The Show That Never Ends

by David Weigel

  It had been years since a band needed to be explained in this way. “This drama excepted,” wrote Bell in a caveat, “Fish is less prop/costume dependent than Peter Gabriel.”3 He was a head over six feet tall, covering himself in face paint, the design changing from show to show.

  Where—where had this come from? It had come from Buckinghamshire. There, in 1977, a kid named Mick Pointer had become the drummer for a group called Electric Gypsy, whose music drew “upon such bands as Camel and Genesis.” As Martin Jenner recalled, “The Genesis influence came with things like song construction and, most notably, offbeat timings.”4

  Electric Gypsy worked but did not last. Around 1978, after a string of disappointing gigs, they splintered. Pointer and bassist Doug Irvine formed the nucleus of a new group, courting new members to keep it going. Their first get was Steve Rothery, an acolyte of David Gilmour and Steve Hackett.5 “It was obvious I was in a similar area of music to them,” he said. “Pink Floyd, Genesis, Camel—but not Rush.”6

  By the end of 1980, the band had started to build a reputation. Progressive covers were in the set; so were fresh, ambitious songs, unlike the rest of what made it onto radio. But Irvine was out, having pledged to succeed by age twenty-five or hightail it away. In December, an ad went into the magazine Musicians Only: “Competent bassist/vocalist required for established progressive rock group with own material.”

  That ad made it to a Scottish bassist, William Minnitt, nicknamed “Diz”—as in “come here diz minnit.” He sent Marillion a tape of his friend Derek William Dick, who slathered on face paint and went by the stage name Fish. Marillion invited the pair down, but upon arrival, the two scoffed at the idea of auditioning. “Bugger the audition,” Minnitt recalled thinking. “We’re here and that’s that.”7

  In no time at all, Marillion absorbed the 1,000-watt personality of Fish. One plus was that he tightened rehearsals and had a knack for conceptual lyrics that bent readily into the music. Another plus was the stage show. “I recall a gig at the White Hart in Bletchley where there was a handful of disinterested drunks in the audience offering low level grumbling abuse,” recalled Minnitt. “Fish dealt with it by using the opportunity to accentuate the inclusive nature of his stage performance and percussively beat time on one of their heads with the tambourine. Needless to say the verbal abuse stopped.”8

  The bet was that Marillion could overcome any resistance from the industry by melting the audience from the stage. The bet was right. “We started in March 1981, that was when we started gigging, and by October we had rejection slips from every single record company in Britain, including EMI,” Fish told the New Musical Express. “Everyone told us, this style of music is dead, ten minute songs are out the window. We went, fuck you.”9

  This was the sort of language that John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) used to dismiss the progressive rock movement. In its crudeness, the phrasing marked something necessary and new. Marillion represented a “neo-progressive” movement that the industry didn’t seem ready for. Neo-prog arose as the first-wave bands moved further into pop. Genesis, without Peter Gabriel, was becoming one of the world’s most successful bands; Peter Gabriel, without Genesis, was becoming an icon for listeners who would never tuck Foxtrot under their arms.

  In November 1981, after more than seventy gigs, Marillion added Mark Kelly on keyboards. “Fish would spend all day on the phone, ringing up different clubs,” said Kelly. “Eventually we were doing three or four gigs a week, which was pretty good for a band that nobody wanted to book.”10

  It was jarring to everyone who witnessed it; progressive rock, obviously, was supposed to be defunct. “Everyone said then that the music Yes did in the Seventies was dead,” said Rick Wakeman. “What came along? The gap was filled by Marillion.” When Fish himself got a chance to meet Wakeman, he pronounced the disappearance of progressive rock and Yes’s rebirth as a pop act to be “crazy.” “Yes are our idols,” said Fish. “If they’re not gonna do that anymore, well, we’re gonna carry on doing it.”11

  WHAT MADE MARILLION’S appearance so unexpected, so perplexing to taste makers, was Wakeman’s observation. The first wave of progressive acts had either vanished or changed their sound completely. It was easy to portray Fish as a successor to Peter Gabriel, because Gabriel had so definitively buried the costumed era of his career. A new Yes had an obvious hole to fill; the old Yes was supplanted by the Trevors, Rabin and Horn. That created a small opening for bands tagged as prog revivalists. “Many journalists’ attitude was, we buried all that Genesis stuff in the ’70s,” said Peter Gee of the band Pendragon. “The last thing we want is for it to come back.”12

  The bands that had transformed into arena fillers weren’t winning the critics either. It hardly mattered. Genesis had become a group of hit makers, fame rising in tandem with Phil Collins’s. They had not abandoned the experiments; their 1983 self-titled album began with “Mama,” its menacing drum track (run through an echo machine) and cackling hook (based, said Collins, on Grandmaster Flash’s laugh on his song “The Message”) made it sound like the darker side of Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” But the hit was “That’s All,” an “almost Beatle-ish” pop song, according to Tony Banks.13

  “When Phil started writing lyrics they were coming straight from the center of his heart,” said Hugh Padgham, the coproducer of Genesis’s early-1980s work. “Your old-school Genesis fan will say that the era I came in on—and I hope they will not necessarily blame me—destroyed Genesis, because when I started working with the band their songs became shorter, more understandable, and subsequently more commercial, and a lot of people thought that the commerciality was selling out. But certainly up until I started working with them, they were still on the bones of their arse financially speaking.”14

  Collins was swiftly becoming one of the biggest stars on Earth, continuing on the lush pop songwriting path that had fit uneasily with the old Genesis. “In America, on the late-night radio, you’d often end up chatting and smoking dope with the DJs,” Mike Rutherford recalled. “With the birth of MTV, promo became a bigger and bigger part of our lives until eventually we seemed to spend more time in TV studios than we did onstage.”15

  By the mid-1980s, Genesis was one of the world’s major touring bands. There were no costume changes or DIY light tricks; the new audiences included fans who had never seen that iteration of the band, or didn’t care to. The shows, said Banks, “became less distinctive because you are playing endless arenas and stadiums. The very early shows when we were playing to three people in Beaconsfield always stick more strongly.”16

  But when the band seemed to be left behind Collins, there were sore feelings. In 1985, on a hiatus between albums, Rutherford was working in AIR Studios with a series of singers, for what would become the first Mike + the Mechanics album—pure pop, with hit potential. Collins, who had drummed on Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” was invited to fill an expanded, historic role at the charity group’s Live Aid concert. The concert spread to two venues, in London and Philadelphia. Collins would play in London, race to a Concorde jet, and hustle to Philadelphia’s stage. Genesis had not been invited at all. “It was one of those events that became Phil’s thing and not ours,” said Banks. “I didn’t even see it on TV. I felt all the time that we should be there. I just didn’t want to watch it.”17

  That was a speed bump, as the improbable superstardom journey that had begun with “Follow You Follow Me” continued. Mike + the Mechanics were produced to a keen pop sheen, with guest vocalists like Paul Young handling Rutherford’s 4/4 swingers. “All I Need Is a Miracle” contained no vestiges of progressive rock but cracked the top ten. And in the studio again, the band was producing such hooky material that Collins worried about repetition. “Well, we won some Grammies,” said Padgham. “It can’t be wrong.” It was a tossed-off line, but it stuck with Collins. “Doubt is a good thing,” he said. “It makes you try harder, while complacency is the worst thing you want.”18

&nbs
p; There was experimentation in Genesis’s next album, Invisible Touch: a metallic instrumental called “The Brazilian,” and Banks’s multipart meditation on war, “Domino.” There were also tremendous hit singles. “Invisible Touch was the first album where we suddenly felt that we were going to have a hit whatever we did,” said Banks. “That may be a bad thing to think, but that’s what we thought.”19

  Asia, less a family than a factory-assembled machine, struggled to remain on top. “In the 1970s, everybody was happy to develop an artist and you were allowed to have a first album that did OK, and a second that did a little bit better and, by the fourth or fifth album, you were starting to make money,” said John Wetton. “In the 1980s, you weren’t allowed to do that.”20

  The rapid success of the band’s eponymous first album had sped up the treadmill. “We fell into the category of about six bands that MTV decided they were going to push that year—that included Duran Duran, the Police, and Def Leppard,” said Wetton. “People would recognize me walking down the street. It was quite good fun because it happened in America. It didn’t happen in England. In England, we were regarded as another prog rock band, plus there was no such thing as MTV in Britain at the time.”21

  Again, the critics rose up in protest. This time they got more of a hearing: the album’s sales were slower, with no breakout single. “We could have toured for another year on that first album,” said Wetton. But everyone was very keen to do the same thing again; to get another payday. Everything went smoothly until the cycle of the first album was done.”22

  The problems had been visible in the recording studio. The band moved on to Quebec, Canada, which had a studio (and more forgiving tax laws) waiting for them. “We lost that feeling of a band that we had at first,” said Geoff Downes, “that ‘we’re going to succeed at this and we’re going to stick together.’ ”23

  The band finished recording with “Don’t Cry,” a slice of schlock that immediately went top ten. But as they toured the material, they stared out at empty seats. “We’d been booked into all these huge halls and outdoor shows because we were too big to play the little theaters anymore,” said Wetton. “And we went to Toledo and only sold about 2,500 tickets in a 15,000-seat arena. America goes in primary, secondary, and tertiary markets. When you get beyond tertiary, you’re playing Amish villages. . . . The longer you’re around, the easier it is to sell out the big cities than it is to sell out the smaller cities. It takes longer to filter through. And Toledo was a big reminder that we hadn’t filtered through at all.”24

  “The guys in Asia were older than other acts who were breaking on MTV, and that showed in their videos,” said John Kalodner, who had helped get the project going. “They had the biggest-selling record of 1983, but they quickly became unhip.”25

  There was no obvious solution, but Brian Lane came up with one anyway. MTV was producing Asia in Asia, a concert film about the band’s hopefully triumphant arena show in Japan—and one-quarter of the band had walked. Wetton, who was showing signs of strain already, would be replaced.

  Greg Lake, who had recorded a solo album that was all bright choruses and soft corners, got a phone call from Carl Palmer, asking for a favor. Lake’s first thought was that Palmer needed to borrow a guitar.

  “I wonder if you could play with Asia for a couple of weeks in Japan because we’ve just fallen out with John Wetton,” said Palmer. “We don’t have a singer and the shows are booked.”

  “Oh dear, oh dear. When are the shows?” asked Lake.

  “It’s in three weeks time,” said Palmer.

  “You can’t be serious, man. I couldn’t do it in three weeks,” said Lake.

  “We have to do it,” said Palmer.26

  Lake, like a growing portion of the universe, considered Asia “corporate rock” and uninteresting to play. But he suited up and went to Japan, with MTV’s editors explaining away the switch in a quick voice-over and a shot of Lake exiting a plane. “I should have been suspicious at this point because they filmed me walking down the corridor to the plane,” Wetton said. “There was no one else in the frame at all; just me walking down the corridor to the departure gate. And they showed me gazing wistfully through the glass at the Detroit airport. They convinced me that the rest of my part was going to be done later. What I would do was walk down the corridor and say ‘see you later,’ and suddenly appear in Japan somewhere.”27

  “I was expelled from the group in a Machiavellian conspiracy,” Wetton claimed, years later. “Management and the record company combined to oust me ‘for personal reasons.’ They said I drank too much. True. That I was arrogant. True. That I wasn’t a team player. True. But did I deserve to be expelled from the group that I started? No. Would the public accept this blatant travesty? No.”28

  But Lane had his way. “I did it as a favor to Carl,” Lake recalled to the journalist Anil Prasad. “They had apparently booked this 747 jet to take contest winners of an MTV competition to the shows and none of it could be cancelled, so the thing had to go on.”29

  Unlike the hiccups with Asia, Brian Lane’s other project was humming, even after being reconfigured in the same manner as Asia. The deconstructed Yes did not quite come apart. Chris Squire and Alan White continued to work on material, and for Christmas 1981 they released a single, “Run with the Fox,” which went nowhere.

  They were still working in 1982 when the South African guitarist Trevor Rabin sent a demo to Atlantic Records. Phil Carson, the label manager, informed Rabin that he could collaborate with a duo of Jack Bruce and Keith Emerson, the rump of Yes. “From a selfish point of view,” said Rabin, “I thought, ‘What I really need is a great rhythm section.’ ”30

  Squire was skeptical. The first he’d heard of Rabin was the soothsaying of Brian Lane, who as early as 1979 had been trying to sell him on a talented young South African by giving him another demo tape. “The guy played and sang everything on it and it sounded just like the last Foreigner album prior to that time, whatever it was,” said Squire.31

  To the mutual surprise of the musicians, something was clicking. Rabin had several strong melodies, and the one that carried was “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” with a nagging, rising five-note bass line. Rabin had written it during a trip to the bathroom, but it worked. The ensemble brought in Tony Kaye, so unceremoniously replaced by the old Yes a decade earlier. This was a different time; bouncing block chords no longer sounded so bad. “We wanted it to be more modern-sounding,” said Kaye. “We wanted to appeal to an audience that the Police and the new Genesis would appeal to. It couldn’t just be old Yes and the same old dirge, yet at the same time we knew that it mustn’t sound like Styx or Journey.”32

  Trevor Horn went into the producer’s booth, mixing the songs for the new band: Cinema. “Owner of a Lonely Heart” took on more heft and more humor after Horn programmed a series of James Brown screams into a Fairlight keyboard and banged the keys.

  After a few months, the band nearly fell apart again. Kaye left the group over the technical aspects of the songs. “Tony is a great Hammond player,” said Rabin, “but we were getting involved with Fairlight computers, the Synclavia, and there was a whole area of technology that Tony didn’t know enough about.”33

  Carson, who was putting out any fire that sprang up, suggested a radical remedy. The new material was strong and hit the marks they’d set when they decided to crack the Genesis/Police formula. But a fractious Cinema would not be the best delivery system for the music. The band needed Jon Anderson; it needed to become a new Yes. “To be frank, if it was going to sell, it had to be a Yes album,” said Phil Carson. “Trevor Rabin wasn’t used to being a front man for a serious rock band. He couldn’t cut it and they needed somebody good. So Jon came back in again, while Rabin did harmonies and some lead vocals.”34

  Squire had not spoken to Anderson since he’d quit the band, at the end of the previous decade. He was dispatched to share the new music and make the pitch. Ostracized by Anderson’s wife, Squire drove to the singer’s h
ouse anyway, and coaxed Anderson into the car to play him the songs. Anderson was back, and on board with the mission. “It was imperative, coming back after such a load of shit, that Yes have a single,” Horn said.35

  “Owner of a Lonely Heart” did everything that Atlantic asked for. It shot to number one on the Billboard pop chart, the first and only time Yes would land there, almost fifteen years into its existence. The label shot an evocative video that barely featured the band at all; one version actually began with a goof, as the new-new Yes plunked through the song, looking as out of time as Asia had. The video suddenly froze, and Anderson, in a voice-over, announced that the band would “try something different.”

  The single led off 90125, the anonymous title—based on the expected Atlantic catalogue number—that replaced “The New Yes Album.” “I wanted to make something more of an experience in music,” said Anderson. “I wasn’t really creating that with Trevor and the guys.”36

  After his cameo with Asia, Greg Lake lacked that kind of direction. So did Keith Emerson, to his frustration. He had composed scores for a run of action films, but by 1984 the work had dried up. It had been six years since ELP’s three-way divorce; Emerson informed Polygram that he was ready and raring for a solo project, carrying on the sort of work he’d loved. “I’ve been speaking with Greg,” said Jim Lewis, a vice president at the label. “Why don’t you do these with him?”37

  It was not the chemistry of 1970, but it was a deal. Emerson and Lake were back together, each adding to the other’s music, but with no intent of reuniting ELP. But Polygram liked what it heard. In just six years, the technology of Emerson’s music had altered dramatically. The Moog, for all of its theatricality, had been replaced by a Yamaha GX-1, a Hammond C-3, and a Kurzweil K250—a smaller setup with vastly more options.