The Living Years (24 page)

I used bass pedals to write ‘Turn It On Again’: it was a quite tiring part to play so I used an echo and only had to play every other note. When we came to record it I knew it would sound better played properly so I ended up sitting on the floor, thumping the pedal with my fist. Then when I got tired, Phil took over: that was where his extra energy was useful.

* * *

‘Mike, I really can’t live in London anymore, on my own with a baby!’

This was one of those phone calls. I hadn’t realized just how unhappy Angie was. She was the first of her friends to have a baby, and she felt isolated living there. She was a country girl at heart, so I agreed she could look for somewhere outside London. I did stress it would have to be the Home Counties as I wanted to be near to London. She managed to sell the house and found a cottage in Sussex pretty quickly. When I arrived at Heathrow my car wasn’t taking me to Courtnell Street but to my new home. It all looked very pretty from the outside but having knocked myself out on the front door I managed to bump my way across the beams to say hello to my family. Angie looked horrified as she’d only taken into account the height of the ceilings from her vantage point and not mine at six feet three. We moved the following year.

I had a problem. There’d be a period of decompression every time I came home from tour. I’d always feel comfortable with the regime on the road. Our days would be completely planned out: a timetable would be slipped under the door of our hotel suite every evening, telling us when to get up and be down in the lobby. We’d be driven to the plane, fly to the next city and then handed a key to our hotel rooms at the other end. It never felt claustrophobic – flying around the world, with people cheering and adoring us every night. I couldn’t really complain.

People would always ask if the band hung out together when we weren’t working, and the answer would be no. We wouldn’t want to go near each other for at least the next six months. It was just that we’d got so close and spent so much time together, we needed a bit of space. The trouble was I didn’t quite know what to fill my time with. Suddenly I would have to make my own decisions.

Angie had settled into country life making friends with other mothers, riding her horse, and generally feeling much happier. I, on the other hand, would come back after a tour, feeling rather important and a bit out of the loop, only to see the horsebox disappearing down the drive as Angie headed off to another dressage competition. (That didn’t necessarily mean the UK: she went to Europe quite regularly.) I didn’t have any hobbies and life seemed to have carried on without me. Angie found a solution when she suggested I take up riding. At first, I didn’t quite see the appeal of riding, and if I’d have read my father’s book, I might not have agreed with her suggestion:

At occasional large combined services’ parades around the Empire the parade orders carried the chilling sentence: ‘Battalion Officers will be mounted.’ . . . I managed to survive except on one occasion when the Army, having checked that my role required me to ride beside my boss at the head of the column, craftily supplied me with a charger normally ridden by a Second-in-Command whose position is at the extreme rear.

When the band struck up and we advanced my horse made determined attempts to get to his right place so that my entry to the parade ground was like something from the Spanish Riding School in Vienna. My only consolation was that our Second-in-Command, who had been given what should have been my charger, had his own problems and spent his time scattering the rearmost platoon like a mounted policeman dispersing a crowd.

I’d been riding for a couple of months – no chargers – when a friend rang up and asked if I want to compete in a celebrity charity event at Tetbury in Gloucestershire. It didn’t sound too bad: a bit of jumping round a little course and then some against-the-clock off-road driving in a 4 x 4. It wasn’t until we were nearly there and I saw the big RAC signs on all the surrounding roads that a bell went off. We were parking the car when none other Captain Mark Phillips, then married to Princess Anne, came over: ‘Oh, Mike! Good man, you’re in my team!’

I’d just about trotted over the odd straw bale at home, but as I walked the course at Tetbury, it turned out to be a load of high dry-stone walls and bloody upturned boats. I’ve never known fear like it to this day. I’d managed to look like the real thing, except my top lip was sticking to my teeth because my mouth was so dry. I was borrowing a horse that I’d never ridden before, and which seemed absolutely huge. Somehow he got me round.

The only problem was that I then had to negotiate the driving part of the event and I couldn’t accelerate because my foot was shaking so much. After repeatedly seeing my life flash in front of me over the course of the day, I’d decided eventing wasn’t for me.

I missed having the blokes around and the camaraderie. That’s when Gordon and Anita Roddick came to the rescue. Angie had been discussing her concerns with Anita and felt I needed a hobby of some sort as I’d said, ‘I’m thinking of moving back to London’. Gordon played polo and invited me along to Terry Hanlon’s yard. We all had bacon rolls and coffee, and then played polo, which was more like rugby on horseback, followed by the pub for lunch. At last, I’d found my hobby.

The problem was that I had soon became overly keen and had got myself a pony. I’d only been playing polo for about a season when Terry suggested I get a second pony in case the one I had went lame. That seemed like a good idea, so I did. A few weeks later, Terry found another pony which he thought was better than the first pony I’d bought. However, if I bought this new pony, pony number three, Terry was sure he could arrange a quick sale of pony number one. This happened a few more times as the months passed.

Angie offered to go and collect the ponies for me at the end of the season. I was pretty sure I still only had two ponies, but when she arrived at the yard, a groom was waiting there with five. Angie got them loaded in and was just about to drive off when the yard owner appeared: ‘See you later for the next lot?’ It turned out I’d got ten.

* * *

In 1980 I was thirty. In my mind the past ten years had been a lifetime: we’d made ten albums, lost Pete and Steve, played Knebworth, toured Japan . . . Of course, none of us knew that we hadn’t yet gone very far at all.

Touring was becoming an increasingly big deal and in America and Europe we’d often find ourselves doing a runner: a dash from the show to the next town that we were playing. While we were on stage playing our encore, the tour manager would be putting friends, families and some drinks in the waiting limos, the engines would be revved up, and as soon as we’d finished we’d rush off stage, grab our robes, jump in the car and off we’d go with our police escort. By the time the last person had left the stadium we’d already be at the airport on the plane to the next date. It was always exciting, although sometimes the excitement would get a bit infectious. We were in Germany when it all got a bit much for one of our drivers and he started getting impatient with some slow-moving traffic. We heard this scraping noise as he started nudging cars out of his path.

After playing such big venues it was always nice to play smaller places again – we were reminded that the music still worked even without all the lights and production – and so in spring 1980 we decided on a ‘thank you’ tour of the smaller English venues in which we’d begun our career. It would be both a return to our roots and a way of showing the fans how much we appreciated their support.

It was odd being back in the old places. We’d played them so often in the early days that even now I can picture them: Bradford St George’s Hall with its tapering balcony and wrought-iron pillars; Birmingham Town Hall with its grand museum-like facade and cramped backstage . . . We even went back to the Blue Boar to see if it was as crap as we’d remembered it: it was.

With Angie pregnant with Tom, and my wanting to be at home more, I drove myself to most of the gigs. The whole tour was filmed by a TV crew who, in the way of all these documentaries, seemed at least as interested in the trucks, flight cases and roadies as the band. Probably more so. I think my parents would have preferred the BBC, rather than ITV, but telly was still telly. As a band there was no danger of fame going to our heads: when we went on to play the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles in May, the security crew wouldn’t allow us back onstage for an encore because we hadn’t got our passes.

Conversations about where we were going musically didn’t tend to happen very often. And normally when they did it was because we’d been drinking. Tony’s tongue was always loosened by a drink, but you had to catch him between the first couple of glasses and the start of the second bottle when he began getting difficult. The only problem was that in the old days by the time you’d convinced Tony about whatever it was, Pete would be so pissed and past caring you’d lost him altogether. I could keep going for longer than both of them but that wasn’t difficult.

In 1981 one of the conversations Tony and I did have over a drink was whether we should change our name. You know when you chat about something knowing that you’re never going to do it? It was one of those conversations. We still talked about it quite enthusiastically anyway.

We’d now reached a point in our careers where we felt we were in danger of becoming a caricature of ourselves and with our new album we wanted to break with the past. Not disassociate ourselves from it, but not repeat it either. We didn’t want to make another album whereby I’d contribute a couple of my acoustic songs, Tony would contribute a couple of his bigger, grander songs, and we’d carry on in the same pattern. This meant less long songs, which was an idea that Tony was less sure about than Phil and me because those were more his area, but we all wanted to move on.

In the end I don’t think we even got as far as seriously putting forward any alternative names – I can’t remember any of them if we did, put it like that. We definitely never mentioned them to Tony Smith: we weren’t that stupid. But Tony’s great strength is that, even if we had, he’d probably have calmly said, ‘Okay . . . let me think about it’ – while screaming silently inside – and then come back to us a few days later and said, ‘On reflection, I think no, probably not.’ He doesn’t overreact, Tony. Which is good.

* * *

We were in the early stages of writing
Abacab
when ‘In the Air Tonight’, the first single from
Face Value
, was released. It went to number 2; the album was released a month later and went to number 1. Phil came in the next morning and we all looked at each other: ‘That’s not bad, is it?’ We were all quite surprised, Phil included.

The timing was important: had
Face Value
been released during a gap for Genesis then it’s possible that Phil might have considered not returning. I’d have understood it if he had moved off – but as it was the songs we were working on were sounding good and Phil, like Tony and me, was the kind of person who would get very engrossed in the here and now. Plus, I think Phil enjoyed what we did as a band too much to leave. The fact that we carried on making group albums even after his solo career took off seems to me to speak for itself.

Face Value
was produced by Hugh Padgham, who had also worked with Pete since he had gone solo. We now brought him in as a co-producer on
Abacab
. Hugh was the first person to make us sound on record like we sounded live. We had real fire playing live but we had never really captured it on record before. Hugh, like Phil, also worked fast. Writing and recording had already got much quicker now that there were just three of us in the band. Two yeses and a no, two no thanks and a yes: done. In any case, we wanted to move faster than Pete. ‘It’s coming out at Easter,’ Peter would always say when you asked him about his latest album. ‘Which Easter?’ you’d say. (It always struck me as ironic that one of the things that bothered Pete about Genesis was not having enough time to write the lyrics. It was only when he began to make his own solo records that he discovered it wasn’t Genesis that was the problem. Lyrics have their own tempo.)

Personally my own preference would always be to do three albums in the time it would take other more self-conscious artists to produce one. Two of the albums would be likely to be good, and one perhaps would turn out bad, but it would be better to let the songs have their own life rather than labour them and lose the momentum. I’ve always felt that what we produced was, literally, a record of a certain moment in time. In another year we’d be sounding a different way and be writing different things, so what was important was capturing how we sounded right at that minute.

Phil had used the Phenix Horns on
Face Value
and was keen to try some brass on
Abacab
. Tony wasn’t sure, but I was open to the idea and so flew with Phil and Hugh out to LA, where the Phenix Horns were based. Phil had been building them up as an incredibly tight, iconic four-piece and I was ready to be impressed. I soon had to revise my expectations. The first hour and a half was spent sorting out various demands: drugs, food, drink . . . Fair enough, I thought, but then we went in for the first take and it was appalling. I looked round at Phil and Hugh, and Phil and Hugh very definitely didn’t look back at me. The second take wasn’t much better and probably slightly worse: out of time, out of tune, all over the shop.

Hugh, in those days, had a slightly boyish look and always wore a big, slightly frayed sweater. He’d have a grin that he used to pull out when it was going well – his eyes would light up – and a frown that came out when it wasn’t going how he thought it should. It wasn’t a mega-frown: just a worried look. Concerned. We’d all seen it when we were trying to prove to him that a bit we were working on was actually okay.

Hugh had taken his sweater off in LA but he was definitely wearing that little concerned look of his. ‘Is there a problem?’ I asked eventually. ‘No . . . ’ Hugh said slowly. ‘They’ll get there . . . ’