Superlatives
A Vulture series in which artists judge the best and worst of their own careers.
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In the beginning, when …
Just kidding.
Hes a master of the chords, never lacking a solo of epic proportions.
Its a wonderful 53-track set just dont expect it to stoke the idea of future projects.
I dont think theres anything else left.
The well is dry, Banks tells me.
We cant tour any more because of Phils state, so thats the end of that.
That was our era, and anything I do now tends to be independent of Genesis.
Ive been working a lot with orchestral music in the last few years.
As he should be.
Different eras, different singers, and different lineups have made less of a difference to me.
I carry on doing the next project.
Or make things less dependent on the big sound.
We returned to that again after, in a way, but it was an important album.
It hasnt ended up being one of my favorite albums for that reason.
A song like Abacab was a return to a different era when we were first starting off.
More of a rock thing.
I like songs that do that.
Those are the ones that give me the most pleasure.
Weirdest song
Who Dunnit?
Most of our audience just hated it.
But we rather enjoyed it.
We knew it was going to cause controversy.
I had this Prophet-5 that I abused to create that backing sound.
I think I played it so often that Mike and Phil felt they had to do something.
Phil went along and wrote thisridiculous lyricthat went with it very repetitive.
We vary between, I suppose, beauty and atmosphere, as well as a bit of musical accomplishment.
Its got none of those things, apart from just making you sit up and listen.
Some people also didnt like it because it meant that we kept off a few other pieces.
There was a song called You Might Recall, which ended up not being onAbacabbecause we had Who Dunnit?
It was a lovely traditional Genesis balance thing.
Solo that shouldve been longer
Most people would say the exact opposite.
Ive been criticized many times about my solos goingon and on.
My solos have always been instrumental passages.
Theyre like vocals with no vocals, so youre trying to build up a certain lot of time.
One of the first most significant solos I did was Apocalypse in 9/8 from Suppers Ready onFoxtrot.
The way I saw it was to start quite playful and slowly build a bit of menace into it.
I think it produced one of the strongest moments from the early Genesis catalogue.
Sometimes its as long as the others would let me.
I didnt do a single solo prior to the albumTrespass.
I didnt feel comfortable until then.
It opened a door for me.
I didnt feel I was a solo player at all.
It was just fun for me to work.
Im not a jazz guy.
I cant go out there and just play stuff.
I worry too much about the bum notes.
I dont really see myself as a virtuoso, but I do like my introduction to Firth of Fifth.
When I wrote it, it was a development from an idea I had rejected from theFoxtrotalbum.
I found a way of developing it that I thought was quite interesting.
I suppose thats always been a key thing from the early days.
Nerdiest song for keyboardists
Robbery, Assault and Battery was the most complex solo Ive ever done.
That was fun to do but its technical.
Its similar to Riding the Scree fromThe Lamb Lies Down on Broadway a very difficult thing to play.
For that reason theyre not necessarily the best songs.
The instruments we had made a difference.
Initially it was all written on piano and then we got a Hammond organ.
I also wrote quite a bit on guitar and those guitar parts I would transfer to two keyboards.
Take a song like Tonight, Tonight, Tonight.
It has that marimba on it, which sounds like milk bottles going all the way through it.
I just got my Akai sampler at the time and it had that marimba sound preloaded on it.
I put it through an echo box and it had this fantastic sound.
So I played a whole thing on that, and we wrote the song around it.
Song that deserves more acknowledgment
All of them.
Yeah, all of them.
The song that both Phil and I always rate as perhaps our favorite Genesis song is Duchess fromDuke.
I like it because it has a simple lyric the rise and fall of a female rock star.
Its the first time we ever used a rhythm machine and a drum box.
I think it has an incredible atmosphere.
I always thought it could have been a hit.
We did release it as a single at one point, but it didntget far.
So Id rate that as very underrated.
The tracks that arent given that attention are the longer ones.
Youd never hear Suppers Ready on the radio now.
Blood on the Rooftops is a lovely song and youll never hear it out of the album context.
Were lucky that 10 percent does get quite a bit of attention, but the other 90 percent doesnt.
There was a moment when we did a charity performance in 1982, and Peter came back to sing.
On that song, Peter went onto the drum kit for double duty, thinking,Thisll be easy.
Hesplaying alongevery fourth bar and theres an extra beat.
And sure enough hes looking at me and saying, What the hell is going on?
Because its not apparent that its an odd time signature.
It shouldnt be, really.
Its not like were Dave Brubeck trying to do funny time signatures for the sake of it.
Its just what came naturally to us.
Definitely on solo projects.
Its not like anybody else.
Its good to not be like anybody else.
If youre getting confused with another group too often, then what you did probably wasnt worth doing.
Most competitive album
Most of the time we battled it.
I tended to win the arguments, so I got a lot of my stuff on.
If you like Genesis, then thats quite a good thing, isnt it?
I know Steve sometimes found that his ideas werent considered as much as mine were.
We pulled all the ideas and normally agreed what would go on.
I said to Peter, I dont want After the Ordeal on this album.
I wasnt happy with it.
I think I was right in that particular argument.
The Cinema Show definitely had to be there and After the Ordeal didnt.
Ill tell you one argument that Im very glad I lost.
Peter was writing the lyrics and wanted to do something on it.
He sang on the first sequence and I thought,Oh, God, hes singing on that.
But then I realized,No, this is actually something rather good.
It ended up sounding fantastic.
Then he did the same thing on the final chords.
And I really thought,Oh God, not again.
Youre going to sing on my bit.
Hed done it at the end of The Musical Box.
But it was very effective.
Its always good when he does it thats whats even more irritating.
Another argument that happened later on was onWe Cant Dance.
A lot of people liked it.
Phil also didnt want it.
On the Shoreline is a really strong track, and I think it could have been a hit.
Most divisive album
Thats difficult.
At the time,The Lamb Lies Down on Broadwaywas a very mixed response.
It didnt sell very well and didnt get a great reaction.
Since then its considered something of a classic.
Its got some great moments on it but perhaps it doesnt quite deliver at the end.
From a fans point of view, its album to album.
Some people likeAbacaband some people hate it because of what it came before.
Some people didnt like anything after Peter left or after Steve left.
Im happy with all the records.
I can always listen back to an old track and get a lot of pleasure from it.
I can talk about tracks that no ones ever heard.
It didnt work at all.
It ended up being a B-side of a B-side, so that wasnt too important.
I never liked After the Ordeal, which was a nice enough piece when Steve wrote it.
But I put this pseudo-classical piano on it that I dont like, so I dont listen to it.
Proudest year with the band
Im going to give you two years.
The first one would be 1972, when we first played a venue called the Rainbow Theatre in London.
It was the first time wed ever used any real visual effects.
We just had this curtain behind us, which wed flukily shine a UV light on it.
It suddenly came alive and had an extraordinary look.
We played a show there and it was one of the first times we did Suppers Ready on stage.
We did four nights at Wembley Stadium, which is around 80,000 people.
I felt that was probably going to be the peak of our career.
We were never going to have it better than this.
And it probably was.
It was very, very exciting to be in that position.
Im not really a performer.
Im just up there.
For our 2007 reunion tour, we played at the Circus Maximus.
It was a free concert and we were playing to about half a million people.
That was pretty extraordinary and nerve-wracking.
We recorded it as well, which didnt help, but we got through it.
We were able to go on stage when it was dark.
When we did Rome it was dark all the way through.
Phil Collins song you wish he gave to Genesis
In the Air Tonight.
Theres always a dispute about this.
Phil reckoned he played it to me when we were choosing songs forDuke.
We always knew we wanted Misunderstanding and hey Dont Ask, so he took those for us.
I think theres such a great atmosphere about In the Air Tonight.
But if Genesis had done it, Id have probably screwed it up.
I bet I wouldve added another chord or tried to do something with it and taken it somewhere else.
Thats my favorite of his songs and always has been.
Its a great piece of music with the greatest drum riff of all time.
I didnt like the puppet of Prince putting mustard on his tongue.
I couldnt help but turn away, but I wouldnt say I found any of it particularly terrifying.
I thought it was wittily done.
The funniest thing wasSpitting Imagealready had a puppet of Phil.
So they had to create a new puppet with eyes for the video.
Puppets for Mike and I were created especially for the video and then sold the day afterwards.
And I said, Why do I want it?
Theres someone out there weird enough to want a puppet of me and thats fine.
I think the best thing about the video was thatwe werent in it.
It won a Grammy the only Grammy weve ever had.
And were not in it, which is quite funny.
Its funny what gets awards; I dont really understand it.
Your thoughts on Genesis being a long-running torture unit onTop Gear
Top Gearwas a fun show.
Ive met Jeremy Clarkson and James May, both of whom like Genesis a lot.
Ive never met Richard.
Its like General Noriega being played rock music to get him out of his palace.
Yeah, I think its great.
He didnt choose a Genesis song.
I thought, Well, come on, man.
I never got invited to the Test Track, but I would never do that thing, anyhow.
Whats great about it was Mike actually holds the record for theslowest roundon theTop Gearcircuit.
I always believe I couldve done better than that, but Im never going to do it.
I venture to avoid doing anything thats outside of the music industry.
Im a musician and thats my main strength, you know what I mean?
