightaway to make it happen. Given that we were in the middle of a forty-date UK tour ourselves, this was a logistical nightmare – did I say Pete wasn’t very realistic sometimes? He wasn’t the only one. In the end we had only a few days of rehearsals at the Odeon Hammersmith, playing songs that, in a few cases, we hadn’t played for years.

I can honestly say that I wasn’t aware of how much the fans would like seeing us all together again. That was one of my main reasons for not wanting the Milton Keynes
Six of the Best
show to be filmed. In retrospect it was one of my worst decisions.

As a band we were very serious about quality control – rightly so, I think – and I knew at the time that our performance was going tobe a bit substandard, purely because of the lack of time we’d had to rehearse. My logic was that if you were there on the night it would be fantastic, but if you saw it again a couple of years later and it looked a bit shoddy and sounded bad, it would spoil the memory.

As it turned out it was special. It was only later that I realized how good it would have been to have a record of it for the fans, and also how special the whole thing had been for me personally, too.

At the start of the show Jonathan King introduced us and Pete came on in a coffin. It was very Pete. We started with ‘Back in New York City’, which was quite brave – beginning with a bang – and ended with ‘The Knife’, which was fun. It took us back to those early club days with Pete swinging his microphone up in the air.

It was hearing Pete sing the old songs again that made me appreciate what an amazing job Phil had done – how he now carried them so well. Over the past few years Phil had got a crack in his voice, a throaty rattle, and they were as much his songs now as they ever were Pete’s.

Pete was never a match for Phil’s drumming, though, much as it frustrated him. When we came to play ‘Turn It On Again’, Pete suddenly decided he would play alongside Chester on Phil’s kit. Like everyone else, what Pete hadn’t realized was that ‘Turn It On Again’ was in 13/8 time, which made it like a merry-go-round: he’d think he had got to the end and suddenly we would be off again. He spent the whole song trying to work that one out, but I’d much rather someone put some passion in and make a mess than get everything note perfect. Plus as a band we always quite enjoyed those moments when someone fucked up.

‘Man on the Corner’ from
Abacab
was a good example: the first beat wasn’t in the obvious place. Until Phil told us where it was, Tony and I were lost. Once you knew where it was the riff felt beautiful, but part of the charm of playing it live was watching Tony trying to work it out in his head: he usually had to get Chester to give him the count. (The one thing about Tony’s mistakes is that he’ll never hold his hands up if he gets it wrong. I’ll always own up but Tony’s technique is to look at me over the top of his keyboard and growl so that I immediately start thinking it’s me that has messed up. He used to do it to Phil too, and it was ages before the two of us were on to him.)

Steve joined us for a few songs at the end but there’s little else I remember about Milton Keynes. It poured with rain the whole night, and it was my birthday too so the crowd sang to me. Backstage was a quagmire with everyone in wellingtons and we all had a glass of champagne to toast the moment, but the whole evening was like a dream, really. It remains one of those things that you look back on and wish you’d taken in more. The problem for me was that life was now so busy there was no time to pause and reflect, which was one of the reasons why I hadn’t thought about how much the fans would like seeing us back together again. When you’re as busy as we were, it’s hard to get outside the moment enough to consider other points of view or even other people. And therein lay a real problem – not that I saw it at the time.

* * *

The
Mama
tour for
Genesis
was when we got our first private plane. This might sound great, but somehow it wasn’t quite how you might imagine it: this was entry-level jet setting. The plane cabin was okay but the cockpit was like something out of
M*A*S*H
: everything was khaki coloured. One night we were playing Cincinnati and our tour manager, Andy Mackrill, and I were walking past the bar in the hotel where we were staying. Like half the bars in America it was too dark to see anything properly, but I thought I vaguely recognized a face in the gloom. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked Andy, squinting at a swaying character who was obviously just about to slide off his stool. ‘Oh,’ said Andy. He did a double take. ‘Oh. That’s the pilot.’

We were playing New York on that tour and Angie had flown out to visit and brought Kate and Tom with her. This wasn’t unusual as our children travelled the world from a young age. We thought it was a great education for them, but they also had to learn to fit in with the band rather than vice versa. When we were flying between cities, we’d plonk their Moses baskets at the back of the cabin and they’d just have to stay there and sleep. You can be quite tough with children, really; it wasn’t much different from my father making Nicky and I park our tricycles neatly inside the painted white lines on Whale Island.

One night we were due to fly to Washington, DC in our private plane to catch the Rolling Stones in concert. The kids stayed behind in our hotel with a nanny, while Tony decided to pass up the opportunity. Given that it was dark, it was snowing and the plane was an incredibly small two prop eight-seater, you couldn’t blame him. It was when the wind got so strong that our plane seemed not just to be staying still but actually going backwards that the rest of us began to wish we’d stayed behind too. I looked out of the window and we weren’t flying above the skyscrapers as we left Manhattan, we were passing them at around the level of the fortieth floor. We would have been able to see people in their offices if it there hadn’t been a blizzard in the way.

At this point we realized we were just going to have to grit our teeth and drink our way through it, the issue then being that, because the plane was so small, there was nothing on board except miniature whiskeys.

After half an hour or so we’d drunk at least a tray of miniatures and I was feeling a bit better; Angie, however (not at all unreasonably) was still convinced that we were going to die.

‘What’s going to happen to the children? We’ve left our children and they’re going to be orphaned!’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said, the whiskey having started to work by this point, ‘Tony Smith will look after them.’

Angie looked at me and went absolutely white. ‘Mike, Tony Smith is sitting behind us.’