Not Dead Yet

by Phil Collins

  Credit 6

  Photographer Armando Gallo was an early believer in Genesis and continues to be a friend to this day. I think he took this photo in Woolwich, London, around the time we were rehearsing there. I can’t believe we were as bored as we look, but you never know.

  Credit 7

  Me, Andrea and a very young Joely at Headley Grange, circa 1974.

  Happy Dad: One of my favorite photos of me and Joely, age four. I adopted Joely when I got back together with Andy in 1974. To me she was, and always will be, my daughter.

  PC as Monty Python’s Gumby, Nurse Joely and Cowboy Simon on our way to Eric Clapton’s New Year’s Eve fancy dress party at Hurtwood Edge around 1980. (Everyone was in fancy dress as instructed, but Eric had refused, so I was given responsibility for taking him upstairs and dressing him up. I took a nice frock of Patti’s and a bath sponge for a wig. Despite his resistance, we went downstairs and he was a hit.)

  Credit 8

  Simon was my first son, and we are very close. Getting him to eat was not always easy, though! I think this was taken on tour in Paris in 1978, near the end of mine and Andy’s marriage.

  The legendary head of Atlantic Records, Ahmet Ertegun—what a great man he was. A huge musical brain, a big heart and great jokes. If he spoke, you listened. For as long as he was alive, he supported me. He used to call me the son he never had.

  With Miles Davis at a small private party after the Grammys in 1986. He’s telling me how much he loves “Separate Lives”—I didn’t have the heart to tell him I didn’t write it. Miles was a living legend, and here he was, talking to me.

  Tony Smith and Genesis backstage at Milton Keynes in 1982. Tony was celebrating ten years of managing us. A fearsome beard, wouldn’t you agree? Left to right: Steve, Peter, TS, Mike, PC, Tony and Daryl. Also present: my kids Simon and Joely, Kate Rutherford and Ben Banks (on far right).

  By the pool at Sir George Martin’s AIR studios in Montserrat. I was producing what would become Eric’s Behind the Sun album. Sting arrived, as he was there on holiday, and Stephen Bishop turned up, as he knew we were all there.

  Or: Genesis on the road and in the fancy-dress box

  Rehearsing at the Maltings, our chemistry is quickly apparent. It’s a friendly old barn, and we feel comfortable playing, jamming and composing in it. A truer test of this experimental line-up will come with performing. Or, to be precise, traveling to the performing. How will the combustible elements of the “new” Genesis combine in the more controlled environment of a tiny, wheezing, British-made family car?

  Our ambitions being considerably larger than rural Surrey, the latter months of 1970 find us gigging up and down the country in Peter’s Hillman Imp or Mike’s Mini Traveller. But even then, old school habits die hard, and a pecking order is soon apparent. Unsurprisingly, I come last.

  Being the driver puts you in pole position. It means you’re in control, and it means you can claim all the Green Shield stamps when you fill up with petrol. Peter and Mike will take proud ownership of a 24-piece dinner service long before I even catch sight of so much as a saucer.

  When Peter is driving, Tony usually wins the argument about who’s sitting in the passenger seat. The rest of us cram into the back, fighting for room with an assortment of electric and acoustic guitars.

  For a while, “the rest of us” means three of us, as there’s another guitarist, Mick Barnard. After the audition that Ronnie failed, we carried on as a four-piece, with no guitarist, Tony manfully trying to play all the guitar parts on a Hohner electric piano through a fuzzbox. Then we found Mick. He’s a nice guy, and a good guitarist, but he doesn’t last. My abiding memory of Mick’s brief time in Genesis is not his playing, or anything musical, but us always dropping him off after gigs at Toddington Services on the M1 near Dunstable in Bedfordshire. How he gets home from there I’ve no idea.

  So the search for a guitar player continues. Scouring Melody Maker one week, we read Steve Hackett’s advert. “A Able Accordionist,” it begins, which is a clever way of putting yourself top of the alphabetically arranged list, and Peter thinks it’s interesting enough to follow up on. We invite Steve to Tony’s new flat in Earls Court, to pitch his stuff to us. Arriving dressed entirely in black, something we will come to expect from him, he’s quite an intense character. Clearly a big fan of King Crimson’s Robert Fripp, Steve impresses everyone less with his technique than with his ideas. And now we are five.

  These are exciting times—I’m still a couple of months shy of my twentieth birthday, I’m on ten quid a week (more than I can spend), and I find the romance of life on the road with a proper band utterly intoxicating.

  That romance takes unusual forms, one of which is stopping at the Blue Boar services at Watford Gap on the M1. A lot of bands pull in there on the way back from gigs in the north. An early-hours’ plate of beans on toast and an inter-band moan about the students at Leeds Uni are just the tonic for footsore rockers. And from here on in, you can see the light: up till this point it’s been endless cat’s eyes on the road. But from Watford Gap the motorway has overhead lamps to usher you south and homeward. In the absence of speed or any other pharmaceuticals, that’s all the wake-up we’re going to get.

  When Peter drives, he talks. We’ll be bombing up the M1 toward the Midlands and suddenly you’ll tune into this high-pitched whining. It’s not me, complaining from the back about my lack of Green Shield stamps. It’s Peter, doing 80 mph in second gear. He’s so wrapped up in what he’s trying to say that he’s forgotten to change gear. He finally shifts and the car relaxes.

  At this time we have a couple of road crew, Gerard Selby, another Old Carthusian, and his nineteen-year-old brother Adrian. We later find out that Adrian has also been “managing” us for a year. Nobody thinks to tell us, and we didn’t think to ask. Unfortunately, throughout this time he doesn’t keep copies of any invoices, or any receipts for UV lights, drapes, batteries, cables and the like. Genesis have been earning a reasonable amount through gigs, but spending far more on actually doing them. Come the end of the tax year we’re in trouble, and so is Adrian: he’s fired.

  Our audiences are mostly male, mostly hairy, mostly students. They favor fishing hats and long coats, accessorized with piles of LPs carried under fragrant armpits. Not the most practical of outfits for sweaty gigs in sticky venues. Fashion is not on our side, a status quo with which we will become well acquainted.

  We take gigs whenever and wherever, with varying degrees of success. We support Atomic Rooster at a university show in London. I never went for Carl Palmer much as a drummer, but he’s a nice guy, and while the band are playing I’m creeping around backstage, trying to find a good vantage point from which to watch the gig.

  There’s a Christmas tree of plugs jammed into a socket which, in the gloom, I manage to trip on and kick out. Bang goes all the stage power, and everything flops down: lights, sound, vibe. I scarper, fast, before the now rather sub-atomic headliners can spot me.

  Mostly, though, the gigs are conducted in a fairly professional manner: get there, get on, get back. A few joints but no bawdy bacchanalia. The closest we get to that is at a show at London’s City University, which happens to be Steve’s first gig with Genesis. Our stage time is later than advertised so I pass the time by sinking a few Newcastle Browns. By the time we’re onstage, I’m all over the place, literally. I do all the right fills but do them three inches to the right of each drum. Forget air-guitar, this is air-drums. Afterward I’m wincing: “What must this new guitarist think? First gig and the drummer’s pissed.” That is the first time I’m ever drunk playing, and it will be the last.

  That’s not to say I’m averse to having a few post-show, especially when there are other musicians to play with. Tony Stratton-Smith has the great idea of booking a tour with three of his strongest bands, playing nine concert halls up and down the country. The Charisma Package Tour kicks off at the Lyceum in London on January 24, 1971. For a very competitive six bob (30p in new money), you
can catch Genesis (“now, without doubt, they have come of age”—Sounds), Lindisfarne (“their hallmark is strong, clear, straight-ahead songs”—Melody Maker) and, topping the bill, Van Der Graaf Generator (“as if heralding Armageddon, VDGG make great use of shock chords and pregnant pauses to highlight their brooding high-decibel tension”—NME).

  The tour is a raging success, establishing all three bands as major, hall-filling acts. NME is on hand to describe the scenes in Newcastle: “Well over 500 people had to be left out in the cold while 2500 enthusiasts created scenes of almost unparallel [sic] hysteria in the sanctum of the City Hall.” In Manchester, the Free Trade Hall “had crocodiles of long-haired youths surrounding it for the last remaining tickets.”

  It’s great fun behind the scenes, too, with much Newcastle Brown-fueled merriment on the shared tour bus that transports us round the country. I fall in with Alan Hull and the Lindisfarne boys—hearty Geordies to a man—and enjoy a smoke or three with the road crews. But for Genesis as a whole, there is perhaps too much merriment: it is our first tour by bus, and it will be our last. Buses travel much slower than cars, and the journeys tend to drag out much more than they need to. London to Newcastle, 274 miles according to the AA handbook, is an interminable trek with a coach. So we decide to go our own way and thereafter revert to our own modes of transport—Peter’s Hillman Imp and Mike’s Mini Traveller.

  In a sign of things to come, we divide the critics. NME reviews the tour’s sixth show, at Manchester Free Trade Hall: “In the demonic, black-clad figure of Peter Gabriel, Genesis have a vocal performer who has the precocious magnetism of which contemporary pop heroes are hewn. A macabre entrepreneur, Peter introduces each selection with strange neo-fantasy monologues which at times border on the realms of insanity.”

  “Genesis, featuring their new but well-rehearsed guitarist Steve Hackett, played well,” begins Sounds’ review of the tour’s penultimate stop, at Brighton Dome, “although they missed the encouragement they are normally given from the auditorium…Peter Gabriel was impressive as usual, although it was one of those nights when his funny little monologues fell on stony ground and were greeted by stony faces.”

  So, to recap: our frontman is a contemporary pop hero, a macabre entrepreneur but also a teller of funny little monologues that no one likes.

  For some reason Genesis have made decent inroads in Belgium. After my trip to the Netherlands with Flaming Youth, all I need is some love from Luxembourg and I can confidently say I am big in Benelux.

  So in March 1971 Genesis play their first foreign gig, in a little club in Charleroi called Ferme Cinq. We make the trip by cross-Channel ferry and, when we arrive, our excitement at now being an international touring band is undimmed when we see that the stage is made of beer crates. We have to arrange them carefully so they don’t wobble and topple mid strange, neo-fantasy monologue. We somehow manage to stay upright, and we go down a storm. All of the half-a-dozen shows are the same: all packed, all incredible. Genesis have taken off, finally. In Belgium at any rate.

  At home we’re still playing places like Farx, a club within a pub in Potters Bar, and another Farx on the Uxbridge Road, Southall. The latter is one of the very few shows my dad attends, it being close to Barbara Speake’s house, where my mum is living, and not far from Hounslow, where he’s staying for a last few months before permanently exiting for Weston-super-Mare.

  That said, my only recall of this is that of him actually attending. No other details present themselves; I have no memory of Dad saying, “Good job, son.” Perhaps he stuck it out just long enough to have a half-pint of bitter. I imagine he’s still of the opinion that I’m not amounting to much. It’s only a pub, and his youngest child appears to be playing in a musical group with little musicality that he can understand. Round about this time it is not unknown for us to play tunes that have no lyrics yet, and songs that are patently incomplete, and/or for Peter to simply sing random syllables.

  The audience don’t seem to notice. Are they so transported by our wonderful music? Or are they pissed? It’s probably as much to do with the fact that our used and abused PA is so knackered that no one’s able to discern any lyrics anyway. Poor Dad. No wonder he hardly ever comes. No wonder he fears for his son’s future.

  Eventually, though, despite the relentless pressure of playing gigs, these wordless tunes (and some meaningless words), plus some rather foggy musical passages, coalesce into new songs. Finally we’re ready to record my first album with the band, which means it’s time for this “new boy” to become a fully blooded member of Genesis.

  Ironically, this is also the moment my actual blood ties are stretched to breaking point. In June, Mum and Dad finally decide to sell 453 Hanworth Road. But here in summer 1971, a year on from my joining Genesis, band life rolls inexorably, distractingly on and we decamp to Luxford House in Crowborough, East Sussex. It’s Strat’s rented home, and also his suggestion: bands “getting it together in the country”—that is, writing some songs away from the hurly-burly of the city—is very much the in-thing. If it’s all right for Traffic and Led Zeppelin, it’s all right for Genesis.

  The house is a beautiful Tudor pile, a picture-postcard mansion with a decent outbuilding that will do for the songwriting sessions. We eat great meals prepared by one of the roadies, we drink red wine by the barrel, we repair to the rolling lawns to play croquet. This old-fashioned, upper-crust, very English game informs the sleeve art for the album that is about to become Nursery Cryme. Personally I find the illustrations, by Paul Whitehead (he’d done Trespass, too), a bit naff. But I’m outvoted, and he will also create the art for our next album, Foxtrot.

  When it comes to choosing rooms at Luxford House, once more the pecking order comes into play. Pete, Mike and Tony pick their sleeping arrangements first, and the new boys, Steve and I, get what’s left.

  Ultimately I’m not bothered, as there are more important things to think about—this will be the debut album by the new line-up of Genesis. We write “The Fountain of Salmacis” and “The Return of the Giant Hogweed.” I’m in my element, reveling in the creative freedom, the free flow of ideas, the scale of our ambition, the length of our songs. I feel emboldened and liberated, encouraged by the guys to contribute.

  There’s room for maneuver, too. Some writing sessions involve us gathering around Tony, sat at his Hammond organ, with Mike playing 12-string guitar and Peter improvising vocals. I’ll improvise along with him. Similarly, Peter writes “Harold the Barrel” on piano and I stand beside him, singing harmony and chipping in with ideas. I can bang out a few piano chords, though my insecurity is shouting: “They’ve heard this all before!” One thing I learn from writing with the guys is to never accept the first melody idea that you sing. Dig deeper, and play around with it. Explore. If you listen to The Beatles’ “She Loves You,” it’s a very simple chord sequence, but the melody that they put on top of that simplicity is beautifully crafted. I soak up all these tips and tricks from Peter, Mike and Tony, considerably more experienced writers to a man.

  A natural progression from these writing sessions is that the drummer sings a song. Not a long one, and it’s only the one song, but it’s a song. The moment arrives when Steve comes up with a pastoral guitar piece, and I write the words. To acquaint the guys with the lyrics and melody, I open my mouth and go for it…a bit. I’m not sure about this—to me, my voice sounds soft and tentative. But the guys like it, and that’s good enough for me. In the end “For Absent Friends,” at one minute and forty-four seconds, is strictly speaking more an “interlude” than a “song.” But it’s my first Genesis lead vocal.

  From that time, on every Genesis record, any voice you hear other than Peter’s, on backgrounds and harmonies, is me. The other boys are frankly just not very good singers. But I’m happy to sing, in the background, from the comfort of my stool.

  Nursery Cryme—recorded at Soho’s Trident with John Anthony, who produced Trespass—comes out in November 1971. It reaches number 4 in Italy
, making it the second European nation to embrace Genesis. We play the Italian capital’s Palazzetto dello Sport, a venue built for the 1960 Olympics that can hold 3,500 seated Romans, 10,000 standing, and they love us.

  This is the biggest place we’ve played, and we’ll play it for many years to come. The Italian audiences are extraordinary. Not only do they love us passionately, but they really “get” it. They whoop and applaud even a change of mood, something at which Genesis are adept—we can go from up-tempo to a whispered nothing to pastoral interlude, with barely a swish of our hair. No wonder the Italians are so enthusiastic about us: we’re an English band plumbing the operatic tradition.

  It’s a mutual love affair that will climax thirty years later, in 2007, when Genesis end the first leg of the Turn It On Again reunion tour with a free concert at Circo Massimo (Circus Maximus) in front of an estimated half a million people. As I’m passionate about Roman history, a venue where chariots once raced for the Emperor’s entertainment is, to me, the epitome of maximus rock’n’roll.

  But even in 1972 this Italian success is sensational, bigger than Belgium. Only eighteen months ago I was an end-of-the-line boy from Hounslow. And now this, international(ish) adoration. It doesn’t matter that in Britain we’re still not far from pub gigs, or gigs on beer crates, or both at once. Yes, back in the real world we’re still gigging in a van, normally rented from a dodgy firm in Kensington. The quality of a rented van will determine whether we will actually make the gig in time. We have a habit of breaking down en route. Sometimes multiple times. On the way to Aberystwyth University, we break down three times on the way there, arrive too late to play, then break down twice on the way back.