The Living Years (21 page)

But it was when we flew out on Concorde to play Brazil in May 1977 that we knew we’d reached the next level.

* * *

Concorde had only begun commercial flights in 1976 so not only were we one of the first big bands to play South America, we were also probably the quickest to get there.

We weren’t quite sure what playing Brazil actually entailed, but the problems began even before we got there. The Brazilian currency, the cruzeiro, was totally worthless in the wider world and there were endless transatlantic phone calls between Tony Smith and the Brazilian promoters, Globo, who finally came up with the brilliant solution of paying us in coffee beans. At that point Tony Smith decided to get on a plane himself.

Payment wasn’t the only issue: Tony had heard various stories about the monopoly Globo had over record companies and their ability to impound equipment if things weren’t going their way. Given that we had a gruelling European tour ahead of us, Tony wanted a cast-iron guarantee that our equipment would have safe passage out of the country as soon as our shows finished. Globo kept stalling but Tony wasn’t backing down and insisted on meeting the Globo boss. The Globo boss kept insisting he wasn’t available. It was cat and mouse for a while but finally Tony secured a meeting. He was picked up at his hotel by a couple of heavies in a limo who immediately headed for the hills. Naturally Tony started to get a bit hot under the collar once they’d left the main road for a dirt track – he loved Genesis but I don’t think he was quite ready to put his life on the line. When the limo finally pulled up outside a huge mansion on the top of a mountain, miles away from anywhere, he was already picturing the gun that was about to be put to his head.

As it turned out, the head of Globo was like someone from
The Sopranos
: ‘Tony! How ya doin’?’ He was even from Chicago, although the effect was spoiled a bit by the fact that he was seriously vertically challenged (something even his wingmen couldn’t hide). But Tony got his signature on the dotted line and we all thought the fee sounded quite substantial, too – until we realized we were expected to play our three-hour set to 20,000 people not once, but twice a day.

It got worse: as soon as we arrived I managed to get severe food poisoning. I was so sick I could hardly leave the bathroom let alone manage six hours on stage but cancelling was out of the question. Bodyguards were the norm in Brazil but even they might not have been able to protect us from 20,000 unhappy punters with typically fiery South American temperaments, all of whom, I imagined, would be glad of any excuse for a riot.

I thought that if I had a show to do, I would do it, even if I fainted in the process. Which I did. Naturally, the band played on.

In the end the only solution was to get a doctor to sit at the side of the stage with a couple of syringes and every so often during the set he’d haul me off and jab me in the backside, which is how I discovered I was allergic to the anti-nausea drug, Maxolon. (The problem was that it was like a mega-dose of speed: I couldn’t stand still and played double time so the band couldn’t keep up.)

Tony finally called Angie in the UK. She was three months pregnant with Kate and was enduring her own throwing up sessions so couldn’t face coming to Brazil. He told her that it was quite serious and that she should jump on Concorde the following day as it still looked as though I wasn’t getting any better.

Angie hadn’t really given Brazil or Concorde for that matter a second thought as she’d been so preoccupied with her own issues. When she did finally board the plane it dawned on her that when it broke the sound barrier there would be a G-force sensation. I think she clung on white-knuckled for a while, waiting for the impact only to be told by the cabin crew that they’d been through the sound barrier half an hour before. The other thing that panicked her was when the captain announced they’d be landing in Dakar in twenty minutes. (She thought he meant Dhaka, Bangladesh, and had got on the wrong plane, with no currency.) After the refuelling in Dakar I’m not sure how much she loved Genesis. Especially when she arrived. The allergy to Maxolon had been detected and I was on another drug, which had kicked in immediately. I was looking a lot better than her by the time of her arrival.

So much so that I suggested we went to the beach with the others. She sat there quietly while I went out to body surf. Suddenly a large wave threw me back into the sea, and I felt I was in a washing machine and couldn’t get out. Every time I came up for air, arms flailing, another wave would take me back down. To this day Angie says she just thought I was having a good time and just waved back at me.

* * *

Despite supersonic transatlantic flights, keeping in contact in the mid-seventies wasn’t easy. If you were phoning from the States it meant booking a call through and the connection was always terrible. I usually forgot the time difference and called Angie at 3 a.m. while I was with the band backstage, drinking, laughing and generally having a piss up. That never went down well.

With my parents some of the gaps in communication were bridged by tour books: spiral-bound records of the hotels we were staying at, the venues we were playing and all kinds of other information that were put together by the tour manager. These were given to families and crew each time we went out on the road. Mum used to love getting the tour book out each morning. She’d sit down at the breakfast table in Farnham and read it over her toast and marmalade: ‘Oh, that’s nice! Mikey’s in Boise, Idaho today!’

But for me showing my parents my touring schedule was also one of the ways I could try to get them to understand what my life was like now.

I was very conscious of trying to prove to my father that it was going okay, even if sometimes I wasn’t sure that it was, and so when Angie and I went over to Farnham I would usually bring along a list of the shows we were playing.

Dad would pour Angie and me a glass of white wine. It’d be the same bottle he’d opened the last time we were there, and then put back on the sideboard. (My parents didn’t drink wine: that generation liked their spirits too much.) Then we’d sit down and look at the tour books and he’d say things like, ‘A lot of travelling involved there’, or, ‘A lot of logistics’, but I don’t know how much it meant to him really. Ironic to think that, as a teenager, I didn’t want him to understand me. Here I was a few years later, wishing he could.

Nevertheless, I felt that looking through our schedule with him was one way of showing him not just the progress we were making, but also the similarities between his world in the Navy and mine as a musician – similarities I was beginning to notice more and more. I showed him photos of us on stage, too: I didn’t know about hurrah cruises at this point but I felt that he instinctively understood about presentation, the need to put on an impressive display, and that was very much what we were doing with our live shows.

* * *

In June 1977 we played Earls Court with a lighting rig consisting of forty-eight jumbo-jet landing lights – a very original look at the time. It was a weird experience for me because I knew Earls Court well from being taken there by Dad to see the Royal Tournament when I was little.

The annual Royal Tournament began in 1880 in Islington and then moved to Olympia and that’s where Dad had commanded the Chatham Field Gun Crew in the 1930s. The competition was taken very seriously in the Navy:

Two crews and a maintenance staff went into training early in the year. They had their own training areas and accommodation and were treated as very much an elite with special diets, medical attention, physical training and so on as no one in the barracks wished to occur the odium of the adversely affecting their performance.

By the time I was born and my father was Commander of Whale Island, the Royal Tournament had moved to Earls Court. Dad’s role was now less active:

I had to take Royal Box duties and ensure that the distinguished incumbent knew when to acknowledge the innumerable salutes from the arena . . . I reacted to the sounds and smells of crews in training and in action like an old war horse to the sound of the trumpet.

It was almost as nostalgic for me being back at Earls Court, except where I’d been used to seeing the backstage area divided up into straw-lined stables full of Army horses, there were now six crew buses, ten lorries and backstage catering. And whereas the merchandise stalls had been arranged with displays of toy tanks and tin soldiers (Dad always used to buy me a set of these), they were now selling T-shirts and fluorescent green plastic necklaces. I shut my eyes and opened them and my brain wasn’t quite able to process it, especially as Earls Court in 1977 was full of red, white and blue bunting for the Queen’s jubilee. It took a second to work out which decade I was in.

I felt our light show, with those jumbo-jet landing lights, was increasingly taking over from what Pete had done with his stories. It never really occurred to me to miss his mystique because we were still painting pictures, setting a scene, creating an atmosphere, only with lights not words. In particular ‘Los Endos’, the song with which we ended our set, was a huge peak musically and visually, especially with two drum kits on stage so that Phil could go back and play drums alongside our new drummer, Chester Thompson.

Chester hadn’t been our first replacement for Phil. Prior to Chester, we’d done one tour with Bill Bruford, who was a friend of Phil from Brand X, a new jazz-fusion band that Phil had been moonlighting in. Bill was up, noisy, direct and humorous. Getting him on board had been a bit of a coup – he was quite a name in America from his time with Yes – but he was a funny choice for a band like Genesis. Bill wasn’t a session drummer: he couldn’t wear a hat and be someone else. He came from that jazz world where every time you play it, it should be different. That’s fine to a degree, but there are certain key moments in certain songs that need to be played a certain way.

Chester Thompson was from Baltimore and an incredible drum–mer. However, he was not a morning man. In London he used to stay at a hotel near Marble Arch and he’d never be in the lobby when I arrived with a driver to take him to rehearsals. One day, after I’d been waiting for ages for him to show up, Chester finally came down wearing a long leather coat. Nothing odd about that, but when he went to get into the back seat of the car, he suddenly stopped halfway. His body was half in, half out and he couldn’t go any further. I was starting to get a bit worried – was he ill? Had he had a stroke? Then I saw that he’d got caught on the car’s coat hook. Half asleep, he’d put his coat on and left a bloody great coat hanger poking out the back of the collar. Then when he’d got in the car, he’d managed to hang himself up.

Chester hadn’t known much about Genesis before he joined the band (he’d nearly been scared off by a rumour that he’d have to wear a costume) but maybe that was why it worked out so well. It was good to have someone who wasn’t too in love with what we did.

With both Chester and Phil playing, ‘Los Endos’ was a thrilling finale. It was so impressive that I didn’t realize there wasn’t anyone singing until a few years later when Elton John pointed it out: ‘I can’t believe you end the show on an instrumental: what a great idea!’ I had to think about it – did we really end on a song with no one singing, no one out front on stage? It sounded suicidal if you put it like that.

Our three nights at Earls Court were one of the moments when I felt we knew who we were as a band: with two drummers and all the lights it felt as though we were going into battle, all the guns blazing. When Pete had left, we had wandered around a bit and taken a while to find out who we were again, but I felt now we were planting our flag in the ground.

And then Steve left.

Steve’s leaving was strange. It was almost a non-moment. We were mixing our live album,
Seconds Out
, in Trident Studios in July 1977 and Phil, who was in a cab on his way in, drove past Steve in the street.

‘Do you want a lift?’

‘No, no. I’ll see you later.’

Steve never did make it in.

I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t realize how unhappy Steve was a lot of the time that he was in the band. We weren’t the most sensitive lot and Steve was quite a reserved person, as we all were, but I thought he was quite enjoying himself.

We’d always been guided by the rule that the song was king: the best bits got used, regardless of who had written them. That was the theory. In practice Tony and I probably lobbied a bit more successfully for our bits than Steve did for his. Unlike us, Steve was never an arguer and because he wasn’t as noisy, he tended to get hurt a bit more too.

Steve was such an excellent guitarist but my overriding impression of him as a songwriter is that he always wrote inside the box, which was what we tried to avoid. And when he tried to write outside of the box, it was great when it worked.

I never wrote much with Steve, which was strange. In the beginning it may have been because, in a funny way, I was missing Ant. What bothered me later was that Steve had gone off to make his first solo album just as we were starting to make
A Trick of the Tail
: it was all very well for Steve but the band would have ground to a halt if Tony and I hadn’t pooled all our riffs into the album. But then perhaps it was Steve’s experience of making a solo record, combined with seeing Pete’s solo career also start to take off, that had made him think that he should be going in that direction too. In any case, and as with Pete, I didn’t want to sell it to him if his heart wasn’t in it.

In terms of my personal Richter scale, losing Steve didn’t really register in the way that losing Ant and Pete had. For me, Ant leaving was the worst; Pete was very bad but there wasn’t quite the same depth of emotion because Ant had been my partner from the start, whereas Pete had been a unit with Tony. Steve was always a slight outsider. It was true that I hadn’t grown up with Phil either, but Tony, Phil and I had developed a strong musical bond.

For some time I’d had a sense of a three-piece bubbling under the surface, that our strongest moments were when it was just Tony, Phil and me playing – now we’d find out if I’d been right.