The Living Years

by Mike Rutherford

  * * *

  We never intended to own a brothel. I wonder how Dad would have felt.

  One of my ploys at the places we visited was to have an outing with the local Provost Marshal to see the types of evening entertainment available to ship’s companies – bars, beer halls and the brothels. As regards the brothels, those at places like Singapore were beyond description, Hong Kong better but in Japan they followed the French system.

  The houses were properly run and supervised by the police; they were pleasantly set out and presented, the girls in Japanese or western dress were attractive enough and face was much in evidence in that for a client to be robbed or done over would be an unforgivable stain on the house’s reputation and most shaming.

  Also, in the case of seafaring men, it would mean loss of face for their clients to be late on board so it was quite a usual sight in the morning to see girls urging their clients along to the ships, occasionally looking at the man’s wrist watch.

  As I did my rounds of several houses it occurred to me that while it was one thing to be an ageing Captain, accompanied by a Provost Marshal, making an official inspection, had I been the young officer of a few years ago with a few quid in my pocket and a few drinks under my belt, it was a moot point whether my researches might not have been a bit deeper.

  * * *

  The brothel was in Dallas, which in the early eighties was like lots of American cities – blighted, full of crime and drugs. But Dallas was also home to Showco, the tour production company we used, and so that’s where we’d spend several weeks rehearsing at the start of each tour.

  At some point someone in governmental office had come up with a plan for a new rail transport system in an attempt to rejuvenate parts of the city and increase land prices. One of the directors of Showco, spotting an investment opportunity, persuaded us to go in with him and so that’s how we ended up owning a car park in Dallas and a small hotel run by a guy called The Chinaman. Thinking about it, his name should probably have been a clue, but The Chinaman always paid his rent on time and in cash so no questions got asked. He had a good run of five years or so before anyone got wise to the fact that he was running a whorehouse.

  Since we’d started working with Showco, the days of Les Adey and his shaking hands were well and truly over. We’d always tried to paint a picture on stage and as the venues we played got bigger, production got more important. We wanted to engage every single person who came to see us, even if they were in the highest row of a 20,000-seat arena.

  Special effects until this point had still been quite primitive. They also had a fatal flaw in that they were operated by people. One of our early laser operators spent ages lying on his stomach above a laser only to realize he was facing the wrong way and his beam had been burning a hole in the wall behind him. The laser geeks didn’t integrate very well either: the roadies never did like them and they once left one at an airport tied to a pillar by his own rucksack straps.

  We felt that we’d been on to something with the mirrors we’d had back in 1978 for Knebworth (as the Daily Express loved pointing out, they each weighed twenty tons, cost £50,000, and contributed significantly to our £25,000 a day running costs – like the TV documentaries, the newspapers couldn’t get enough of the figures). But the problem with the mirrors was that the light that we shone up at them from follow spots got dissipated on the way back down. Once again, we would have to rely on operators to direct the spots themselves. When we had played at local halls in America with union guys at the controls, this meant we’d inevitably end up with Tony brilliantly lit for my solos and vice versa.

  Lights that moved automatically and changed colour were the dream, and one that Rusty Brutsché of Showco shared. Until now coloured lights relied on gel filters, which burnt out with the heat from the bulbs behind them. The dichroic filters that Jim Bornhorst invented for his new VARI*LITE lighting kept cool, which was not only a technical breakthrough but also a bonus for us, standing under them. It wasn’t too bad for me but Chester was bald and sat on a drum riser at the back of the stage: he’d often complain that he was starting to feel a little bubble going on up top.

  VARI*LITE lighting may have stayed cold but they weren’t climate-proof: when Rusty came over to The Farm in December 1981 to demonstrate them to us it was a freezing cold day. We were out in the old wooden barn and the lights took forever to fire up – but when they did start to work, they were fantastic.

  The visuals and lighting had always been something that Tony and I loved. At some point, the two of us even discussed making an office version of the VARI*LITE. (The idea was that because VARI*LITE lighting didn’t generate extra heat, companies would be able to save on air-conditioning costs – this being an era when empty offices in Dallas still left their lights burning all night.)

  Tony and I would often have our differences musically but when it came to visuals, never: we both shared the same strong sense of what we wanted and what would work. Because Phil was less interested in that side of things, it always made for a natural division of labour when we were rehearsing. We would go back to our hotel each night and Tony and I would work with our lighting director, Alan Owen, on new looks; meanwhile, Phil went to his room to listen to the day’s tapes and make notes on the sound mix.

  With VARI*LITE, however, all of us saw the potential. We put up a few hundred thousand dollars for research and development, and then spent the next few years as guinea pigs at the mercy of lights that would suddenly start smoking or spinning round like they were possessed. During the whole of the Abacab tour, I would be aware of crew padding backwards and forwards across the truss above me to deal with a light that was freaking out: the technicians would either unplug it or take a hammer to it. The funny thing was that both methods seemed to work equally as well.

  But as the problems got ironed out, other bands started to see that we were setting the standard.VARI*LITE lighting had revolutionized the industry and because they weren’t commercially available, the only option was to rent them from us. By the early eighties the Stones were hiring ourVARI*LITE rigs for their world tours. I’m sure that a lot of cheques made payable to Genesis were written through gritted teeth.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  For me, the first side of the album Genesis is pretty high on the list of the best things we’ve done.

  Duke had been a bit of a rebirth for us as a band in that although we’d each brought a couple of individually written songs into the studio, the strongest ones were the ones we’d written as a group. (Group written songs were always the favourites on an album too, simply because we’d all had a hand in them.) Abacab had proved to be a transitional album, but a necessary one. I always felt that one of our strengths as a band was to go a bit too far off in one direction, realize that we had, and then get back on course again. Looking back, Abacab was one of our off-piste moments, and maybe that’s because even on that album there had been some individually written songs.

  All of the songs on Genesis were written as a group, hence the title. When we went into the studio in May 1983, none of the songs were already written.

  We went in, plugged in, took a deep breath . . . and began to play. Although we didn’t know it at the time, this would be the start of a wonderful roll that would last for almost ten years.

  The making of Genesis would set the pattern for the albums that followed it. We’d go into The Farm with nothing, sometimes having not worked together for a year or more, and plunge into the unknown. Compared to other bands it was a weird way of working and there’d always be a nice kind of fear about it. What were we going to do? Would it work? But always, even by the end of day one, it felt natural. Better than that, when we were making the next few albums the music flowed out so fast that we couldn’t keep up.

  I’ve always felt that the only way to have any integrity in music is to do what inspires you and what you like, and to not worry about what’s going to happen when the record comes out. When we were touring Abacab, we’d been booed
in Holland by a bunch of old hippies when we’d played ‘Who Dunnit?’. It was a sonically bizarre, angular song, which we loved and everybody else hated. But what people didn’t get was that we weren’t trying to be punk: that song was a punk pastiche. Also, from our point of view, our set was pretty intense and quite technically challenging, and ‘Who Dunnit?’ was simply a bit of a break. I played drums on it and Tony even wore a frogman’s mask. And yet those old Dutch hippies still couldn’t tell that they weren’t supposed to take the song seriously.

  There would always be talk of ‘old fans’ and ‘new fans’, but in the studio there were no fans. We just went in and jammed and improvised, and the songs came out the way they came out. None of us were in control. Nevertheless, the way the songs came out on Genesis – long songs with long, long solos – meant that even at the time it felt like an album that the old fans would enjoy.

  ‘Home by the Sea’ was a dark, moody, two-part, eleven-minute thing (the second part was called ‘Second Home by the Sea’). It’d got size, it’d got grandeur, it’d got everything. We knew how to do pieces like this by now. It was like a classical piece and when we played it live the automatedVARI*LITE truss would break up into diamond-shaped pieces and descend on the stage, moving around and beaming down green light. This may not sound so special now thatVARI*LITE lights are everywhere, but at the time it was one of our most iconic looks.

  ‘Mama’, the best song on the album, was seven minutes long. The tune had begun with a drum loop I’d written in the soundproofed spare bedroom at home. I put it through my Boogie amplifier and distorted it so much that it nearly fell off the stand. That was something an American musician would never do, I always thought. Take a sound and really fuck it up.

  We had got the drum pattern playing in the studio and Tony started with his dark, low sustained chords, and then we just jammed on it for half an hour, recording as we were playing. We had known that if we caught the song as it came into being we might catch some magic. This was why we had wanted a studio of our own – to catch that spontaneous magic – and with ‘Mama’ we succeeded. Quite a lot of the final song came from that first, original jam.

  The evil laugh was Phil’s idea. He had said he wanted to do something like ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster Flash. Phil was always more musically aware than Tony and me, and would get out and see bands much more than we did. Tony and I never really left the house musically in the same way as Phil (although our solo albums had cured the agoraphobia: we could at least now go past the front door). I saw our insularity as a strength: when we played and wrote together we realized how unique each one of us was musically, and how unique we sounded as a band.

  ‘Mama’ was too brave for American radio, but I was very gratified when it came out in the UK and went straight to number 4. It was such an uncommercial song, given its length, but it really caught the public.

  With Genesis, I was now achieving what I wanted to achieve without having to try so hard. It was also the first album where I felt I’d got into decent lead playing, purely because I’d been doing it for so long. It was the same as had happened in the early years with Phil’s voice: you couldn’t go faster than you could go.

  The slight shame was that I was now playing a Steinberger guitar, which looked odd on stage. It was tiny – just a bit of carbon fibre and some strings – and it had a small sound too, although that was why I had wanted to use it. If everything on a song is big – a big bass, a big bass drum, a big guitar sound – then you’re left with no space. For our music, the beauty of the Steinberger sound was because it was small enough to fit into the narrow band that was left, it sounded big as well.

  It did make me look like I was playing a banjo, though. On stage I used to feel like George Formby. (That’s why I designed the MR1 Steinberger: the first to be shaped like a proper guitar.)

  * * *

  Genesis went to number 1 in the UK, the same position as Abacab. That previous album had been our first official number 1, but unofficially we’d probably had several number 1s by this point. The problem was that previously we’d always fallen victim to the fact that sales were calculated according to the returns figures supplied by record shops. Because our cult following mostly raced out to buy our albums in the first week of release, the record shops would be overwhelmed and unable to register all the sales they were making. At least that’s what I believed. It was only as barcodes had come in at the start of the eighties that sales figures were beginning to be more accurate.

  Between Genesis and Abacab we’d also released a live album, Three Sides Live, which had got to number 2. It was while we were touring this that we reformed with Pete and Steve at Milton Keynes. For one night only.

  * * *

  By 1982 Peter had made four solo albums and also started the WOMAD festival. It was a huge undertaking: very well intentioned but a financial nightmare. Pete always had innovative ideas – he was a brave character – but he wasn’t very realistic sometimes with the detail. After WOMAD he had ended up so far in debt that he was even getting death threats (although I didn’t know about them at the time).

  Being honourable, Pete had promised to pay everyone back, personally if necessary, and so when the idea of helping him with a fundraising reunion show came up there was no deliberation. We decided straightaway to make it happen. Given that we were in the middle of a forty-date UK tour ourselves, this was a logistical nightmare – did I say Pete wasn’t very realistic sometimes? He wasn’t the only one. In the end we had only a few days of rehearsals at the Odeon Hammersmith, playing songs that, in a few cases, we hadn’t played for years.

  I can honestly say that I wasn’t aware of how much the fans would like seeing us all together again. That was one of my main reasons for not wanting the Milton Keynes Six of the Best show to be filmed. In retrospect it was one of my worst decisions.

  As a band we were very serious about quality control – rightly so, I think – and I knew at the time that our performance was going tobe a bit substandard, purely because of the lack of time we’d had to rehearse. My logic was that if you were there on the night it would be fantastic, but if you saw it again a couple of years later and it looked a bit shoddy and sounded bad, it would spoil the memory.

  As it turned out it was special. It was only later that I realized how good it would have been to have a record of it for the fans, and also how special the whole thing had been for me personally, too.

  At the start of the show Jonathan King introduced us and Pete came on in a coffin. It was very Pete. We started with ‘Back in New York City’, which was quite brave – beginning with a bang – and ended with ‘The Knife’, which was fun. It took us back to those early club days with Pete swinging his microphone up in the air.

  It was hearing Pete sing the old songs again that made me appreciate what an amazing job Phil had done – how he now carried them so well. Over the past few years Phil had got a crack in his voice, a throaty rattle, and they were as much his songs now as they ever were Pete’s.

  Pete was never a match for Phil’s drumming, though, much as it frustrated him. When we came to play ‘Turn It On Again’, Pete suddenly decided he would play alongside Chester on Phil’s kit. Like everyone else, what Pete hadn’t realized was that ‘Turn It On Again’ was in 13/8 time, which made it like a merry-go-round: he’d think he had got to the end and suddenly we would be off again. He spent the whole song trying to work that one out, but I’d much rather someone put some passion in and make a mess than get everything note perfect. Plus as a band we always quite enjoyed those moments when someone fucked up.

  ‘Man on the Corner’ from Abacab was a good example: the first beat wasn’t in the obvious place. Until Phil told us where it was, Tony and I were lost. Once you knew where it was the riff felt beautiful, but part of the charm of playing it live was watching Tony trying to work it out in his head: he usually had to get Chester to give him the count. (The one thing about Tony’s mistakes is that he’ll never hold his hands up if he gets i
t wrong. I’ll always own up but Tony’s technique is to look at me over the top of his keyboard and growl so that I immediately start thinking it’s me that has messed up. He used to do it to Phil too, and it was ages before the two of us were on to him.)

  Steve joined us for a few songs at the end but there’s little else I remember about Milton Keynes. It poured with rain the whole night, and it was my birthday too so the crowd sang to me. Backstage was a quagmire with everyone in wellingtons and we all had a glass of champagne to toast the moment, but the whole evening was like a dream, really. It remains one of those things that you look back on and wish you’d taken in more. The problem for me was that life was now so busy there was no time to pause and reflect, which was one of the reasons why I hadn’t thought about how much the fans would like seeing us back together again. When you’re as busy as we were, it’s hard to get outside the moment enough to consider other points of view or even other people. And therein lay a real problem – not that I saw it at the time.

  * * *

  The Mama tour for Genesis was when we got our first private plane. This might sound great, but somehow it wasn’t quite how you might imagine it: this was entry-level jet setting. The plane cabin was okay but the cockpit was like something out of M*A*S*H: everything was khaki coloured. One night we were playing Cincinnati and our tour manager, Andy Mackrill, and I were walking past the bar in the hotel where we were staying. Like half the bars in America it was too dark to see anything properly, but I thought I vaguely recognized a face in the gloom. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked Andy, squinting at a swaying character who was obviously just about to slide off his stool. ‘Oh,’ said Andy. He did a double take. ‘Oh. That’s the pilot.’

  We were playing New York on that tour and Angie had flown out to visit and brought Kate and Tom with her. This wasn’t unusual as our children travelled the world from a young age. We thought it was a great education for them, but they also had to learn to fit in with the band rather than vice versa. When we were flying between cities, we’d plonk their Moses baskets at the back of the cabin and they’d just have to stay there and sleep. You can be quite tough with children, really; it wasn’t much different from my father making Nicky and I park our tricycles neatly inside the painted white lines on Whale Island.