The Living Years

by Mike Rutherford

  There was a lot of luck involved in the first Mechanics album: I had found B. A. and Chris Neil at the first attempt, and Paul Carrack and Paul Young were perfect for the songs straightaway. It felt almost like it was meant to be. But there was one final piece of luck to come. Originally the first single from the album was going to be ‘Hanging by a Thread’, which was a rather obvious and heavy song. Then Andrea Ganis from Atlantic heard ‘Silent Running’ and chose that instead.

  ‘Silent Running’ was striking, six minutes long and a brave choice for American rock radio. It sounded complicated but it was only three chords and the bass note stays the same throughout the entire song. It was also exactly the right sound for 1985: it went to number 6 in the US. Our next single, ‘All I Need Is a Miracle’, went to number 5.

  Like the first demo tape Genesis had made in Brian Roberts’s attic, Andrea’s decision was one of those moments of good fortune that sometimes you need in life.

  * * *

  Paul Young lived to be on stage and was a force to be reckoned with. He gave everything in a live performance and in the studio; he was an intuitive writer and a brilliant singer. We had a wonderful twenty-year relationship.

  I soon realized that he loved the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle a bit too much when we arrived in New York for our promotional trip. The first morning I went down to the hotel lobby ready to do a full days work of interviews with him. As I was waiting for him, he stumbled into the lobby from the street, completely out of his head on coke, booze and whatever else he managed to score in Harlem where he ended up. Obviously I couldn’t take him with me and he had to sober up for the evening as we were doing a live performance on TV. So I called Angie in our room and asked her to look after him for a few hours and to keep him away from booze and any other substances. Apparently this was easier said than done. In between diving between the mini bars in both rooms – Angie had managed to get there first – he tried to smash the hotel window with a chair. He was in such a state and desperately needed a drink that he then threatened to jump from the forty-fourth floor. Angie gave in after a while. By then, she had had enough: she slipped a very strong sleeping pill into a drink. I forgot to tell her about needing him for the live performance later.

  In fairness to Paul, everything about the first Mechanics tour was a bit surreal. We performed on the same bill as a troop of lumberjacks at a state fair somewhere and late-night American cable TV also seemed to be showing one of Chris’s risqué films on a loop. I’d get back to my hotel room after a show, switch on the TV set and suddenly there would be Chris’s bottom going up and down as he bonked some girl in a canoe. But that all seemed par for the course compared to what happened when we got to Washington.

  The idea of Youngy hanging out with a cop from Manchester just didn’t begin to compute. The idea of that cop moving from Manchester to Washington and – God knows how – getting a job with the US Secret Service team that looked after President Reagan was pretty mindboggling. But the idea that this cop would give us a private and very unauthorized tour of the White House . . .

  From what I remember the most impressive part of the White House is the façade. I can’t remember much because we were smuggled inside in secrecy in the middle of the night, we’d just finished a show, we were tired and all of us, not just Youngy, were stoned. Inside, the place seemed quite bland, almost ordinary. The only really extraordinary bit was thinking that President Reagan was asleep upstairs and we were all tramping through his state rooms. I think the only thing we didn’t see was the Oval Office, which actually felt like quite a relief: even stoned, I realized that would have been pushing our luck.

  Nevertheless, when we were invited back to the State Department building the following day for an (equally unofficial) demonstration of lie-detecting equipment, we obviously went along.

  As well as looking after the President’s security, the Secret Service was apparently also responsible for preventing financial crime. Youngy’s friend took us into the vaults where all kinds of top-secret files were kept – we looked at a few of them, too. We all took lie detector tests, which were very unnerving as you start to feel guilty before it even starts, especially if you were trespassing in the White House the night before.

  * * *

  When I married Angie I was a bit of a cold fish and found it hard to express my feelings. She wasn’t and didn’t, and she wasn’t going to wait around while I mumbled incoherently either. She was going to drag my emotions out of me by force if necessary.

  Angie instilled in me the notion that sport was a good thing – okay for health reasons, but she maintained it kept relationships together. I’m not sure I quite got it at first: the sum total of my sporting career was loading and unloading gear, and playing the guitar. Once we had our children, she had us skiing (me included and properly this time), riding, playing tennis, swimming, waterskiing, golf. You name it: we did it.

  There had always been such a gap between myself and my own parents when I was growing up. They were older parents from another era. I’d often think about how much fun I had with my kids running around and doing stuff and remembered that the only time I’d every shared anything like that with Dad was the single golf match we’d played together at prep school.

  I did everything I could to keep up my bond with my children. Touring could make this hard to accomplish, but Angie was still escorting them across the globe so I could see them as often as possible. However, there was only one occasion that really made me stop and think. It was a winter half-term in the mid-eighties when Kate was about seven. We’d gone to Mull for the holidays and were all out for a walk. The scene was bathed in that four o’clock winter light that you get in Scotland, when you can’t help but take a great photograph with any old camera. I’ve got a lovely picture of Angie and Kate standing in wellingtons in a river, Angie with her arm around Kate. They’re both happy, smiling: a mother and daughter. But when I see that picture now, I remember that during that holiday Kate, who I hadn’t seen for three months, didn’t quite know how to act around me. She wasn’t embarrassed exactly, but it wasn’t natural. It was quite a shock at the time. She saw me almost as a stranger, not her dad. I tried to make sure that would never happen again.

  I was less competent in trying to get closer to my own father. Dad was never impulsive enough just to pick up the phone and say, ‘Hi Mike, I’m just ringing for a chat . . . ’, something that pains me to think about now. If he called me, it was always with a purpose, and he must have sat down and thought about it beforehand. And I suppose it was for that reason that I was less inclined to pick up the phone myself.

  But the pace of my life was also now so fast and I was so busy with work that, much as I find it hard to admit it, I was also often lazy when it came to keeping in touch with my parents.

  ‘Mike, have you rung your dad?’

  This would be the first week that I’d arrived back from tour.

  ‘No, I will.’

  A couple of days later: ‘Have you rung your dad yet Mike?’

  ‘No, but I’m going to.’

  A couple of days later: ‘Ring your dad!’

  Unlike Angie, I put things off. My sister would see my parents regularly but I had to be pushed into being a good son.

  I’d always been impressed by my dad’s sense of duty towards my two grannies, who he took care of into old age. I had a similar sense of duty regarding Angie and the kids, and to my work. But with Mum and Dad I felt slightly that all the work I’d been doing – the touring, the recording, the constant travelling and publicity – somehow excused me from having to bother putting in the necessary effort. I’d send them on a cruise each year, which they loved – my father would always be looked after and invited to eat at the Captain’s table – and I’d kid myself that I’d done enough.

  All of this meant that it was Angie who was the one who saw my parents the most. She would always be the one who organized Sunday lunch, birthdays, Christmases – the family occasions – and so it was he
r suggestion that we have a special lunch for my dad’s eightieth birthday.

  At eighty, Dad was still mentally very sharp and I suppose that’s what I saw when we met that day at the Bush Hotel in Farnham, not how much he’d aged. With hindsight, I should have noticed that he had lost weight, his neck didn’t quite fill his collar, his cheeks had hollowed out and he seemed frail inside his double-breasted jacket. But when someone is so familiar, you don’t see those changes so easily.

  I gave him an engraved Genesis gold disc as a present and it felt like a nice thing to do: a way of thanking him and acknowledging how much he’d supported my career. Because his own career had been marked by medals and ceremonies, I thought he’d appreciate the symbolism of it too.

  A photographer from the local newspaper came to the hotel to take a few pictures and later a reporter interviewed Dad:

  The captain, who lives in Ridgway Road, Farnham, was adamant when we spoke to him last week that he had backed his son to the hilt – and had not even nurtured a private hope that the boy’s career might take a more orthodox course.

  ‘We always supported him,’ he said. ‘I told Michael right from the beginning: “If there is something you want to do more than anything else, as long as it is both legal and viable, we will support you,” and we did.

  ‘My wife would have liked him to go into the Navy, and I also wondered whether it would be suitable, but from the very beginning he was so far into music that we gave him our support.

  ‘I did tell him, though, after he started playing the guitar at the age of seven: “If you are serious about the guitar you must at least know which way up to hold it.” So I sent him to classical guitar lessons.’

  When I read my dad’s memoir, I found he’d written a longer version of the Genesis story there:

  Getting their A levels, a parental condition for support, they came up the hard way, travelling around in an old bread van, living on motorway egg and double chips and sleeping rough on the floors of the places where they played their gig, as such performances are known.

  Despite vicissitudes, they stuck to it and are now ‘Genesis’, a world famous group, jetting around the globe in Jumbos and Concordes with an entourage of forty managers, administrators and technicians and a formidable array of specialized vehicles. When not on the job they live the active but relaxing lives of country gentlemen in Sussex engrossed in horses and other activities of a healthful nature.

  Anne and I have been their fans from the outset attending their gigs with a discreet insertion of a bit of cotton wool in the ears, taking the musical magazines appropriate to their style of music and becoming in-persons in this field.

  On one occasion, Anne was outside in a garden chair with her radio going full blast as the programme was playing the group’s music and Michael, the Pop Star, in the house composing further tunes, had to come outside and shout: ‘Mum – do you mind turning your radio down!’

  When I met my father that day for his birthday it never occurred to me, even for even a minute, that anything would happen. I thought I’d see him again in a couple of months in the little window I had between the end of the Mechanics tour and the start of the next Genesis one. My father knew what my schedule was like and I always felt he understood: for all the gulf between us, our lives had ended up being similar in so many ways.

  But that day was the last time I saw him.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  It seemed to me realistic to assume that if you’d got into Genesis in the early days you probably wouldn’t be so keen on Invisible Touch. Fans are always going to prefer the era when they first discover you and assume that any change is for the worst. It’s a problem common to all long-lived bands. But on stage when we were playing live it never felt any different at all to me: it was all a continuum.

  Invisible Touch isn’t the definitive Genesis album but it was probably our hottest moment in terms of commercial success. It was the biggest we would ever get as a band. And, like Genesis, it seemed almost effortless to make. My memory of writing it is of going into The Farm and it just flowing. Phil had a little drum machine – a blue, mono Akai – and we’d start with a nothing-very-much loop and jam over it. Phil would sing whatever came into his head and Tony and I would pile in fearlessly with any old chords and noise and racket. And out the songs came.

  When we went into the studio to make Invisible Touch towards the end of 1985, the three of us hadn’t worked together for three years. During that time I’d released Acting Very Strange and Mike and the Mechanics, Tony had released a soundtrack to a Michael Winner film called The Wicked Lady and two solo albums, The Fugitive and Soundtracks, and Phil had released Hello, I Must be Going and No Jacket Required.

  Had it not been for the fact that we all shared one manager, Tony Smith, then Invisible Touch might never have happened. There’d have been so many conflicts of interest – clashing tours and competing publicity schedules. With different managers pulling in different directions, it’s easy to imagine that the band would have been pulled apart. As well as having one manager, we were simply three people held together by a thread from way back and, while not ever being demonstrative, we were friends in a genuine way. Plus, for all our solo work, there was still something the three of us could only do when we were together in a room.

  The Invisible Touch tour ran from September 1986 to July 1987. It started in America, then went to Australia and New Zealand (our first time in both countries), then went back to America, then over to Japan, then up to Europe, then back to America, then back again to Europe and ended finally in four nights at Wembley. We’d been doing pretty well for quite a few years but Phil’s solo success and Mike and the Mechanics had pushed us into a different kind of global visibility. Yet one of the main reasons Genesis were still achieving so much was because we were a very hard-working live act. Live shows had always been our foundation.

  It was while we were discussing our touring plans that Tony Smith noticed that I was going to be out of the country for almost a whole year. Prior to the start of the Invisible Touch tour in September the band would be rehearsing for a month in Dallas, and for the two months prior to that I’d be on tour in America with the Mechanics. ‘If you wanted, you could take a tax year out,’ he said. If I didn’t return to the UK, I would save a fortune.

  At the time it seemed almost crazy not to do it. Angie and the kids would be flying out regularly so there wouldn’t be any difference from that point of view, and I’d be in the country so little anyway that staying away for a few more weeks seemed hardly here nor there. At the time, it all seemed so simple.

  * * *

  While we started rehearsing in Dallas for the tour, I asked Angie to come and join me for the weekend, as I hadn’t seen her for a while. I told her that one of the road crew would pick her up at Dallas airport and take her to the hotel. I’d meet her there after rehearsals and we’d spend some time together. What could go wrong?

  Firstly, Angie must have picked the only carry-on bag from the cupboard that had a huge ‘joint’ stashed in a side pocket. (I’d managed to forget about it while I was in Jamaica.) She boarded the plane not realizing what lay ahead. She was sitting in first class with only one other passenger. They exchanged niceties and that was that. When they landed Angie thought she’d sail through customs as she only had a carry-on bag. She also noticed the Nancy Reagan ‘Just Say No’ [to drugs] campaign posters everywhere. As she went through customs, she was stopped and searched. The Jamaica Inn matchbox and one large joint were discovered. Thinking this was some kind of joke to begin with, she soon realized this was a very serious situation. She was questioned about who was meeting her – she didn’t know – though being the wife of a rock musician certainly didn’t help. Her fellow passenger had also been arrested and, while being interrogated, had managed to swallow a bag of heroin. He was promptly whisked away in an ambulance.

  Seeing as they had travelled together, the customs officers thought Angie was involved with the man. After being s
trip-searched and questioned again, she was told she could ‘go down’ for twenty years. Meanwhile the roadie who had gone to pick her up assumed she wasn’t on that flight. He had come back to the rehearsal hall so I thought she was at the hotel, and just carried on playing. (There were no mobile phones then so communication was terrible.)

  Angie was allowed one phone call and telephoned a very good family friend, Nick Cook (who is also known as ‘The Commander’). He lived up to his name and managed to get hold of Tony Smith. Angie was released three hours later. The look on her face said it all. It also didn’t help, as her name would now be logged, which made travelling to America and Australia very difficult. Whenever she came on tour after that – it was frankly was a miracle she’d want to come anywhere near me – she’d have to wait on the plane until the authorities came to take her off. She would always explain to the children that it was because they wouldn’t have to queue.

  * * *

  Certain bands have certain years and 1986 must have been our year. When Invisible Touch was released in June 1986 it went to number 1 in the UK and number 3 in the US; we released four singles from it and each got into the US Top 5 including ‘Invisible Touch’, which was our first US number 1.

  The tour began in mid-September in Detroit, Michigan. It was like we had entered the stratosphere: private planes, police escorts, packed stadiums every night. And everywhere we went there’d be a Genesis song or a Genesis video playing. For the next eleven months it was like being royalty.