My father had visited Japan in 1952 when he was commander of the Newcastle, which was based at Hong Kong. He was impressed by:
The national characteristics of discipline, passive face, austerity and economy . . . nothing was wasted and not a piece of string or empty cigarette package was allowed just to lie around.
Dad always thought that you should try and glean something from other people. He believed that it was important to keep an open mind, to consider everything that might be put to you and learn what you could. And this must have rubbed off on me because one of the places I particularly wanted to visit while I was in Japan was the Roland music factory in Tokyo. They made some nice guitar effects pedals and I wanted to see what else they had.
The rule of thumb in the band was always that we should learn how to use anything that was available and then choose to use it or not. The electric sitar which I’d bought in New York at the same time as my six-string Microflet bass was a good example: for every album we wrote, I would bring my electric sitar out and try and get it on. Steve had played it on ‘I Know What I Like’ and I’d tried it on ‘Follow You, Follow Me’, but sometimes a song just says, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’
Restraint was important. I always thought that Tony was very restrained at a time when a lot of guys were going mad with three-keyboard stacks. The great thing about being a guitarist is that guitars are so primitive – a bit of wood and six strings. That limitation often seemed to me like a strength, particularly when I remembered that, however mad I wanted to go on record, I would still have to figure out how to play what I’d written live.
None of the pedals I saw at the Roland factory that day really appealed to me but I did pick up some drum machines: one for me, one for Tony and one for Phil. Phil wasn’t very grateful: ‘I’m a drummer. What do I want a drum machine for?’
I was a bit miffed but thought he’d probably find something to do with it. He did. The opening bars of ‘In the Air Tonight’ were programmed on that drum machine.
Unlike Angie, who came out to Japan for part of the tour, Phil’s wife Andrea never came with him. By 1978 it was putting a big strain on his marriage and Phil spent the ten days we were in Japan on a bender – although Phil’s capacity for alcohol was such that even then he was still the same lovely, easy-going Phil he always was. He was in exactly this mood when we invited him out for a late dinner in Tokyo one night. We were all talking, eating and laughing when suddenly Phil stopped dead. He looked around the table at us, then at his plate, then back at us.
‘Hang on a minute,’ he said slowly. He looked at his plate again. ‘I ate earlier.’
He’d forgotten that he’d already been out for dinner with Daryl.
To be honest I think Phil could easily have gone for a third dinner after that if he hadn’t realized. So much so that when we all ended up at a club in a funky part of town and he suddenly started dancing, he blew everybody else off the floor. He was incredibly good and incredibly fast.
We always tried to embrace local culture when we were on tour, even if it was a bit of a stretch, such as at the Japanese restaurant where the chefs cooked our dinner in front of us. We’d all watched in horror as they’d thrown handfuls of shrimps – all still alive – on to a hot plate. Even my dad had balked a bit at sushi, although in 1952 it probably did seem a bit more exotic than nowadays:
the dishes, delicious to a fish eating nation, sometimes looked like a specimen from a marine life research laboratory.
I had shared a car with Phil on the way to the airport when we flew out to Japan so when we returned to England we dropped him off first before Angie and I went home ourselves. It was only as we drove up to Phil’s house that we all realized something was seriously wrong: there wasn’t a light on anywhere, it was completely dark.
Andrea had left and taken the children.
* * *
I often think that the reason Genesis lasted so long is that we never made any plans. We were quite fatalistic as a band and we never thought too far ahead. At the same time, as I got older, I seemed to be developing my father’s ability to take the long view.
When Phil told us that he was going to Canada to try and save his marriage, I wasn’t sure if he’d come back but, at the back of my mind, I thought that if he did go and live there permanently we’d find a way round it – after all, if you’re touring, it doesn’t matter where you live.
Phil told us what he’d decided at a group dinner with Tony Smith. Smith always knew everyone’s angles and Phil had told him before the rest of us, just as Pete had gone to Smith first when he’d decided to leave.
It’s funny, as a band we’d always been so close to each other and yet not. Tony and I didn’t lead Phil but we did set the mood a bit. We could talk about anything when we were together but only if it was within the specific, defined area of our work and our life together. Our personal lives didn’t really feature.
Phil’s decision was something that we accepted immediately, which seemed to me like a sign of how much we’d changed. In the years since Pete had left we’d finally developed some empathy for each other and we all knew how serious it was for Phil. He’d always been an organized person – it had started with the cassettes of our jams, which he always kept labelled and ordered, and in the early days he was the only one of us who’d ever know how much was in his bank account. When we were writing an album he’d never feel like he’d started until he had a list of songs – we’d always make him wait a week and by day three he was dying to get his pen out. To have his life turned upside down must have been terrible for him. None of us hesitated when he told us he was going: ‘Okay, Phil. Whatever it takes.’
And I genuinely didn’t see any point in worrying about the future. It wasn’t as if worrying was going to change anything. But there was also the fact that 1978 had been such a good year. Partly because of the success of ‘Follow You, Follow Me’, for the first time in our careers we could actually afford some time off. Unlike when Ant and Pete left, we were at a stage now where the whole thing didn’t feel as though it would fall apart if we had a break.
Anyone was free to leave at any time now – we were more relaxed – but I did think that just walking out, the way Steve had done, wasn’t the correct way of doing it. Still, had the graph not changed direction at that moment, our career may never have turned a corner. Maybe Phil’s absence, which we hoped would be temporary, would also do us all good by allowing us to take a step back. Suddenly we had some breathing space, some time to take a left turn if we wanted.
* * *
I wasn’t dying to make a solo record but I thought it might be quite fun. Smallcreep’s Day was based on a novel I’d liked by Peter Currell Brown. It had a Gormenghast feel to it, which appealed to me, and it provided both a setting and a story for the music. Unlike The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, though, it also had a plot that you could explain in a paragraph.
One of the nicest things about making the record was thinking about who I wanted to work with: Simon Phillips, a drummer I’d always admired; Noel McCalla, a session singer with a very high voice, and Ant on keyboards. In any other band working with other musicians would be seen as the start of a slippery slope: ‘What’s wrong with us?’ But Tony was also taking the opportunity to make a solo album while Phil was away and the bond between the three of us was such that we never felt threatened by anything we did outside the band.
Storm Thorgerson (of Pink Floyd’s album covers) had designed several album covers for Genesis and so he seemed a natural choice for the design of Smallcreep’s Day. I’d decided on an image that I wanted to use and Storm’s idea was to spray developing ink over the photograph so that it only came through in patches. When he came down to show me the results he brought six different versions and asked me which one I liked: they all looked pretty similar to me but I liked one a bit more than the rest.
‘That one,’ I said. Storm looked disgusted.
‘No, no, no, no, no. That one.’
Storm
was very opinionated: that was his strength and his weakness. He was very good at fighting your corner with record labels – getting them to use good quality paper and things like that – but he would also always try to get you to go to the desert somewhere for a photo shoot and spend a fortune. ‘We’ll do this over here, and that over there, and then we’ll move that sand dune . . .’ It wouldn’t even be a three-day shoot, it’d be five. I’ve always preferred graphics to photographs and this was one of the reasons why: with photographs you can waste ages and spend a bomb on them, and then you’ll take a look at the end result and think, ‘That’s not very good is it?’
Storm looked like you’d imagine a painter – dark clothes, longish hair, cerebral – and had the artistic temperament to match. His partner at Hipgnosis, Aubrey Powell or Po, would then have to come along and made peace in Storm’s wake.
Storm would always have a little sketchbook of ideas that he’d show you and I later recognized some of the ones Genesis turned down on 10CC and Led Zeppelin albums. There were only three or four Genesis covers that I ever actually liked: I was never that mad about Foxtrot or Nursery Cryme, they were a bit busy for me, although I thought Selling England was fantastic.
But in the end the problem with covers was that they’d always end up being rushed. You couldn’t decide on a cover until you knew what the songs were going to be about, and then you’d only get a limited time to come up with something before the record was released. A prime example was . . . And Then There Were Three . . ., our last Hipgnosis cover. It was definitely one of Storm’s B-ideas.
As an album Smallcreep’s Day is quite strong instrumentally, but its real value was as a breath of creative fresh air. Unlike other bands, our solo projects were never a reaction to being unhappy with what we were doing as a group and going forward. We’d always work on solo projects between albums. It was one of the things that marked us out and made us unusual as a band, and I think it was an important part of what kept us going, too. We learned how much we appreciated the other members of the band and, because we were doing something different and challenging individually, the probability that we would get stuck in a rut was less.
* * *
Until this point in my life Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights had always meant a show: I think I was the only person I knew who looked forward to Mondays. Now I was discovering weekends: strange things: two days when you stayed at home, had a Sunday lunch with your family and didn’t work – and also holidays, which were a bit strange too, especially the one Angie and I had in Florence.
I’d been to Florence before: Genesis had played there in 1973 and Rich had scored some morphine. My main memory of that trip is of Tony, who was sitting in the front of the van, turning round to look at Phil and me in the back, raising an eyebrow, sighing, then turning away again.
I didn’t tell Angie about the morphine when we went on our holiday although I did give her a full guided tour. I think she was quite impressed by the time I’d finished. Then we got home and Angie told the Banks about it, and Tony pointed out we didn’t play Florence in 1973, it had been Genoa. We’d actually never played Florence. I knew the morphine was strong but I hadn’t realized it was that strong.
* * *
Unlike me, downtime was not something that Phil every really did. Music was his job but it was also his hobby, which I think was part of his problem. He couldn’t relax, switch off and engage in family life. His idea of a day off was buying and listening to a stack of records. To be fair, he did have a train set. He kept it in his basement and every time he took me down for a look I’d nearly beat my brains out on the ceiling. I couldn’t really see the appeal myself – but it made him happy.
Phil was always a worker and the one of us who was most drawn by the idea of outside work. When Keith Moon had died in 1978, I know Phil would have loved the job with the Who. They were pretty much revered by everyone and we’d all grown up watching them on the TV. I always think if Phil had joined them we would have found a way to make it work, although God knows how.
In 1979, after it had become clear that his marriage was over, Phil had moved back to England again. Tony and I were still busy with our own albums, so Phil had gone back to drumming for Brand X, the jazz-rock band he’d been moonlighting with for several years. However, for the first time he had also begun writing his own material.
There was a noticeable difference when we met again to make Duke. We recorded it at Phil’s house by default: he was on his own, feeling slightly sad and dejected, and I think he probably quite liked having us around. He may not have realized that we’d kick him out of his bedroom but it was lighter and bigger than his music room, so he just had to sleep in the spare bedroom instead.
The songs that Phil brought to Duke, ‘Misunderstanding’ and ‘Please Don’t Ask’, had a lovely sense of space and ease about them, a feeling of not trying too hard. Tony and I would always try quite hard and when it worked, it was great. When it didn’t, it didn’t. Phil was always able to let a song breathe; he also had an empathy for what was right musically. Whatever he said, you listened.
It’s a question undecided to this day whether Phil also played us the demo for ‘In the Air Tonight’. Phil thinks yes, Tony thinks no, and I think it was quite possible that Phil had played it and we hadn’t really noticed it. The thing about ‘In the Air Tonight’ was that it was all about atmosphere: without that famous drum sound I could imagine that it would sound quite plain initially. It was just three chords and all of them probably a bit too ordinary to impress Tony and I, who are chord snobs. Anyway, we didn’t end up with it on Duke so Phil had it for his solo album, Face Value, and the rest is history.
In terms of my own songs, Duke was an album of highs and lows, the low being ‘Man of Our Times’, which was my attempt to be a bit Gary Numan. I had a guitar synthesizer for the first time, which allowed me to write songs with string parts. I wasn’t a great fan of synth stuff but, once again, I thought it was important to investigate what was on offer. With hindsight it’s a song that’s best forgotten, like the New Romantic haircuts. They always worried me.
The high was ‘Turn It On Again’, which came from a riff that I’d had left over from Smallcreep’s Day and which I always thought was in 4/4 until Phil told me it was in 13/8. Phil was going through his own highs and lows at this point – mostly highs – which may have been why he suggested we speed it up. My only regret now is that the chorus didn’t come until four and a half minutes in.
I used bass pedals to write ‘Turn It On Again’: it was a quite tiring part to play so I used an echo and only had to play every other note. When we came to record it I knew it would sound better played properly so I ended up sitting on the floor, thumping the pedal with my fist. Then when I got tired, Phil took over: that was where his extra energy was useful.
* * *
‘Mike, I really can’t live in London anymore, on my own with a baby!’
This was one of those phone calls. I hadn’t realized just how unhappy Angie was. She was the first of her friends to have a baby, and she felt isolated living there. She was a country girl at heart, so I agreed she could look for somewhere outside London. I did stress it would have to be the Home Counties as I wanted to be near to London. She managed to sell the house and found a cottage in Sussex pretty quickly. When I arrived at Heathrow my car wasn’t taking me to Courtnell Street but to my new home. It all looked very pretty from the outside but having knocked myself out on the front door I managed to bump my way across the beams to say hello to my family. Angie looked horrified as she’d only taken into account the height of the ceilings from her vantage point and not mine at six feet three. We moved the following year.
I had a problem. There’d be a period of decompression every time I came home from tour. I’d always feel comfortable with the regime on the road. Our days would be completely planned out: a timetable would be slipped under the door of our hotel suite every evening, telling us when to get up and be down in the lobby. We�
�d be driven to the plane, fly to the next city and then handed a key to our hotel rooms at the other end. It never felt claustrophobic – flying around the world, with people cheering and adoring us every night. I couldn’t really complain.
People would always ask if the band hung out together when we weren’t working, and the answer would be no. We wouldn’t want to go near each other for at least the next six months. It was just that we’d got so close and spent so much time together, we needed a bit of space. The trouble was I didn’t quite know what to fill my time with. Suddenly I would have to make my own decisions.
Angie had settled into country life making friends with other mothers, riding her horse, and generally feeling much happier. I, on the other hand, would come back after a tour, feeling rather important and a bit out of the loop, only to see the horsebox disappearing down the drive as Angie headed off to another dressage competition. (That didn’t necessarily mean the UK: she went to Europe quite regularly.) I didn’t have any hobbies and life seemed to have carried on without me. Angie found a solution when she suggested I take up riding. At first, I didn’t quite see the appeal of riding, and if I’d have read my father’s book, I might not have agreed with her suggestion:
At occasional large combined services’ parades around the Empire the parade orders carried the chilling sentence: ‘Battalion Officers will be mounted.’ . . . I managed to survive except on one occasion when the Army, having checked that my role required me to ride beside my boss at the head of the column, craftily supplied me with a charger normally ridden by a Second-in-Command whose position is at the extreme rear.
When the band struck up and we advanced my horse made determined attempts to get to his right place so that my entry to the parade ground was like something from the Spanish Riding School in Vienna. My only consolation was that our Second-in-Command, who had been given what should have been my charger, had his own problems and spent his time scattering the rearmost platoon like a mounted policeman dispersing a crowd.
The Living Years Page 18