The Selling England set consisted of big, weirdly curved screens and we also had explosive flashboxes for the end of the show. Pete, however, decided he’d add a bit of extra drama by flying up from the stage on wires at the end of ‘Supper’s Ready’ – which, given that performing ‘Supper’s Ready’ was already a drama in itself, probably wasn’t the best idea. I would often see chaos out of the corner of my eye as Pete went backstage to do his costume change mid-song. It was always touch-and-go whether he’d make it back out in time.
Once we were committed to an idea, we saw it through no matter what. That night at the Rainbow, we dutifully pressed on, the epic finale came, all the explosions went off, Pete cast his black cloak to the ground and up he soared, singing away. Fine – expect that what then happened was his wires began slowly, slowly crossing. Very gradually he was being spun round to face the wrong way, leaving the audience to stare at his back.
Pete spent the rest of the song trying to sing and twist round at the same time – I know because from where I was standing all I could see were his feet paddling in mid-air.
* * *
Tony Smith was a big guy with a big beard that made you think of Father Christmas. He’d worked in concert promotion alongside his father and had promoted tours for the Rolling Stones, the Who and Led Zeppelin. He’d first seen Genesis on the Six Bob Tour, which he’d worked on with Strat, but he now realized that we could really do with some help from someone who knew what they were doing.
The final straw was one night in Glasgow when we played Green’s Playhouse. We’d played there before, a gig I remember mostly because of the absolutely deafening silence that followed our first song. The stage was high at Green’s – this being Glasgow on a Saturday night, you had to be out of reach – and, looking down on the silent crowd, you could just hear a nation deciding: ‘Do we like them? Are they crap?’
After about a decade of silence – I exaggerate only slightly – everyone went completely mad: they loved us. But it did occur to me that it would have only taken one drunken ‘Fuck off! Rubbish!’ and the bottles would have been flying.
No one needed to bottle us off the second time we played Green’s because we never got on. Adrian Selby was in charge that night, ‘charge’ being the word: every single truss on stage was live. There was no way we could have played without electrocuting ourselves. Tony Smith, who was promoting the gig, obviously felt sorry for us because a few days later he agreed to meet us at the office he shared with Harvey Goldsmith in Wigmore Street.
Smith is someone who has the ability to calculate exactly how many people there are in an audience or how many ticket stubs a box office has collected with a single glance: his eyes will take a snapshot and the degree of accuracy will be uncanny. He was always quite direct but when we asked him to manage us he took his time. ‘I think I’m prepared to give it a try,’ he said eventually.
He then worked out we were £400,000 in debt to Charisma. No wonder he was hedging his bets.
We never really knew how we were doing financially because to us Charisma was a bank: we understood that they were lending us money against future earnings but as long as we got our wages and could play our music, we were happy. None of us even handled cash. Rich, our road manager until this point, would get the per diem – what bands call their living allowance – keep our receipts, go back to the office and return with more funds. The rest of us wouldn’t give it much thought.
That’s probably why Gail Colson and Fred Munt thought we were a waste of time, actually – they saw the money going out and nothing coming back in. And it was a lot of money going out, too. Although all the bands on Charisma had overheads, they were nothing like ours. Now that we’d developed our stage production and set we were very protective of it and so when we started touring America, we refused to support other bands. Our thinking had been that as long we were the only act on a bill, we would have complete control over our own lights and show. What we didn’t realize was that (a) the support band role was how you cracked America and (b) that entirely funding our own shows was losing us a fortune. The more we toured the more we were getting into debt.
With Smith at the helm the chaos slowly began to recede; it also helped having someone who’d fight our corner. I never saw his temper first-hand but he could put it on if required. Backstage he could be talking to me and then go next door and start screaming down a phone. The record labels were all a bit scared of him – although with us he took a softer line. He’d just say ‘It’s up to you’ in such a way that we knew it wasn’t up to us at all.
* * *
Now that we were getting an increasingly large crew of our own, my father would often find a way of drawing parallels between his life and mine. In his mind, we were like a ship’s crew: everyone pulling in the same direction, everyone committed to producing the best result and ensuring that equipment worked, schedules were kept, standards upheld.
And it’s true that it did feel like that on the road, surrounded by roadies and technicians. But when it came to making music, Genesis always felt to me more like a Venn diagram: the music came from the place where we interweaved and overlapped. Tony had his feminine, Rodgers and Hammerstein chords, Phil and I were the engine room of rhythms, Steve had his original sound. And Pete ranged across all of us.
It was a way of working where the goal was shared but each of us would be pulling our own way, trying to get what we wanted. The result would always be a compromise but that to me was fine: that was what being in a band was about. I felt that as long as you were getting back more than you were giving up, it was okay.
But we all had our limits.
CHAPTER NINE
Headley Grange in East Hampshire was a huge eighteenth-century country house that had fallen on hard times. Then it had Led Zeppelin living in it while they recorded Physical Graffiti, which hadn’t helped. When Genesis arrived in June 1974 to write The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway there were rats everywhere, it was barely furnished and Rich, who’d been down before us to suss it out, said he’d found ropes on one of the beds.
By this point I was living in a flat in Weymouth Street, which runs across Harley Street. I’d left Gay Tom and his silver platforms in Earls Court but Bruce, my other flatmate, I couldn’t shake off. We could only afford one bedroom between us so the rota system continued, but Bruce minded sleeping on the sofa less now he knew it was just me in the bed, not Tom and one of his random blokes.
I was first to arrive at Headley Grange and took the nicest bedroom, which had a carpet and was en suite. Then when Tony and Margaret arrived, rather than do the decent thing and offer it to them, I pretended not to notice, so they ended up in a tiny little room up in the roof. (I like to think I’m more generous now, but I did once make Margaret toss for a hotel room in San Sebastian: I’d got a big room with a nice view and Tony and Margaret were overlooking a car park at the back. A straight swap somehow just didn’t occur . . .)
The Selling England tour had only been finished for two weeks when we all moved into Headley Grange. The tempo of the business was much faster back then and I personally liked the quicker turnover: it made starting on an album less of a big deal. You felt it wouldn’t be all over if you made one bad record. Having said which, making The Lamb was anything but fast – it often felt like pulling teeth.
Selling England had been our longest album to date but that had made it sound quiet on record: the longer an album was, the more grooves there would be in the vinyl, making the volume lower. For this reason we’d decided to make our next album a double one; this also had the advantage of allowing us to spread out and get more musical variety on. If we were doing a single album then everything had to sound pretty strong, but with a double album we could experiment with moods and atmosphere. Even on our first album for Jonathan King we’d included short instrumental links between tracks – which, looking back, had been pretty adventurous. On The Lamb these evolved into atmospheric jams which we all loved, particularly Phil. Like all drummer
s he loved improvising and never quite got that the rest of still had to play A chords or E chords if A chords and E chords were what we’d written.
The idea of having a concept came later when we the thought we might as well give the double album a bit of a story. My idea was to use The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a book I’d studied in French at school and which I have a fascination with even now. I loved the fact that it was a children’s story that was actually for grown-ups and quite profound. If we had a basic storyline, my thinking went, we could go to town elsewhere. I could see how it would work visually too, with the book’s simple graphic cover and illustrations. However, instead of a sensitive, otherworldly blond prince, we ended up with Pete’s idea, which involved a greasy Puerto Rican street kid called Rael.
Pete came up with many different versions of the storyline for The Lamb and I didn’t buy any of them, if I’m honest. It was a journey, really, not a concept, but it never did hang together in my mind. I read the principal version of the story all the way through without making much sense of it at all (as I told Pete). But what was so fantastic about it was the imagery: the lyrics gave you the freedom to jump to the most amazing places musically. The only issue then was whether we’d get to these amazing places and back in time for us to tour in the autumn.
We didn’t have huge, noisy rows at Headley Grange. From the start we realized we’d got a big job on our hands and knew we couldn’t waste a lot of time arguing. It also became clear very early on that we’d only get the album made if Pete was working on the lyrics full time while the rest of us were working on the music. This bothered Tony more than it bothered me, but Pete’s mind was elsewhere. His marriage had been in difficulties and Jill was also pregnant with their first child. This meant that Pete was coming and going a lot, and when he was around there was often a sense that there was something unresolved going on between him and Tony.
When Genesis had started out we’d been two pairs: two guitarists – myself and Ant – and two keyboard players, Tony and Pete. Pete wrote on piano but, because of Tony’s sensitivities, he wasn’t allowed to play it as part of the band – which seems a real shame. Pete wasn’t a fast, technical player, he was a feel man, so he and Tony would have complemented each other rather than the reverse.
In some ways, Pete grew up faster than we did. He’d got married very young, which was itself a strain. He and Jill had met as teenagers so they’d both had to go through the painful process of discovering who they were at the same time as being in a relationship. And then when Jill gave birth it was touch and go with the baby. Phil was a father too by now, but Tony and I were too selfish and wrapped up in our careers to understand what Pete was going through. Looking back we were horribly unsupportive – there was no hint of sympathy for Pete – and nearly losing his daughter must have put the band in perspective. I’m sure he felt then that something would have to change.
William Friedkin, the director of The Exorcist, called Pete while we were still working at Headley Grange. He’d read a quirky story that Pete had written, which had been on the back of the Genesis Live album (it had been about a woman on a tube train who unzips her skin) and he now wanted to engage Pete as a writer and ideas man in Hollywood.
Ever since Ant had left, we hadn’t been forced to consider a major factor that might disrupt us as a band. When Pete came to tell us about the offer, we were quite prickly. As with Ant, if this moment had happened later in our career I’m sure we could have found a way forward and allowed Pete a few months off. But we still weren’t at the stage where we realized that was really feasible and, what’s more, we knew we were committed to touring in the autumn.
Pete’s the most wonderful bumbler. It often looked like he would never decide on things – but for all his ‘ers’ and ‘ums’, he usually knows exactly what he really wants. Eventually, the rest of us began to get a bit fed up with his indecision and gave him an ultimatum, and at that point Pete left the band.
Afterwards, I drove Tony down to the red phone box in the village to discuss the situation with Strat. He always believed he could talk anyone round – ‘Pete, dear boy, come and talk to me’ – and he probably could have done too, but Pete wasn’t around to be talked to. And after that, strange as it may seem, the rest of us just carried on writing: it was a way of escaping from worrying, of not dealing with the elephant in the room.
We jammed for hours, recording everything we’d played – Phil was the keeper of the cassettes, being a collector by nature – and then listening back to what we’d done each evening. That was how we found the start of ‘Carpet Crawl’: I was sitting in the kitchen one night drinking beer, playing back one of the jam tapes of the day, and there it was – one of those bits that at the time we hadn’t really rated but, with renewed perspective, was potentially quite interesting.
I knew we’d got a great, strong-sounding album and Pete’s leaving had left me feeling completely deflated. The songs had such effective moods: ‘Back in New York City’, which was aggressive and crude; ‘In the Cage’, which was claustrophobic and suffocating; ‘Fly on a Windshield’, which had real size and power. To have written songs like that and then to have lost our singer felt like a real bummer – so when Pete came back three days later the feeling was mainly one of relief.
What had happened was that when Pete had told Friedkin he’d left the band – ‘I’m free now!’ – Friedkin had put the dampers on it. He liked Genesis and didn’t want to break us up, and his plans for a collaboration had also been much vaguer than Pete realized at the time.
But while Pete’s return wasn’t something that any of us gloated about, at the same time we knew it would never be the same again. For the first time we felt that someone wasn’t pulling in the same direction as the rest of us. It wasn’t ‘one for all’ anymore. We didn’t put it into words but there was a feeling that if Pete wasn’t into the group in the same way as we were, something fundamental had changed.
The most pressing issue, however, was that we were now incredibly behind schedule. The music was on course and we even had a recording date booked, but Pete’s lyrics were nowhere near ready. Things got so bad that Pete eventually had to ask Tony and me to write the lyrics to ‘The Light Dies Down on Broadway’. He gave us a brief so what we produced was much less flowery than our usual style and I felt it ended up being quite in keeping with the album. Obviously, it was a token contribution but at least we could feel we’d done a song and wouldn’t have to live with an album that had ‘All words by Peter Gabriel’ written on it.
Having finished writing the music, the next stage was to record, which we did in a converted barn in Wales, the idea being that we’d sound more real in a space like that than in a soundproofed studio. But while it should have been quite an idyllic country interlude, having to hang around for days waiting for Pete’s lyrics just left us irritated. By the time we came to mix the album in London, we were so far behind schedule that John Burns, the producer, had to work round the clock.
Island Studios was a converted church in All Saints Road in Notting Hill. There were two studios: a nice big one upstairs and a cheap, depressing one downstairs with chocolate-brown shagpile on the walls. We weren’t upstairs.
In those moments when you’re up against it, I think anything is allowed. For example, letting Steve doze off while he was holding a full polystyrene cup of coffee. Not very nice for Steve, but funny for us at the time.
When Pete finally got round to recording his vocals he brought in Brian Eno, who I’d seen at Roxy Music’s first ever gig, to work on them. Eno didn’t make a huge difference as far as I could tell – it was just a case of taking a few vocals and wobbling them around – but because he had a reputation for doing odd stuff on synthesizers people tend to think Eno did much of the keyboard work on The Lamb. That annoys Tony to this day. He’ll be asked about it and his face will drop.
It was now October 1974 and, somehow, we’d managed to finish the record in time to make our touring commit
ments. We couldn’t believe we’d actually done it, we were going to make it . . . and then Steve cut his hand and the tour was put back by a few weeks.
Steve said he’d crushed a glass in a fit of stress, which I never bought, but at that point I decided I needed some time out too . . .
* * *
The Surrendell commune near Bath was a bit of a scam. It was for people who wanted to say they were in a commune, getting back to nature, but couldn’t face going up to Findhorn in northern Scotland and dealing with that.
Rich had been to Findhorn and he’d also been the one responsible for an earlier macrobiotic phase I’d been through. I was mainly doing it to be part of the in-crowd, the peace-love-man brigade, but Rich was completely dedicated and would even bring a little primus stove on tour with him for the nights when we’d smoked a bit of grass and got the munchies. Without Rich I would probably have been ordering out for hamburgers but, given that he was my roommate and given that he seemed quite happy to start making brown rice and tahini at three in the morning, I wasn’t about to stop him. We’d be in a Holiday Inn somewhere in Texas and he’d unpack his rucksack, lay out his stove and supplies at the bottom of the bed, then start chopping carrots. As we’d both be stoned, it’d be a health and safety nightmare.
Being macrobiotic in America was reasonable enough and in California the macrobiotic restaurants were good – outdoors, with bamboo fences round the seating area so that you could look out at the ocean as you ate. But then back to England I found myself eating in basements off Ladbroke Grove. There’d always be a burning smell where the material hung over the lamps was starting to catch, and the food was so heavy I would have a job getting back up the stairs to the street afterwards.
I’m not a commune kind of guy, basically, but Surrendell wasn’t a commune kind of commune: Princess Margaret and Helen Mirren had stayed there and, although I never saw them, I did see Roddy Llewellyn, who had a pleasant aura. You drank elderflower wine, not beer, which says it all, really. There was a bit of digging in the garden, a bit of building log fires in the evenings, some nice vegetables to eat . . . It wasn’t a bad way of killing time, all things considered, but after a few days the cold began to get to me: the cold gets to you in the end in all these places. I stuck it out for a week and then went back to my flat in Weymouth Street, where the heat came free with the rent so it never went off.
The Living Years Page 13