Not Dead Yet

by Phil Collins

  But bless the fans, they do their best. By the time the ninety-minute spectacular finishes, with two versions of Peter onstage for the closing number “it.” (a song whose title is lower-case, italicized and accessorized with a full stop), everyone is seeing double. We triumph, but not in the way we would have, had the music been known and the plot more accessible.

  The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway tour will become mythologized, not least in This Is Spinal Tap. This tour would be perfect fodder for the scriptwriters and actors. When that pod doesn’t open? I’ve been there, stuck on a stage with malfunctioning props and an irate guitarist. Is it perhaps no coincidence that Derek Smalls, Spinal Tap’s bass player, is a ringer for Steve Hackett at this time?

  Out front, we occasionally play to half-full houses. In the back, Peter has his own dressing room, with make-up and a mirror, and the four of us are welcome visitors. He’s no prima donna, but there are a lot of record company guys coming into the dressing room afterward, huffing and puffing, “Great show, Pete!”

  Their blowing dry ice up his arse also gets up Tony’s nose, and mine too. Peter is being viewed as the glorious architect. Genesis are in danger of being overshadowed by him. That said, I don’t remember Peter ever taking the bait of stardom. Backstage, despite his separate dressing room, he remained one of us.

  Finally, France and, to everyone’s relief, the end of the tour. Just before we go onstage in Besançon, a small, inauspicious town close to the Swiss border, Tony Smith tells us that the last gig, in Toulouse, is canceled due to lack of interest. This seems to sum it up. So the penultimate show, in Besançon, becomes the last show. It suddenly dawns on us: this is more than likely our last time performing the likes of “The Colony of Slippermen” and “Here Comes the Supernatural Anaesthetist.” It’s our last gig with Peter. It’s the last time we’ll see him crawling through a big cock. It is May 22, 1975.

  Peter plays “The Last Post” on his oboe. It’s all rather anticlimactic. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and, finally, it doesn’t get up again. And then there were four.

  Do I resent Peter for leaving? Absolutely not. Personally, he and I are as close as we were when I joined Genesis five years previously, and for all the difficulties and unwitting comedy of the Lamb tour, I’ve enjoyed myself. Professionally, if anything, the challenges have bonded the rest of us even more closely. There’s never any question of Tony, Mike, Steve and me calling it a day. The four of us are committed to carrying on. We don’t know how. But we will. So we need a new singer and frontman. We’ll cross that Rubicon when we come to it.

  We all amicably agree to keep schtum about Peter’s departure for as long as possible. We want to be ready, with new material, before word gets out.

  And The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, now? It’s one of the few Genesis albums I can put on and be surprised by, not that I can ever remember having listened to it in its entirety. But it’s a high-water mark for the band in some respects, and even the Spinal Tap reference is a compliment, backhanded or otherwise. To quote Peter’s final lines onstage with Genesis: “It’s only rock’n’roll, but I like it.”

  As for me, I’m excited about what tomorrow might bring. After all, I now have other, personal obligations. On the Canadian leg of the Selling England by the Pound tour, I had reconnected with an old flame, and was delighted to discover she came with a plus-one: an infant daughter.

  We’re halfway through the seventies. The decade began with me finding a band, continued with me losing my dad, and now, at its midpoint, has me recast, out of nowhere, as a family man.

  Or: trying to keep everyone happy. Results: mixed

  Pause, rewind, reflect.

  It is March 1974, fourteen months before Peter leaves Genesis. The Selling England by the Pound tour rolls into Vancouver for a show at the Garden Auditorium. I’m twenty-three and I’m excited: this city on Canada’s distant Pacific coast is where Andrea Bertorelli, my on/off/on teenage girlfriend, now lives.

  Andy, you’ll recall, was in my year at Barbara Speake’s Stage School. Being childhood sweethearts, we spent a lot of time at each other’s family homes. I loved Andy’s mum, and would happily hang out at the Bertorellis’ whenever the opportunity arose. The Bertorellis were part of the famous London restaurant family of the same name, and both Mr. and Mrs. B. were fantastic cooks. The after-dinner refreshment was equally welcome: they didn’t mind their daughter’s boyfriend sleeping over. I was already part of the family.

  In the late sixties, as Andy and I went our separate ways—courtesy, as usual, of my going back out with Lavinia Lang—so did our wider familial ties. After Andy’s father died, her mother rekindled a friendship with a Canadian air force officer, once stationed in wartime Godalming, Surrey, married him, then emigrated to Vancouver. Andy, her sister Francesca, a Playboy bunny, and her brother John went with her.

  By spring ’74 I haven’t seen Andy for three or four years. I know some of her news, though. Mrs. Bertorelli writes to my mum, and Mum relays that Andy had gone off into the wilderness, met someone, lived in a cabin for a short while, fell pregnant and was then abandoned by the father. Andy returned to the family home in Vancouver, and on August 8, 1972—two years to the day after I’d joined Genesis—had a baby daughter named Joely Meri Bertorelli.

  Ahead of the band’s arrival in Vancouver, I call to invite the Bertorelli family to the show. Andy’s mum, hospitable to the last, insists that I stay with them during my brief stopover in the city. It’s a wonderful reunion. I gladly accept Mrs. B.’s invitation to eat with the family. I meet the Canadian stepdad, Joe, a keen tenpin bowler (I will sponsor his team many years later), and I meet sixteen-month-old Joely, a little peach. We haven’t even finished dessert before old feelings between Andy and I start to flicker and flare.

  She’s a beautiful young lady, with a beautiful body too. She’s ragingly sexy, which is why she was good at breaking hearts. I have to confess that large chunks of the lyrics to Genesis’ 1986 song “Invisible Touch” were written about her.

  Andy’s pleased, I’m pleased, and Mrs. B. is pleased—she always wanted me for a son-in-law. By the time Genesis leave Vancouver, Andy and I are once again a couple. And I am, I suppose, a father. Life has changed, quickly, but I don’t look back or sideways. Andy has a piece of my heart from school. She has a daughter? I don’t think twice about it.

  The next show is in New York, six days later, back at the Philharmonic Hall, so I’m on the move again quicksmart. But over the following month we stay in touch by phone, falling in love all over again. My life has reset, both to my teenage days, but also to the future.

  The tour loops back toward New York, where it ends with the three scheduled nights at the Academy of Music. Andy joins me. Joely sleeps in the bed between us, and I remember her looking at me, as if to say, “What are you doing here?”

  It’s been less than six weeks since our reunion in Vancouver, and we have decided: we are getting back together, and Andy is returning to the U.K. with me. I’ve gone off on tour a single man and I’ve come back hitched, and a dad. We are a family and I couldn’t be happier.

  Back in England, Genesis have a month off before we start writing and recording the album/concept/vision/milestone/millstone that will become The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Before long, Andy and Joely join me in my rented one-bedroom flat in Epsom. We’ll discover that it’s not a great place for a young family. Mercifully, we soon relocate to Headley Grange…where we’re confronted by the horrific sight of all those rats in that stinky old house. I don’t have time to dwell on the conditions, as I’m immediately plunged into work. Which is fine by me, of course—I’m working and my new family is going to be with me. But what is it like for Andy and Joely? They’ve been uprooted from a family home on the other side of the world, dropped down into the chaos of a band, then left to their own devices, with nothing to do except sit on the grass and count the rats. Daunting, overwhelming, frightening—take your pick.

  This is not the best of environments
for partners, to say the least. As Peter will find out with his (literally) embryonic family, within Genesis there is no such thing as compassionate leave or family time. We work evenings, weekends, any or all of the Sabbaths. Then, habitually, we up sticks and work some more. That’s the way it is.

  As ill fortune has it, recording The Lamb pretty much overlaps with touring The Lamb, so things in Genesis world are even more frenetic than normal. Bearing in mind the chaos, and the cost of the show, Andy and Joely are unable to join me on tour anywhere near as much as we’d like. From the outset of our relationship she’s being forced to be alone. From day one she’s a rock’n’roll widow. However, I don’t recall this seeming to affect Mike or Tony, or their partners; they seem omnipresent. Maybe I just wasn’t assertive enough.

  We manage to move out of the Epsom pit, to a house in Queen Anne’s Grove in Ealing. But we have to wait until the following year, till the end of the Lamb tour, to be married, which we are at East Acton Registry Office. The beautiful bride wears white, the groom a carnation, neatly trimmed beard and brand-new Converse All Star sneakers, bought specially. True to form, there’s no time for a honeymoon.

  Meanwhile, with Peter having left, Genesis still have to solve the tricky problem of finding a singer. We place an advertisement in Melody Maker: “Singer wanted for Genesis-type group,” the wording, we hope, artfully maintaining secrecy, while also throwing the press off the scent.

  The lore is that we receive 400 replies to the ad. I don’t believe that figure, but maybe Tony Smith’s office sifted out more chaff from the wheat than I know.

  I do know we get all sorts. Tapes by the bucketloads. Guys singing along to our records. Playing guitar to our songs. Some guys doing a bit of piano, bit of this, bit of that. Some people send tapes of them singing over Frank Sinatra or Pink Floyd. We whittle them down to a presentable bunch before we start auditioning.

  Simultaneously, we’re squirreled away in Maurice Plaquet’s basement in Churchfield Road, East Acton, familiar to me from my brief drum-lesson days. We dive into the songwriting for the band’s seventh album, our first as a four-piece, though Steve is missing initially while he adds the finishing touches to his first solo album, Voyage of the Acolyte. My sense is that he wanted more of a shout as a songwriter—Tony, Mike and Peter monopolized the writing of the material for the band, and frankly they wrote better stuff than Steve. Better stuff than me, for sure. But up until The Lamb, I’ve barely been writing at all, so I have no issues. Steve, though, wants an outlet, so, without any grumbles or dissension from us, he plows a solo furrow. Mike and I even play on Voyage of the Acolyte, and I obligingly sing lead vocal on “Star of Sirius.” It’s all quite amicable.

  Even working without Steve at first, to our huge relief it’s clear quite quickly that we’re going to be OK without Peter. The songs are coming like the old days, and it’s good stuff. We have “Dance on a Volcano” even before Steve rejoins us. “Squonk” and “Los Endos” follow, a strong opening salvo for the album we will title A Trick of the Tail.

  Then, disaster: another Peter front page in Melody Maker—“Gabriel Quits Genesis.” News has leaked before we’ve had time to regroup.

  The whisper in muso circles is that this means the end of Genesis. Of course it does: how can any band survive the loss of a frontman, especially one as charismatic and creative as Peter Gabriel? We have to move fast, in case the idea of us as a dead duck gains a traction from which we can never free ourselves.

  All the accompanying press and available facts help bolster the opinion that Genesis are finished as a going concern. Just prior to this, in October 1975, before we’ve had a chance to even start recording A Trick of the Tail, Steve’s album comes out. Also not helping matters is the fact that I choose this period to start seeing another band.

  My on/off affair with Brand X begins in late 1974 when I get a call from Richard Williams. The former Melody Maker writer is now head of A&R at Island Records. He tells me he has an interesting group, a jam band he’s not long signed, and they’re looking for a new drummer.

  I join them for rehearsals, and we have some fun. At the time Brand X are more funk than jazz. They have a singer, but for much of the time there’s nothing for him to do, so he jumps on the congas (with a shudder and the sudden specter of Phil Spector, I empathize). There’s lots of improvising around a groove and one chord. Hours of it.

  Nonetheless, I like these guys, and I like the freedom they offer, so I agree to join Brand X on a part-time basis, even though I don’t really know what I’m joining. There are no gigs and only distant rumors of a record. But eventually the guitarist and the singer say their farewells to do something else, leaving bass player Percy Jones, keyboardist Robin Lumley, guitarist John Goodsall and me.

  When the four of us instrumentalists start playing, Brand X become a whole different thing. These are the days of fusion and jazz-rock, some of which is definitely too noodly and self-indulgent for me. But we will make a few interesting records, notably the first two, Unorthodox Behaviour (1976) and Moroccan Roll (1977).

  But right now, in the autumn of 1975, the members of the Peter-less Genesis are all-for-one-and-one-for-all united. Our defiant feeling is: we’ll show them. All Peter, was it? He wrote everything, did he? Well, just because the fox’s head is gone, doesn’t mean we are. We might have to find a singer, but the new material he’ll have to work with is great. Rumors of Genesis’ death have been very much exaggerated.

  We step up a gear, and every Monday at Churchfield Road we audition four or five potential singers. I teach them the vocal parts, singing along while Steve, Tony and Mike quietly play the music. We choose a few pieces that might indicate their talents. Selling England by the Pound track “Firth of Fifth” is one, and “The Knife” from Trespass, another—a couple of touchstones to show range and quality. Just snippets, but even so these ask a lot of any would-be frontman. We have to do it this way: we’re a demanding band, and Peter’s are big boots to fill.

  We’re not just looking for someone with the vocal chops. We’re asking ourselves, will he be a good writing partner? What will he bring to the band? We’re trying to suss out whether we want this person in our family. Because right now Genesis, with our backs against the wall, are very tight. A band of brothers.

  I begin to enjoy these Monday routines, having the opportunity to sing. It’s always been a given that on this album I might front a couple of the acoustic songs—“Entangled,” say, or “Ripples.” But I know I’m not ever going to be able to pull off “Squonk,” “Dance on a Volcano” or any of the heavier material.

  Yet this isn’t an issue: we need a new singer, and are doing our damnedest to find one. It doesn’t occur to me—or to any of the guys—that I’m even remotely frontman material.

  Not least, of course, because we’ve just come off The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway: a big, bold double album with a lot of singing—a lot of elaborate singing—and with a theatrical production to match. How on earth would I scale that cliff? I couldn’t. And frankly, I have no interest in scaling that cliff. I’m happy at the back.

  Equally, I’m still ready to pull out my joker: I’d rather be in an instrumental band than take over the microphone. Unfortunately that idea is, again, quickly shot down. Tony and Mike have long had aspirations to be songwriters—that is, songs with lyrics, lyrics that need to be sung. More than that: they want to write hit songs, singles that will reach the pop charts. They’ve always wanted that; always wanted to write like The Kinks and The Beatles. You can’t do that if your band doesn’t have a singer, or lyrics, or choruses.

  It’s a development of some irony that it takes almost ten years for their songwriting skills to “mature” and come up with hit singles—exactly coinciding with another emerging reality: I’m becoming the singer-by-default, in the basement of Churchfield Road at least.

  Every night I’m going home to Andy.

  “Find a singer yet?”

  “No. No one that meets the requirements.�
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  We audition for five or six weeks. We’ve seen about thirty guys. It’s starting to become tedious. With the clock ticking—unsurprisingly, there’s already talk of another tour—we have no option but to commit to studio time. At least we’ve written some strong material.

  We go into Trident with a new co-producer, Dave Hentschel, and record at a cracking pace. I’m most involved with “Los Endos,” which I model on the groove of Santana’s “Promise of a Fisherman,” from his just-released jazz-fusion album Borboletta. “Squonk” is really Zeppelin-esque. And there’s “Robbery, Assault and Battery,” proving there’s still a place for the “story” songs for which Genesis are known.

  We’re really pleased with these songs. They’re sounding strong, fresh and a bit different. We feel like a new band, and we’re sounding like it.

  Then we’re briskly back to business, dividing up the backing tracks and deciding who’s writing lyrics for which song. There’s added time pressure now, because the tracks are recorded and there’s still no singer. That said, we finally agree to let one vocalist past the front door. Mick Strickland is a bit better than the rest, and we ask him into Trident to have a crack. We give him “Squonk” to sing. The very first line of that vocal is a bitch: “Like father, like son…” We don’t ask his key or his range. We just give it to him. Take it away…

  Poor guy. It’s not remotely his key. We have to say, “Thank you and goodbye…” Looking back, I feel bad for Mick. I’ve been that soldier that has to sing the song in the key I’m given. In those days, though, we didn’t even consider that an issue.

  But “Squonk” is new and it’s a groove I like. More pertinently, right now we’ve no other option, nothing left to lose, and there are studio hours racking up. So I say, “How about I have a go?” And the rest of the guys shrug: “Might as well.”