The record execs weren’t the only ones who didn’t know what to make of us.
One evening we appeared on American TV to perform ‘Watchers’ and were introduced by Steve Miller, the cool American blues guitarist who was about to have his biggest hit with ‘The Joker’. Pete wore his usual costume – cape, bat-wings, UV eye makeup – and you could see that Steve Miller was totally lost.
When we played live, American audiences, like the ones back at home, would be split. Half of them would be fascinated: we were like a bizarre circus coming to town and they couldn’t keep away. The other half would shout ‘Boogie!’ or ‘Rock and roll!’ whenever we got to a long acoustic section. It was annoying – it only took one voice to completely ruin the atmosphere.
We were playing Princeton University one night and, unusually for me, I’d had a joint before the show. Pete was telling one of his stories in a gap between songs so it was all a bit chilled out, a bit hushed, and somehow or other I just nodded off. That was the thing about sitting down to play: it was technically possible to fall asleep. I came round after a moment or two and looked about to see if anybody had clocked me – no one had – but I had come pretty close to just falling off my stool.
I was determined to pack in as much of America as I could. Tony, Pete and myself were good tourists, Steve perhaps less so, but Phil was interested when he could be bothered to get up. On every day off, we’d hire a couple of cars, put the tops down, turn the music up and speed off somewhere.
One afternoon in Florida Pete and I went to visit a place we’d heard about that was funded by some West Coast hippies who were researching dolphins. Pete and I wanted to play some music to them – the dolphins, not the hippies – so off we went, me with my guitar, Pete with his flute.
It didn’t feel odd at the time. After all, in our first summer as a band we’d often played outside, sitting in a circle in someone’s garden, although I don’t know how the dolphins felt about it. They lasted the day at least. But the thing that did feel weird was seeing these beautiful creatures in their tiny concrete pools just a few yards away from the lovely, blue, open ocean: I came away feeling that the hippies hadn’t quite thought that one through.
On another occasion we were due to play in Mississippi and Louisiana but when the dates were pulled, Rich, Tony, Margaret and myself decided we’d drive down to New Orleans anyway. It’s a unique place: the jazz clubs, the narrow streets with the balconies hanging over them. It has a darkness to it, an exciting edge. While I was there I also tried oysters for the first time, having heard about their aphrodisiacal powers: I ate twenty-five of them and then threw up. The Russian chocolate incident had obviously taught me nothing.
But perhaps our best road trip was when Tony, Margaret, Steve and I decided to check out the Grand Canyon and Vegas en route to LA. Pete had flown on ahead but the rest of us hired cars, booked a Travelodge and set off.
Having got to the Grand Canyon we decided we’d do it properly and hire mules to take us right down to the bottom. Steve stayed at the top – he was even less adventurous than Tony, if that’s possible – but Tony came down with Margaret, despite having a fear of heights and being less than au fait with his mule. I’ve got an album full of photos of beautiful Californian scenery, with Tony looking unhappy in the foreground.
That evening we drove into Vegas, which, in those days, was extremely seedy. I’ve always quite liked gambling and hit a winning streak at the Dunes but there was definitely an edge in the air: you half expected to be escorted out with a gun to your head. It all made for a kind of Rat Pack charm, though.
The West Coast was one thing but arriving in the South felt like arriving from Mars. We probably looked like aliens to the locals in our velvet flairs, with Pete in his black jumpsuit and his hair shorn down the middle. Even off stage there was always a definite ‘What the fuck? Goddamn hippies!’ body-reaction from the police whenever we got stopped – which, in my case, happened often. It took me some time to realize that the speeding laws were different in different states. I’d just about worked it out when in 1974 a flat 55 mph limit was introduced. When you were trying to drive across America and were on huge, dead-straight highways in the middle of the desert, this was a joke.
As time went by I developed a bit of a spiel that I would deliver every time I was pulled over: it was the first time I’ve ever been in America, the cars were just so good, I hadn’t realized how fast I was going and so on. Plus the accent helped. To their ears, you only had to open your mouth to sound sorry.
These occasions were also when I discovered the wisdom of one of the few bits of advice my father ever gave me: ask for someone’s name in a sticky situation and always write it down if you can, as it changes the power dynamic. I’ve often used that tactic when I’ve had trouble with unhelpful customer service departments. Nevertheless, I regularly had to backtrack by a couple of counties to pay a speeding fine: ‘You gotta go back and see the judge in Gainesville’ is a phrase that particularly lives in the memory. And America isn’t short of Gainesvilles.
* * *
Just before the war my father had also visited New York. Like me, he was impressed by the food:
a roast beef sandwich at ‘Jimmy Kelly’s’ . . . a many layered affair tackled with knife and fork and very different from the dreary ones wilting under glass on English railway buffets.
This was in 1939, but English food in 1974 was still pretty basic even if you weren’t eating in a railway buffet. My memories of the time seem to be mostly of Berni Inns, Berni Irish coffee (10p with whiskey and cream) and Berni gammon steaks. American food – pastrami, gherkins – was a revelation.
Dad had come to America from Australia, where he’d been the Gunnery Officer of HMAS Sydney. When his relief arrived, after he’d been promoted to Lieutenant-Commander, he was given the chance to travel back to England via the Pacific, Canada and America for $50.
My father left Sydney in a heatwave of 48 °C in the shade; by the time he’d sailed up the Pacific to Canada and joined the Canadian Pacific transcontinental railroad it was -16 °C.
On our first platform stroll, a friendly Canadian asked if we were English, saying that he thought so as our ears were obviously freezing which he could tell as they were drooping like tired flowers. At the next stop we bought ear muffs.
At the same stop we found the international boundary post between Canada and America in the middle of the platform and crossed and re-crossed from country to country twenty-four times before the whistle blew.
Arriving in New York, my father visited the Empire State Building, the Rockefeller Centre and Harlem. Then, when his Cunard liner home to England was cancelled, he was offered an upgrade: a premium cabin on the Queen Mary.
The first class passenger list read like a mixture of Debrett’s and Who’s Who, some names carrying the additional information that the personage was accompanied by a manservant or personal maid.
An E. M. Wagner, ‘bon-viveur and epicure’, also kindly introduced Dad to ‘snails, frog’s legs, caviar, plover’s eggs and many other delicacies against a backdrop of carefully chosen wine’.
Five days later, my father arrived back in England and a country rearming for war.
I’d often think, as the band set off on tour, that Dad must have felt the same buzz, the same sense of adventure that I did every time he sailed off somewhere new. You’d try to pretend touring was work, just part of the job, but the excitement was intoxicating: I never did understand bands who said that it was all such a big drag.
The downside was that England always seemed so far behind to me, coming back from America. Everything was better and less expensive there, Americans were naturally get-up-and-go positive, which I liked, and success wasn’t a bad thing, whereas in England people only liked you if you were struggling. Added to that, in the UK we were originally thought of as public schoolboys; in America they weren’t really interested in that kind of thing.
Perhaps the biggest thing for me, though, was that
in America you’d hear rock on the radio all the time and in cars all day long. I used to have a little tape recorder which I would just leave on for half an hour and the range of music would be fantastic. I’ve still got some of those tapes. Even the sound of the radio was better: English radio at that time was still very flat, whereas every American station would have a compressor, which they’d crank up. It would automatically make what you were hearing more exciting.
I would come back from every American tour full of energy: confident, charged up, on top of the world and feeling a bit all-powerful, thinking I could get away with anything . . .
Dad always told me if ever I was in trouble I could call him, whatever it was, and I usually felt I could. But there’s trouble . . . and then there’s being busted at Heathrow Airport with a huge bag of grass nearly a foot square. I didn’t call him, naturally, partly because I didn’t want to cause him any worry and partly because I just felt stupid at getting caught.
It wasn’t that I’d forgotten I had got drugs in my suitcase. The grass in America was much better quality than anything I’d had in England and I’d wanted to bring some back. It was more that, having just finished a tour, I was feeling a bit invincible and couldn’t for the life of me imagine anything going wrong. Then the Customs Officers asked me to open my bag.
My initial reaction was to deny the grass was mine and insist that I had no idea how it got there, but given that the package was nestling between my socks, and given that the officers were glaring at me doubtfully already, I decided I had no choice but to own up.
Strange as it seems, I still wasn’t worried at this stage. Even when I was arrested by the two young police officers it was hard to take them seriously. Walking from the airport to the car, you could almost see them thinking: ‘Hey up! We’ve got a live one here, Bob! First blood!’ They sort of bounced.
It was only when I was charged with possession and flung into a cell at Hounslow Police Station that I came to my senses.
I had a night to contemplate my actions, looking at the dreadful graffiti and scratchings on the walls, imagining the guys who’d been there before me – by the morning I was convinced that this would be my future and I was a lifer. It was so depressing and claustrophobic I vowed I’d never end up behind bars again (although at this point I was still wondering if I’d ever get out).
I was allowed one phone call the next morning and there was no way I was going to call my father. Instead I called Charisma, who fortunately sent a lawyer to get me out before anyone forgot about me and threw away the key.
The drugs laws were much stricter in the early seventies. There was no differentiation between whether you were in possession of drugs for sole use or whether you were going to sell them – but to my relief I got bail. However, when I left court a couple of weeks later with a fine, I still wasn’t out of the woods. Quite the opposite. With a criminal record, getting a visa to travel to America would now be impossible. I would have to leave the band.
But while the drugs laws were stricter in the early seventies, global security was laxer. In fact, it didn’t really exist. This meant that when I filled in the visa form I would simply write ‘No’ to the question: ‘Do you have a criminal record?’
Over the years, I must have developed quite a convincing poker face.
* * *
I’ve always thought that politics and music should be separate. If you bang people on the head lyrically, it’s not as effective as making suggestions and painting pictures. Protest songs have rarely worked for me. Although our fourth album, Selling England by the Pound, had a Labour Party slogan as its title and was partly about increasing commercialization and the sense that something was being lost, our music was still more about moods and atmospheres. Perhaps that’s why we’ve always connected well with northern, industrial towns. You might think we would be university-town material, with our thinking man’s lyrics, but in fact it was the towns with industrial histories – Bradford, Leeds, Hull, Halifax – who took to us most. I often felt our music was a form of escapism.
The next album was difficult to write because Foxtrot had been so successful. We wrote Selling England in Chessington, in the big, old country house of a doctor. There was a massive oak tree in the garden outside the window – the leaves hanging down, the boughs sagging – and every time I saw it, I had a little moment of recognition. It seemed to be a mirror of how it felt to be making the record.
Our songwriting methods had come on since Foxtrot. Instead of writing bits and joining them together we were now writing more out of improvisations and group jams. The trouble with Selling England is that the jams never really fired up. When you’d jammed all afternoon and you’d got nowhere, it’d get a bit demoralizing. Which is probably why I spent so long staring out of the window at that bloody tree.
Selling England wasn’t my favourite album but ‘Cinema Show’ was a real standout moment. The second half of the song was the start of a new phase between me and Tony. The rhythm was 7/8, which feels different but doesn’t sound clever-clever. I’m moving around chords, Tony’s reacting and improvising over them, and between the two of us we’re coming up with something that would go on to be the essence of the Genesis sound for the next twenty years. And the drumming’s great, too.
When we played the song live, Pete and Steve would leave the stage at the end so it was just me, Tony and Phil. It was so strong and it was just the three of us. Although I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, I think that must have been something I stored away in my memory: the knowledge of what the three of us could do.
‘More Fool Me’ was a song that Phil and I wrote, and which Phil would sing on stage. It was the first thing Phil and I had written together, and although Phil had come into the band with no desire to write, it felt easy, intuitive. Nothing was ever laboured with Phil: he’d work fast, he’d write fast, he’d record fast. He was completely opposite to the rest of us. The first time that Phil came out front from behind his drum kit to sing, he put on a white jacket which, because he was wearing white dungarees, made him look like a painter, but from the word go people liked Phil. Before he even sang a note, people cheered.
God knows how, but we also ending up writing a hit single, ‘I Know What I Like’, which got to number 17. Suddenly – only four years late – Top of the Pops came knocking.
We turned them down, of course: we were an albums band, not a singles band, and there was no crossover at all in that era. Top of the Pops was for singles bands like Mud, Sweet, Pickettywitch and all that kind of sugary stuff. It would have felt so wrong for us to have appeared with Pan’s People prancing about in the background. We didn’t mind the track being played, but we didn’t want to go on TV and look cheesy.
Strat freaked out, poor guy. It was our one chance to sell records, to get known, and what did we do? I think my parents might have liked us to appear too, although Mum made the best of it: ‘Mikey’s been on Top of the Pops – nearly!’
* * *
In 1974, we played the Lamb Lies Down on Broadway at Wembley Arena. Seeing as it was a respectable venue I decided to invite my parents along. Angie was back from Milan for a few weeks, so I thought it would be a good idea for her to come and accompany them. She hadn’t seen us since we were the warm up act for the warm up act. When my parents arrived in the lobby they were dressed as if they were going to the Opera House: my mother in sequins, my father black tie. They may have been dressed smartly – Angie didn’t have to look too hard to find them amongst the mêlée of Afghan coats – though I think it was the sight of my mother clutching virtually everything she could buy from the merchandising shop that caught her eye. (I suppose it’s just something only a mother would do.) Having taken their seats, my mother had made sure that most of the rows in front and behind knew who she was, pointing to my photos in the programme in case they didn’t know who I was. Pete’s grand entrance was to crawl through a phallic symbol, which started from the back of the stage and ended up right at the front. My father ad
justed his ear plugs and settled back in his seat, only to be targeted by a thirty-foot inflatable penis.
By the time we were touring Selling England, we were mostly playing theatres which suited us. We always did better in them: the old, fading velvet seats with cigarette burns in them had an atmosphere that matched our music. Plus people were sitting down in seats, which made a big difference from our point of view. Unlike in the early days of our career, they couldn’t just bugger off in the quiet bits.
We had wanted to go further with our staging and it was our production manager, Adrian Selby, who had helped take us to the next level.
Adrian was a friend of a Charterhouse friend: big-faced, big-boned, big-bodied, blustering . . . but in a nice way. And quite fearless, too: he could blag like anything, which is how he’d ended up with us. He came somewhere with us once, just to help out, and then suddenly he was running the show. He was just making it up as he went along and you always felt he was thinking, ‘Phew! Got away with that!’ Which he did. He even got away with organizing one of our American tours and keeping no receipts. The taxman was after us for years after that.
We were about to play the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park when Adrian suggested that we buy a massive gauze curtain to form a backdrop to the stage and illuminate it with twelve UV lights. It sounds like nothing now but it was pretty revolutionary at the time. Suddenly we’d created a platform. It was a slightly ghostly, surreal setting that showcased our songs and was definitely more atmospheric than staring at great big Marshall stacks, especially with Pete’s UV-sensitive eye makeup glowing in the light.
For me, it was a special gig for another reason – along with the Marquee Club, playing the Rainbow Theatre had been one of my ambitions since I’d seen Jimi Hendrix there in 1967. He’d been on a bill with the Walker Brothers, Cat Stevens and Engelbert Humperdinck. Peculiar combinations like that would turn up all the time back then.
The Living Years Page 12