The Living Years

by Mike Rutherford

  When we’d finished recording ‘The Living Years’, Chris came up to me, shook my hand, and told me that working on it had been one of the highlights of his recording career. I wasn’t at all sure how well it had worked, though. I was too close to it.

  Then Andrea Ganis from Atlantic heard it and rang me: ‘That’s a number 1,’ she said. And it was: in the US, Canada, Australia and Ireland, and a number 2 in the UK. It also won an Ivor Novello award in 1989 and was nominated for a Grammy in 1990.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  It’s funny: when I write a song, I never really think anyone’s ever going to hear it. Occasionally I will walk into my studio, look out of the window at the orchard and be amazed by the thought that what I’m writing on a spring day at home will be heard by guys in Argentina or the suburbs of Detroit. It’s not something I ever quite believe.

  Songs do touch people but to have a song that changes people’s lives as ‘The Living Years’ did is something else. I’m very aware that I’m lucky. The number of people that I’ve met or who have written to B.A. and me over the years telling us how it’s affected them continues to amaze me. I’ve heard from people who have picked up the phone to their father after years of silence, or people who have managed finally to get close to their father as he is dying.

  I had so many regrets after Dad died. I wished he’d have been younger so that he and Mum could have enjoyed their retirement more; I wished I’d seen them more often; I wished I had done more for them both. It wasn’t until I found Dad’s notebooks in his trunk that I realized they’d had money worries. If only I’d known, I could have given them an allowance instead of just sending them off on a cruise. But perhaps my biggest regret was that my dad and I hadn’t just chatted more.

  It was only really after I found my father’s memoir that I became aware of all the conversations we could have had and all the questions I could have asked him. I also began to get a sense of what he had done in the war, including the role he’d had in sinking the Bismarck in May 1941:

  . . . as a gunnery specialist I had probably the best ringside seat of the day.

  First came the spine tingling order ‘enemy in sight!’ followed by shouted orders and the clash of machinery as the turret’s crew made the final drill movements. Then a nagging silent wait until the ‘ting ting’ of the fire gong and the jar and shudder of the first salvos.

  There she was in my periscope – a bit indistinct but large and menacing.

  As I looked, large shell splashes went up in the vicinity and, as it was too early for them to be ours, ‘Rodney’ had clearly fired first.

  Then ‘Bismarck’ herself erupted in a flicker of reddish flashes and I recalled that this was not a target practice and that we were under fire ourselves.

  It was just like Dad that he didn’t take pleasure in the sinking:

  Once the excitement of battle was over there was no euphoria. To a professional seaman the sinking of a ship, no matter whose she is or the reason for her loss, is not a matter for rejoicing, his innate instincts being to keep ships afloat and help those in them.

  I began to understand what a shock leaving the Navy must have been for him, too.

  But Dad’s sense of humour also came out in his memoir – something else that I had not really appreciated when he was alive. What I realized, gradually, was that if there were communication problems between us it was to do with me as much as him. First, I was the grumpy teenager and then I was the ambitious musician and Inever really had time to ask how he was. I’m sure I closed him down and prevented him from really talking to me, but that’s only something I have come to appreciate since my own children, Kate, Tom and Harry, have started carving out their careers and having families. They don’t want to sit down and discuss my life, which is only natural. If I’d been more open, as I am now, I think Dad would have responded, I only realized that when it was too late. One of the most painful parts about discovering Dad’s memoir was seeing what he’d called it: ‘This is My Thing’. ‘Doing my thing, man’ was something I’d often said to him as a typical sixteen-year-old if I felt he was on my case. It didn’t really mean much – I was often just saying it for the sake of it – but he’d obviously taken it to heart. Luckily for me, he chose to respond by writing his book. It’s the best legacy he could have left me.

  * * *

  After The Living Years I made another three Mike and the Mechanics albums with Paul Young and Paul Carrack. ‘Over My Shoulder’, from Beggar on a Beach of Gold, was the most played song in Europe in 1995 and the whole album was one I enjoyed. It had a good, up feeling about it, as though the Mechanics had found their place. But then in July 2000 I got a phone call from Tony Smith to tell me that Paul Young had had a heart attack and had died aged fifty-three.

  It was unexpected, but it wasn’t a total shock. I had a wonderful twenty-year relationship with Paul but he had his demons: there was a sense that he was always living just on the edge. He loved the music world, he lived to be on stage, he was the king of rock ’n’ roll . . . but the trouble was that when he finished a tour he would go home and carry on in the same vein. At the back of my mind I had always wondered how long he could keep it up.

  We were poles apart, Youngy and me. I was always quite organized and controlled and he was so much the opposite. Even today I’m still hearing stories that the crew kept from me at the time. He would always be having brushes with the police or getting caught up in some drama or other. But he was also a mesmeric presence on stage. Even now, I can recall standing behind and seeing how audiences got him, the looks on their faces as they watched him. He’d have the audience in the palm of his hand even when he was just playing tambourine and backing vocals. And his stage smile was never a stage smile, either: with Youngy it was always absolutely genuine because he was up there, doing what he loved.

  By 2007 Paul and I felt the Mechanics had run their course, although I never, ever say I’ve stopped doing something. I just don’t say anything. Nevertheless in 2009 I was writing some songs at home and realized that they sounded like Mechanics songs, although at this point Paul Carrack was busy with his solo career, so I no longer had anyone to sing them.

  I asked Brian Rawling at Metrophonic Music who he recommended: he suggested Andrew Roachford and Tim Howar and, for the second time, it was almost like it was meant to be. Roachford and Tim were the first two singers through the door and they both just clicked. Then of course I was reunited with Gary Wallis, followed by the two new additions, Anthony Drennan and Luke Juby. There’d been no plan, no auditions, we simply tried it to see what would happen. And it worked.

  While I was busy with the Mechanics during the eighties, Phil had been involved with the Buster film and soundtrack and his . . . But Seriously album.

  Tony was a realist, like me. The odds that one of us would succeed with solo projects were slim; the odds that all three of us would were miniscule. Tony always blamed me for the fact that he didn’t do more film scores after we’d worked together on a soundtrack for The Shout, a 1978 film directed by Jeremy Thomas. It was never a great film but we quite enjoyed working on it together. However, when we went to the premiere the music we had written was completely drowned out by atmospheric gusts of wind. I was so cross that I got the producer up against a wall afterwards: what was the point in bloody getting us to do all that work? Tony always reckoned that my roughing up the producer had damaged his soundtrack career. But the trouble is that you need to schmooze to get anywhere in that world and, by nature, Tony’s not a schmoozer. In everything he has ever done Tony has been true to himself.

  My own career could never be compared to Phil’s either, though: his success was off the scale. But among the three of us there was never any ego. When we were on stage each night it felt the same as it had always done – three mates together – and we still appreciated the things that we each contributed musically that no one else could. Which is why, in 1991, we decided to make another album.

  * * *

  ‘Yo
u’re so rich you don’t need to work again. Why are you making another record?’ was the question that journalists always asked. That question always pissed me off – as if we were ever doing it for the money. We Can’t Dance happened simply because we wanted to work together again. Which, after all that had happened to each of us in the five years since Invisible Touch, felt like an achievement in itself.

  We went into The Farm and, like the two albums before it, the making of it just seemed to fly by. On day one we were a bit edgy, a bit nervous – hoping we’d fire up but knowing that it was never a given that the music would come. But then there was just a rush of exciting creativity. We shot the photographs on the inside of the album at Chiddingfold Working Men’s club and it all felt familiar again – the band, the crew, the studio – like no time had passed at all.

  Sometimes it really didn’t seem like we had been away. We were touring the album in America when I thought to myself that the private plane we were using looked quite familiar. It had been repainted but I knew there was a sure-fire way of finding out if it was the same one. Five years earlier I’d left a little stash of grass tucked behind the sun shield of one of the windows. It took a bit of finding but there it still was – a little dry, a little tired, a little old – but exactly where I’d left it in 1986.

  The ‘We Can’t Dance’ walk was Phil’s idea: it just happened spontaneously on the set of the video, which we made in LA while we were there on tour. It was quite strange, after years of long progressive songs, most of which were spent sitting down, suddenly to be so well known for a silly walk. When the tour got to Earls Court, huge images of Tony, Phil and me were up on the hoardings in the same place that I remembered posters for the Royal Tournament. We looked a bit different from the marching soldiers, though. I didn’t mind the walk becoming so famous because I knew it was only part of what we did, but Phil got upset with Roger Waters after he wasn’t very complimentary about it. Phil would always want to ring someone up if they had said something rude about him. I would always tell him, ‘Don’t believe the good reviews or let the bad ones hurt you.’ But I’d been saying that for so long now that even I was beginning to realize that he wasn’t going to take any notice. So he rang Roger up and gave him an earful.

  Phil always had a way of standing between Tony and I, the stiff public schoolboys, and bringing out the humour in both of us: that was what the ‘We Can’t Dance’ walk was about. No one else could have got Tony and I to unbend enough to do that. We couldn’t not laugh with Phil around, and sometimes I’d even think it was a shame that Pete wasn’t around to enjoy it, too. Pete only ever experienced the early, very intense stuff and never any of the laughter which, given that he had such a great sense of humour, was sad. Pete would have fitted in so well later on – but maybe it was because we weren’t together anymore that we were all able to lighten up, Pete included. We all moved in the same direction in our separate ways.

  Following my Egyptian adventure and Jesus Spitting Image moment, another single from the album provided an opportunity for a further flirtation with being a religious figure. While we were in Dallas making the video for ‘Jesus He Knows Me’, American evangelists were big news, filling up the American TV channels, and that was exactly what the song was about . . . exposing crooked evangelists. A high-profile evangelist had been on TV on a Friday night saying the Lord’s wish was for his followers to give him $5 million by Monday – only the Lord knows how he did it, but he did. This was followed by a huge investigation into the drug taking, affairs with minors and other sordid antics which these millions were funding.

  Phil, Tony and I were whooping it up making the video in the guise of evangelists, and having a small insight into their lifestyle. The filming started with a jacuzzi filled with Californian babes . . . and us, of course. The next scene was of me having a four-hand massage (non-pornographic) with even more babes. The filming took longer than expected, although no one was complaining. Except I did have to call home and say I wouldn’t be home as this wretched filming was running overtime. I’m not sure Angie felt too sympathetic once she saw the video.

  The We Can’t Dance tour was a fantastically opulent time. Each night, we would leave the stage in a convoy of limos with a police escort, bath robes over our heads, go straight to the airport and get on our private plane. But the other side of touring was that the bigger we got, the bigger the shows we played and the more serious it got. There’s a lot of pressure when you’re playing to 70,000 people a night, and Phil felt that most of all. I could play a concert if I was ill and half dead, but if Phil caught a cold it would be a big deal because he was concerned about his voice. We would always have to worry if he caught a chill going to the plane in his robe; he’d have to wrap up, he wouldn’t be able to talk, he wouldn’t be able to go out for dinner after a show not that, even in 1986, he could go out much anyway: he’d be recognized everywhere. The voice was like another person on tour – the fourth one of us – and I think that got to Phil. It stopped being as much fun.

  Phil would still make us laugh, but there had been a transformation from the laid-back, beer-drinking hippy he’d been in the early years into someone who had gradually become more serious. He’d always been organized but over the years it came out more and more, and he’d be punctual to the minute. I quite enjoyed making a bit of a mess of my room, making it feel like home with a few things lying around the place, but Phil’s would be pristine. He’d become very meticulous even with his packing and unpacking, and I don’t think maid service ever had much to do. I’m sure it was a coping mechanism – he would try and keep his own life in order in an attempt to help him handle the workload, the pressure and the fame. Looking back now, I see how strange it was for him to have gone from being the drummer to the singer. He did it so effortlessly that I don’t think Tony or I ever thought much about it at the time, but it had never been part of his plan.

  All of this meant that when we went for a meeting at Tony Smith’s house in Chiddingfold one day in 1996 and Phil said, ‘I think I’m going to call it a day,’ it wasn’t really a surprise. The surprise was that he’d stayed with Genesis as long as he had, after all that had happened with his solo career.

  And I think I also knew the chances were it wasn’t quite the end.

  * * *

  Do I regret Calling All Stations? No: professionally I don’t really regret anything. We did it because Tony and I had written some songs together that we liked. We had replaced a singer before, although I was very aware that the hill to climb was pretty big this time around.

  Ray Wilson did a good job as the vocalist but he wasn’t a writer. Without a third writer, there was no one to glue Tony and me together; we didn’t have anyone to pull us back into the middle ground, the centre of the musical Venn diagram. I’d never been aware before of quite how far apart Tony and I were musically until this album. It only hit me then that Phil was the one who reined us both in, took what we did best and found a setting for it. Calling All Stations was released in 1997 and sold two million copies – not bad – but when the record was released I also sensed that the mood had changed in terms of radio play. We were becoming a catalogue act. Tony and Ray were keen to carry on but I knew we’d have had to bring in another writer. To me it felt right to just stop there – no real harm done.

  * * *

  In 2007 Tony Smith told us that Pete had been thinking about touring The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. He’d always thought it was a strong, undeveloped concept and he’d wanted to do something more with it. The technical difficulties of the original production had frustrated all of us and we’d had virtually no budget, so the idea of having another go was appealing. Obviously part of the special effects would have involved making Pete look a little more like he did in 1974, and a bit less 2007.

  Phil was touring at the time so Tony, Steve, Pete and I all agreed to meet in Glasgow where Phil was playing. As far as Tony in particular was concerned, we were meeting to discuss the tour we were going to do. As far a
s Pete was concerned, we were meeting to discuss discussing the tour we might be going to do. As we realized while spending quite a long two hours going round in circles.

  The funny thing was, it was exactly like the old days again: Tony and Pete the same; Steve was quiet; Phil was loving the idea of playing drums again. It all came back: the dynamic was just the same. Personally, I felt it would have been great for Phil and me to be back together as the rhythm section. People always talk about Phil the singer but I still think of him as Phil the drummer who moved to the front rather reluctantly because no one else was going to. But it had never been an easy album to play and, Steve apart, it turned out that we all had our reservations. Eventually we realized we were getting nowhere and first Pete left, then Steve left, and then it was just the three of us: Phil, Tony and me.

  And the weird thing is, when you put Phil, Tony and me in a room, we are the band again. We had been together so long that although Phil had left, I’d never actually thought of it that way. On reflection, that was probably why it didn’t strike me particularly deeply when he’d told us he was going in 1996. I’d thought that he could say he wasn’t in Genesis anymore and that was fine, but I wasn’t sure he could really leave. We had been through too much, shared too much, it was like a bond you just couldn’t cut. We may not have seen each other very much but it doesn’t ever go away.

  So there we were in Glasgow, wondering what would happen next, when Phil said: ‘If there is going to be a reunion, we should do the three-piece first. The five-piece would be the finale, but the three-piece should come first.’