That would have been one way of bowing out, but Pete’s final exit was far less dramatic. In fact, we didn’t know the show was going to be his last until just before it happened. Smith’s plan to claw back some money had backfired and we had to cancel a few dates, with the result that our penultimate date was suddenly our last. Because we didn’t find this out until a few hours before, and because Pete couldn’t tell the crowd that this was his last show (having agreed with us that it would be a secret for now), the sense of anticlimax was awful.
Afterwards we all had a few drinks but we didn’t want to get drunk and maudlin. I felt dull, rather than depressed, and we were all pretty tired after half a year on the road. The album had never resonated like we’d hoped: it was bizarre and interesting and brave, but it was only later that it would grow to be one of our fans’ favourite albums. At the time, most people found it a bit too demanding, a bit much to take in one hit.
Having said that, it probably wasn’t a bad thing for Pete or for us that he didn’t leave on a high of album sales and rave reviews. The pressure then would have made all our future lives much harder. And perhaps it was a fitting end, too. The Lamb had involved more than its share of highs and lows, but the thing that we couldn’t deny was that it was an achievement.
CHAPTER TEN
A Trick of the Tail was written in a basement in Acton, Phil’s old patch. It was a pretty soulless place – tongue-and-groove pine walls, a threadbare carpet – but sometimes that’s what you need when you’re writing. In a dead setting, the music can create the images.
Going in to make A Trick of the Tail felt to me like the start of an exciting new chapter. I hadn’t wanted Pete to leave but I knew we’d been due a change. There’s only so long you can carry on productively without shaking things up and now that he had gone it felt like we were a new band. Our backs were up and we were determined to show the world. I think we all felt a new sense of solidarity – although when we first began work on the album it was as a three-piece. Steve was off working on his first solo record.
Voyage of the Acolyte was a decent album. In fact, Phil and I played on it. I suppose Steve thought he’d ask us because he wouldn’t have to pay us (and he didn’t). But although we believed in never standing in each other’s way I felt that his timing could definitely have been better: this was a critical point for us and we needed all the ideas we could get. However, as it turned out, those first three days without Steve would set the scene for the next phase of the band.
Writing The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway had been like pushing a huge weight uphill but ‘Dance on a Volcano’, the first song we wrote for A Trick of the Tail, just flowed out. It sounded dark and it sounded big with interesting chords and time signatures: I felt that anyone hearing the intro to that would think it was how Genesis should be going forward. By the time Steve made it back, we’d also written the start of ‘Squonk’, which was a bit like Led Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’, and I knew we were going to be okay. If we could write this sort of stuff any doubt I had – that any of us had – about carrying on was dispelled.
Seeing our obituary in Melody Maker was therefore a bit weird. They’d got hold of the news about Pete before we were ready to announce it ourselves and soon the music press was full of it: ‘Gabriel leaves! Genesis to revolution! It’s all over!’ After that, if you tried to tell people that you’d already got some great new material, they’d just roll their eyes.
Part of the problem was that although we’d always credited the songs to the group, everyone had assumed that they were entirely written by Pete. At the time we’d thought it was a generous and wise move not to have individual credits but it didn’t seem so wise now that most people thought we’d lost the main songwriter in the band as well as our singer.
My parents were worried too: they read the music papers, as did Jean Granny, who’d take the bus into Farnham from Morris Lodge each week to get Woman’s Weekly and Sounds. (The newsagent would usually mishear her, or else not quite believe that’s what she wanted, and she’d usually get given the Sun instead. Jean Granny used to get quite offended.)
I felt that it was educative for my parents to read the music press and learn about our world, but the downside was that their perception of how things were going with the band was filtered by the kinds of things that were written about us. That Pete could jump ship – so to speak – was something that made Dad a bit angry too, but he didn’t understand artistic things. In his world, if you didn’t get on with someone or something wasn’t right, you just had to deal with it. Walking away, to him, was unprofessional. But I can remember explaining our ‘try it and see’ philosophy and after that he felt we were taking a quite sensible and grown-up approach. Plus the last thing he’d seen of Pete was when he was coming out of a giant penis. Whatever our future held, he knew that at least there wasn’t going to be any more of that.
Privately the question of finding a new singer had been too painful for us to think about since Pete had left: we just didn’t go there. Some of the best stuff we were writing for the new album was instrumental and for a while we thought about keeping it that way. However, we realized that it could get a bit boring without any vocals. But then who would sing them? It seemed an insurmountable problem. Phil could sing, but Phil was the drummer. What to do?
We thought Mick Strickland had the right kind of bluesy voice for us and he also had a low enough profile to be able to slot into the band. We knew it would have been even more difficult if we were bringing in an image as well as a new face. Mick came in for an audition but when he tried ‘Squonk’ it was in completely the wrong key: the poor guy battled through but it was never going to work.
The next day Phil came in with a suggestion. ‘Listen, I wouldn’t mind giving it a go.’ Apparently Andrea, a Canadian girl whom he married in 1975, had encouraged him, but I think it’d been on his mind anyway. ‘All right, go on then,’ we said. And so he did.
It sounds strange to say now but Phil’s voice then was not the voice it would become. Strat would often be quoted as saying that Phil sounded more like Pete than Pete did, but actually their voices weren’t at all similar. It only seemed that way if they were singing the same song, the same Genesis-style melody. What people also tended to forget was that Phil had always sung backing vocals with Pete, so Phil’s voice was already familiar – when we played live what people were hearing was often a combination of the two of them. But the truth was that in 1976 Phil had a pure, choirboy voice whereas Pete had an R & B raunch, which was what you needed for a song like ‘Squonk’. After a little more unchoirboy-like living – life on the road, drinking and drugs – Phil got the raunch too, but back then he was still a bit too healthy.
The singing was one thing but the real issue in my mind was whether Phil would contemplate leaving the kit: being the front man definitely wasn’t a promotion as far as he was concerned. Drummers generally tend to think singers are the icing on the cake, and not quite the same calibre of musician as everybody else in the band. Even after we’d recorded A Trick of the Tail with Phil singing, we weren’t sure that he would want to sing on stage or if it would work if he did.
As always there was only one solution: try it and see.
* * *
It often feels to me as though life in Genesis has fallen into two halves – Pete’s years and Phil’s years. During Pete’s years we were like school kids, fighting our corners, storming around and stomping out. That all changed when Pete left.
It wasn’t that Pete wasn’t fun – he was – but he was also a big character and without him there Tony and I found ourselves suddenly needing to be less aggressive, less needing to push to get things to be the way we wanted them to be. As much as anything it was down to numbers: the less of you there were in the band, the less need there was to score points and the fewer conflicting opinions there’d be. Musically, this also made for a greater sense of cohesion. But Pete’s leaving had made us all grow up a bit as people too, although growing up for Tony and
me also meant learning to lighten up a bit.
As Tony and I were ordinarily quite stiff, I always enjoyed making videos. Some bands would treat making a video as though they were making an album but we never took it very seriously. It wasn’t as though our performance was going to make a difference. We’d rock up, do what the director told us and cross our fingers. None of the ideas ever sounded so bad at the time, but then you’d see the end results and wonder what on earth any of us had been thinking, like the video for ‘A Trick of the Tail’, where Phil ended up minimized, hopping around on a piano keyboard.
Our next video, for ‘Ripples’, was better simply because it couldn’t be any worse. Steve, Tony and I seem to be going for a velvet-and-tassels look; Phil is wearing a beanie and may have been making a point. Whatever it was, I’d say it was a good one.
I’ve been very lucky in my career in having two great front men to hide behind.
Steve had now ditched his black look and took to looking like a cross between a swashbuckling Errol Flynn and Rhett Butler. Tony never did change his look or position once in forty years. If you look at pictures of him on stage, sometimes he’ll have his hands out in front of him and sometimes they’ll be to either side, but it’s essentially the same picture. At least I was now standing up.
I often think how much the guitar maker I asked to chop up my Rickenbacker twelve-string and Rickenbacker bass and stick them together must have hated it. Cutting them up was probably the equivalent of sawing off a limb for him.
I’d taken them into his workshop, put them both on the table and said, ‘Can you join them up?’
He looked at me as though I was mad.
‘You are joking, aren’t you? You’ve got to be joking. It can’t be done.’
When someone says ‘It can’t be done’ to me – to any of us in the band – it’s a given that it can and it will be. Sometimes the result wouldn’t be quite what you’d hoped: my second doubleneck was made from a Rickenbacker twelve-string and a six-string Microflet bass, which I’d bought in New York and used on The Lamb. The bass never sounded quite as good again once I’d had it chopped in half. But the thing about doublenecks was the range they gave me. I’d seen other guitarists with them – Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin and Rob Townsend of the Family, but they didn’t have the range that I had. On stage with my doubleneck I could play bass, twelve-string guitar and bass pedals. Bass pedals went an octave lower than an ordinary bass so they were great for songs like ‘Squonk’. People would come out of the gig shaking.
Doublenecks have their downside as well. They’re heavy brutes to play and unbalance you, although I only ever fell off stage once. It was during rehearsals somewhere in the American Midwest and no one realized I was no longer there. I could have killed myself and they would have just carried on playing. ‘Musical Box’ had no bass until the pedals at the very end – the middle section was just the low strings of the guitar, filling the bass area in. But as I was laying there flat on my back, pinned to the floor, slightly concussed, I can remember thinking that it would have been nice to have been missed.
* * *
The Trick of the Tail tour began in London, Ontario, on 25 March 1976 – Phil’s first show as the lead vocalist. We would always play our first show in the sticks – not that London, Ontario was really the sticks – and we’d chosen Canada deliberately because there was less history with Pete there than in Europe. Even so, we weren’t just worried as we stood backstage, we were shitting ourselves. As was Phil.
In the early sixties, Phil had played the Artful Dodger in a West End production of Oliver! and he’d also been an extra in A Hard Day’s Night and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. We all knew about Phil’s stage-school background, but it wasn’t something he ever talked about so it had tended to fade from our minds.
Pete had been such a strong figurehead and after so many years we just couldn’t quite imagine how Phil would do it. As soon as he’d made the transition, the history all came back: ‘Oh yes, the Artful Dodger! I remember!’ In retrospect it was obvious that he was going to be a success. He came from within the band so there was already love for him from the audience: people were on his side from day one.
On stage, Phil was always a very visual drummer – never flamboyant but very watchable. Even when he tinged his little Chinese cymbals he was a showman. It was noticeable how Pete would always be drawn to standing near Phil on stage, looking over his shoulder to see him perform. But how would Phil would translate what he did at the back to the front?
We knew from the start costumes wouldn’t be part of it: you only had to look at Phil to realize he wouldn’t have been good in a flower mask and, having found a new setting for the band by default, none of us wanted to go back in that respect. Phil only ever dressed up once and that was at a show in Spain when we were playing a bullring: being fascinated by the Alamo, he came out in a cowboy outfit and you knew the minute he set foot onstage it wasn’t going to work. So did he.
But what we didn’t know was whether Phil would carry on with Pete’s surreal, ghostly stories. He was always more worried about the chat between songs than the singing. So much so that on that first night in Ontario he’d written out pages of A4 notes, reminders of what he was going to say, which I could hear rattling in his hand as he went up to the microphone to say good evening.
I’ll always hold that image in my mind: Phil in his T-shirt and long beard and his shaking hand. It was a surreal moment, looking at him in front of me and not having Pete there. An odd moment for everyone. But then you got past it and I can still remember the feeling, after we’d played the first couple of songs, that it was going to be okay. And it was. After that first night he just made up banter as he went along and everybody loved it.
Phil’s chat helped us. It lightened the atmosphere between some of our moodier, darker songs. Pete was mysterious and untouchable on stage, which was great, but Phil was always the bloke-next-door to whom you could relate. With Pete’s theatrics we never quite knew where we were going. Now the emphasis seemed to be back on the music and us as musicians. Compared to The Lamb, I certainly felt a bit more confident on stage now – not that, besides the standing up, anyone watching would have noticed. From now on I would start feeling more comfortable inside myself, more sure of who I was, and my only regret was that I would never again play a whole show with Phil on drums. No one could play drums like Phil – he’d play for the song, not for himself – and I missed that to the end. From the drumming point of view, it was never quite the same again live.
* * *
When I split up with Debbie ‘the dancer’ (who happened to be a very good one) my thoughts once again went back to Angie. I was starting to get worried. She was now living with an annoyingly good-looking guy and seemed quite smitten. Fortunately, they had a volatile relationship, so when I saw her after there’d been a blazing row I suggested she come to America with me for a couple of weeks to think things through. To my surprise she agreed. Her boyfriend even dropped her off at my flat. He seemed to be cool about the whole thing, realizing that we were just platonic friends. (My long term plan belonged to me.) I was trying not to feel insulted that he didn’t even see me as some red-blooded rival.
We arrived in Dallas for band rehearsals and checked into the hotel for two weeks. I still didn’t feel it was the moment to tell Angie how I felt, and we slept in separate beds. For whatever reason Angie decided not to go home. She hadn’t mentioned the boyfriend and stayed with me as we flew up to Canada to begin the tour. I would have thought it would be a difficult transition from ‘friend’ to ‘lover’ but somehow it just seemed right one night when we were in New York. (Admittedly we’d been to a party thrown by Andy Warhol and were both a bit smashed, and our barriers were down.) We finally started sharing the same bed, but unlike Earl’s Court this time it was together. Nothing had ever felt so right.
* * *
Dad never did give me any advice about relationships. I’m not sure how he discovered the facts of life bu
t he was obviously still in the dark as a ten-year-old when his father took him to see a musical hall performance at the London Empire:
as we made our way from the dress circle for my interval ginger pop, we crossed the famous promenade behind the circle. I saw many beautiful ladies, exquisitely dressed and usually moving about in pairs. When I asked who they were, my father said that they were on holiday. In later years I realized that they were, professionally, very much on the job.
My father always impressed on me the importance of treating women well: always being polite, always pulling out chairs. He was naturally chivalrous, to the extent that during the war uniformed Wrens seem to have been a bit of a shock to him:
I found it odd to be called Sir and have doors opened for me by girls whom I should rightly have been partnering on the tennis court or squiring to dances.
Having said that, he’d always liked my mother’s independent spirit. And fortitude. She was:
one of the few people I know to be totally unaffected by a ship’s motion however violent. On many occasions in passenger vessels, with the ship standing on her head in rough weather, she was the only person in the saloon at breakfast, leg hooked round the table and ploughing through porridge, fish and eggs, while even the experienced stewards looked a bit wan.
Dad loved a pretty girl and he adored Angie. At family functions he would always seek her out. Angie got my father’s dry sense of humour, too. In marrying her I think that Dad thought that I was doing something the right and proper way for once, and I know that he and Mum both enjoyed our wedding in 1976.
I had asked Tony Smith to be best man at my wedding. As our manager he lived the same life as we did in the band and if there was a problem we’d always confide in him first before each other. We would always hope that Smith would be able to find a solution and normally he did. He didn’t strike me as being the perfect person to organize a stag party, though, but I couldn’t see Tony or Phil being up for the best-man role either. As it turns out Smith wasn’t as hopeless as I had feared.
The Living Years Page 15