The Living Years (16 page)

Over the years, I must have developed quite a convincing poker face.

* * *

I’ve always thought that politics and music should be separate. If you bang people on the head lyrically, it’s not as effective as making suggestions and painting pictures. Protest songs have rarely worked for me. Although our fourth album,
Selling England by the Pound
, had a Labour Party slogan as its title and was partly about increasing commercialization and the sense that something was being lost, our music was still more about moods and atmospheres. Perhaps that’s why we’ve always connected well with northern, industrial towns. You might think we would be university-town material, with our thinking man’s lyrics, but in fact it was the towns with industrial histories – Bradford, Leeds, Hull, Halifax – who took to us most. I often felt our music was a form of escapism.

The next album was difficult to write because
Foxtrot
had been so successful. We wrote
Selling England
in Chessington, in the big, old country house of a doctor. There was a massive oak tree in the garden outside the window – the leaves hanging down, the boughs sagging – and every time I saw it, I had a little moment of recognition. It seemed to be a mirror of how it felt to be making the record.

Our songwriting methods had come on since
Foxtrot
. Instead of writing bits and joining them together we were now writing more out of improvisations and group jams. The trouble with
Selling England
is that the jams never really fired up. When you’d jammed all afternoon and you’d got nowhere, it’d get a bit demoralizing. Which is probably why I spent so long staring out of the window at that bloody tree.

Selling England
wasn’t my favourite album but ‘Cinema Show’ was a real standout moment. The second half of the song was the start of a new phase between me and Tony. The rhythm was 7/8, which feels different but doesn’t sound clever-clever. I’m moving around chords, Tony’s reacting and improvising over them, and between the two of us we’re coming up with something that would go on to be the essence of the Genesis sound for the next twenty years. And the drumming’s great, too.

When we played the song live, Pete and Steve would leave the stage at the end so it was just me, Tony and Phil. It was so strong and it was just the three of us. Although I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, I think that must have been something I stored away in my memory: the knowledge of what the three of us could do.

‘More Fool Me’ was a song that Phil and I wrote, and which Phil would sing on stage. It was the first thing Phil and I had written together, and although Phil had come into the band with no desire to write, it felt easy, intuitive. Nothing was ever laboured with Phil: he’d work fast, he’d write fast, he’d record fast. He was completely opposite to the rest of us. The first time that Phil came out front from behind his drum kit to sing, he put on a white jacket which, because he was wearing white dungarees, made him look like a painter, but from the word go people liked Phil. Before he even sang a note, people cheered.

God knows how, but we also ending up writing a hit single, ‘I Know What I Like’, which got to number 17. Suddenly – only four years late –
Top of the Pops
came knocking.

We turned them down, of course: we were an albums band, not a singles band, and there was no crossover at all in that era.
Top of the Pops
was for singles bands like Mud, Sweet, Pickettywitch and all that kind of sugary stuff. It would have felt so wrong for us to have appeared with Pan’s People prancing about in the background. We didn’t mind the track being played, but we didn’t want to go on TV and look cheesy.

Strat freaked out, poor guy. It was our one chance to sell records, to get known, and what did we do? I think my parents might have liked us to appear too, although Mum made the best of it: ‘Mikey’s been on
Top of the Pops
– nearly!’

* * *

In 1974, we played the
Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
at Wembley Arena. Seeing as it was a respectable venue I decided to invite my parents along. Angie was back from Milan for a few weeks, so I thought it would be a good idea for her to come and accompany them. She hadn’t seen us since we were the warm up act for the warm up act. When my parents arrived in the lobby they were dressed as if they were going to the Opera House: my mother in sequins, my father black tie. They may have been dressed smartly – Angie didn’t have to look too hard to find them amongst the mêlée of Afghan coats – though I think it was the sight of my mother clutching virtually everything she could buy from the merchandising shop that caught her eye. (I suppose it’s just something only a mother would do.) Having taken their seats, my mother had made sure that most of the rows in front and behind knew who she was, pointing to my photos in the programme in case they didn’t know who I was. Pete’s grand entrance was to crawl through a phallic symbol, which started from the back of the stage and ended up right at the front. My father adjusted his ear plugs and settled back in his seat, only to be targeted by a thirty-foot inflatable penis.

By the time we were touring
Selling England
, we were mostly playing theatres which suited us. We always did better in them: the old, fading velvet seats with cigarette burns in them had an atmosphere that matched our music. Plus people were sitting down in seats, which made a big difference from our point of view. Unlike in the early days of our career, they couldn’t just bugger off in the quiet bits.

We had wanted to go further with our staging and it was our production manager, Adrian Selby, who had helped take us to the next level.

Adrian was a friend of a Charterhouse friend: big-faced, big-boned, big-bodied, blustering . . . but in a nice way. And quite fearless, too: he could blag like anything, which is how he’d ended up with us. He came somewhere with us once, just to help out, and then suddenly he was running the show. He was just making it up as he went along and you always felt he was thinking, ‘Phew! Got away with that!’ Which he did. He even got away with organizing one of our American tours and keeping no receipts. The taxman was after us for years after that.

We were about to play the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park when Adrian suggested that we buy a massive gauze curtain to form a backdrop to the stage and illuminate it with twelve UV lights. It sounds like nothing now but it was pretty revolutionary at the time. Suddenly we’d created a platform. It was a slightly ghostly, surreal setting that showcased our songs and was definitely more atmospheric than staring at great big Marshall stacks, especially with Pete’s UV-sensitive eye makeup glowing in the light.

For me, it was a special gig for another reason – along with the Marquee Club, playing the Rainbow Theatre had been one of my ambitions since I’d seen Jimi Hendrix there in 1967. He’d been on a bill with the Walker Brothers, Cat Stevens and Engelbert Humperdinck. Peculiar combinations like that would turn up all the time back then.

The
Selling England
set consisted of big, weirdly curved screens and we also had explosive flashboxes for the end of the show. Pete, however, decided he’d add a bit of extra drama by flying up from the stage on wires at the end of ‘Supper’s Ready’ – which, given that performing ‘Supper’s Ready’ was already a drama in itself, probably wasn’t the best idea. I would often see chaos out of the corner of my eye as Pete went backstage to do his costume change mid-song. It was always touch-and-go whether he’d make it back out in time.

Once we were committed to an idea, we saw it through no matter what. That night at the Rainbow, we dutifully pressed on, the epic finale came, all the explosions went off, Pete cast his black cloak to the ground and up he soared, singing away. Fine – expect that what then happened was his wires began slowly, slowly crossing. Very gradually he was being spun round to face the wrong way, leaving the audience to stare at his back.

Pete spent the rest of the song trying to sing and twist round at the same time – I know because from where I was standing all I could see were his feet paddling in mid-air.

* * *

Tony Smith was a big guy with a big beard that made you think of Father Christmas. He’d worked in concert promotion alongside his father and had promoted tours for the Rolling Stones, the Who and Led Zeppelin. He’d first seen Genesis on the Six Bob Tour, which he’d worked on with Strat, but he now realized that we could really do with some help from someone who knew what they were doing.

The final straw was one night in Glasgow when we played Green’s Playhouse. We’d played there before, a gig I remember mostly because of the absolutely deafening silence that followed our first song. The stage was high at Green’s – this being Glasgow on a Saturday night, you had to be out of reach – and, looking down on the silent crowd, you could just hear a nation deciding: ‘Do we like them? Are they crap?’

After about a decade of silence – I exaggerate only slightly – everyone went completely mad: they loved us. But it did occur to me that it would have only taken one drunken ‘Fuck off! Rubbish!’ and the bottles would have been flying.

No one needed to bottle us off the second time we played Green’s because we never got on. Adrian Selby was in charge that night, ‘charge’ being the word: every single truss on stage was live. There was no way we could have played without electrocuting ourselves. Tony Smith, who was promoting the gig, obviously felt sorry for us because a few days later he agreed to meet us at the office he shared with Harvey Goldsmith in Wigmore Street.

Smith is someone who has the ability to calculate exactly how many people there are in an audience or how many ticket stubs a box office has collected with a single glance: his eyes will take a snapshot and the degree of accuracy will be uncanny. He was always quite direct but when we asked him to manage us he took his time. ‘I think I’m prepared to give it a try,’ he said eventually.

He then worked out we were £400,000 in debt to Charisma. No wonder he was hedging his bets.

We never really knew how we were doing financially because to us Charisma was a bank: we understood that they were lending us money against future earnings but as long as we got our wages and could play our music, we were happy. None of us even handled cash. Rich, our road manager until this point, would get the per diem – what bands call their living allowance – keep our receipts, go back to the office and return with more funds. The rest of us wouldn’t give it much thought.

That’s probably why Gail Colson and Fred Munt thought we were a waste of time, actually – they saw the money going out and nothing coming back in. And it was a lot of money going out, too. Although all the bands on Charisma had overheads, they were nothing like ours. Now that we’d developed our stage production and set we were very protective of it and so when we started touring America, we refused to support other bands. Our thinking had been that as long we were the only act on a bill, we would have complete control over our own lights and show. What we didn’t realize was that (a) the support band role was how you cracked America and (b) that entirely funding our own shows was losing us a fortune. The more we toured the more we were getting into debt.

With Smith at the helm the chaos slowly began to recede; it also helped having someone who’d fight our corner. I never saw his temper first-hand but he could put it on if required. Backstage he could be talking to me and then go next door and start screaming down a phone. The record labels were all a bit scared of him – although with us he took a softer line. He’d just say ‘It’s up to you’ in such a way that we knew it wasn’t up to us at all.

* * *

Now that we were getting an increasingly large crew of our own, my father would often find a way of drawing parallels between his life and mine. In his mind, we were like a ship’s crew: everyone pulling in the same direction, everyone committed to producing the best result and ensuring that equipment worked, schedules were kept, standards upheld.

And it’s true that it did feel like that on the road, surrounded by roadies and technicians. But when it came to making music, Genesis always felt to me more like a Venn diagram: the music came from the place where we interweaved and overlapped. Tony had his feminine, Rodgers and Hammerstein chords, Phil and I were the engine room of rhythms, Steve had his original sound. And Pete ranged across all of us.

It was a way of working where the goal was shared but each of us would be pulling our own way, trying to get what we wanted. The result would always be a compromise but that to me was fine: that was what being in a band was about. I felt that as long as you were getting back more than you were giving up, it was okay.

But we all had our limits.

Headley Grange in East Hampshire was a huge eighteenth-century country house that had fallen on hard times. Then it had Led Zeppelin living in it while they recorded
Physical Graffiti
, which hadn’t helped. When Genesis arrived in June 1974 to write
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
there were rats everywhere, it was barely furnished and Rich, who’d been down before us to suss it out, said he’d found ropes on one of the beds.

By this point I was living in a flat in Weymouth Street, which runs across Harley Street. I’d left Gay Tom and his silver platforms in Earls Court but Bruce, my other flatmate, I couldn’t shake off. We could only afford one bedroom between us so the rota system continued, but Bruce minded sleeping on the sofa less now he knew it was just me in the bed, not Tom and one of his random blokes.

I was first to arrive at Headley Grange and took the nicest bedroom, which had a carpet and was en suite. Then when Tony and Margaret arrived, rather than do the decent thing and offer it to them, I pretended not to notice, so they ended up in a tiny little room up in the roof. (I like to think I’m more generous now, but I did once make Margaret toss for a hotel room in San Sebastian: I’d got a big room with a nice view and Tony and Margaret were overlooking a car park at the back. A straight swap somehow just didn’t occur . . .)