The Living Years (9 page)

Christmas Cottage in Dorking was where Genesis spent the winter of 1969 and where we really became a band. If we had been in London, we’d have been going out to see other bands all the time, comparing ourselves, thinking about what everyone else was doing. Instead we were in a beautiful but incredibly remote part of the country, determined to find out where we could go musically. This involved lots of long improvising sessions.

Rich had secured the cottage for us – it belonged to his parents who were trying to sell it – and we moved there in November 1969. We parked at the bottom of the drive and then had to climb up about a hundred earth steps in the cold to get to the cottage – not great given that we were laden down with our new gear. Ant, because he’d been ill with bronchitis, got away with carrying two microphone stands, but the rest of us had to deal with Tony’s organ.

The organ had been bought with money from our parents, something that my father had organized. Our parents hadn’t had much contact with each other since the renegotiation of the Decca contract but my father had rung them up when we’d decided to turn professional:

‘Now listen here, we should have a conversation about helping these young boys.’

‘Listen here’ was how he always began.

I’m not sure exactly what he said next but my father would have wanted to talk about the best way to help us go forwards: planning and organization were his things. And whatever he did say must have been persuasive because our parents agreed to contribute £200 each to help us buy equipment, so not only could we get Tony an organ, we could also buy a PA so you could actually hear Pete’s vocals. We also got a bass guitar and amp for me (I’d been borrowing until then). Transporting the lot down to Dorking hadn’t been easy. I was in Pete’s taxi, driving behind Tony in his Austin 35, and there’d been a speaker cabinet completely filling Tony’s rear window.

We argued like fuck in that cottage. It was a mixture of love and hate with probably a bit of murder as well. Tony, Ant, Pete and I were all incredibly strong-willed, all determined to prove ourselves musically and determined to get our own way. To make matters worse we were crushed inside the small cottage. Rich, now officially our roadie, had to sleep on the floor in the living room: he couldn’t sleep in his old bedroom because Tony and Pete were in there.

There was no furniture except the beds and it was always dark because we rehearsed in the living room with a blanket over the window even though we were miles from anywhere. When you’re not very good – which we weren’t – you tend to turn the volume up to compensate.

Someone would always be storming off upstairs or out of the front door and we’d have to regroup. Being a Libran I tended to be a bit calmer but I think we would have killed each other without Rich. Or starved. As well as being the peacemaker Rich was our cook, which meant trying to keep all of us fed on a virtually non-existent budget. Occasionally I would go home and Mum would slip me £10 and send me back with a fruit box (being the son of a sailor she might have thought I had a tendency towards scurvy) but none of us wanted to ask our parents for more money. This meant we lived on sausages, potatoes and yoghurt, which Pete always kept in a bowl in the airing cupboard. There was one occasion when Ant’s mother sent us sweetbreads. Rich took one look at them and said, ‘What the hell am I going to do with those?’

God knows what John Mayhew, our new drummer, made of it all.

After John Silver had left for America, Pete had, once again, found us a replacement drummer and a professional one at that. The new John had been a carpenter but had given it up to go touring with bands. It showed. When we started doing gigs, John would arrive backstage with a little bag containing fresh clothes to change into after he’d got sweaty playing. We were incredulous. We would all go onstage in what we were wearing. I would write all day in T-shirt and jeans, go and play, and then go home.

The problem was that while John was a good carpenter (he made a couple of Leslie speakers for Tony’s organ) he was possibly better at carpentry than drumming. Pete would often have to show John how his part should go – not that Pete could play it either but he’d explain the feel. Which was pretty frustrating for both of them.

Pete often found it hard to put across what he was thinking musically. He’d sit down at the piano and play us a piece and then at the end of it say, ‘No, no, that’s not right. What I meant was this.’ Each of us had to get the others to use their imaginations to see what something could become, to transport them and make them understand how it sounded in our own head – but Pete never managed to sell things very well. There’d be lots of ums and ers.

Pete composed on the piano but he wasn’t allowed to play it: that was Tony’s territory. If Pete wrote something, Tony would have to learn to play it himself. In many ways they were the best of friends but Tony was competitive and there was a friction between them that didn’t exist between Ant and me. With our two twelve-string guitars we were busy creating a distinctive, unusual sound, coming up with new, interesting chords and experimenting with tunings. (A new tuning would be a great way of finding inspiration: it’d be like turning over a new page.) We were taking folk music and developing it into another area, I felt, and we’d often carry on when the others had finished for the day.

We had a strong work ethic, undoubtedly – we were very serious about everything back then. We simply realized that if you worked until 4 a.m. one morning you probably wouldn’t start work until midday the next day. Better to get going by ten in the morning (although none of us were early risers) and finish for supper at around eight. Occasionally we’d try and work after that but because we were tired and full up, we never really achieved anything. Rich, Ant and I had usually smoked a bit of grass by then, too, which had an effect.

Our blackout of other music wasn’t intentional either – we’d hear of other bands ‘getting it together in the country’ but we weren’t deliberately trying to keep ourselves pure. We listened to King Crimson’s
In the Court of the Crimson King
endlessly, which made us want to get a mellotron, and
Days of Future Passed
by the Moody Blues. Ant and I also listened to Crosby, Stills and Nash. However, now that I’d started writing I found I didn’t really want to listen to other bands. The music I’d heard between the ages of eight and fourteen – the Kinks, the Small Faces, Joni Mitchell and the Beatles, most of all – would always have the biggest impact. I knew that was where I would find my inspiration.

* * *

It wasn’t all work. Occasionally I would escape from the cottage for the night to visit Josie in Brighton, where she was now living. This was a drag because I’d recently got rid of my Ford Anglia so was back to a motorbike, a Triumph 250. That motorbike and I were never meant to be as one and riding it down to Sussex on a wet, windy winter’s night was pretty grim. Especially the time, after not having seen Josie for weeks, I got there and found someone else in her bed.

Things didn’t improve when Josie came to stay at the cottage and there were endless me-or-the-band ultimatums. A group is a very selfish sort of being: it soaks you up and doesn’t leave time for much else. People on the outside suffer.

Pete had a very attractive girlfriend called Jill, who was more forgiving than Josie. Pete would sometimes disappear off to go and see her. This caused some resentment, although we tolerated it as long as it didn’t get in the way.

Ant also had a girlfriend – a dancer in the Ballet Rambert – but she had broken up with him in the summer. I’ve never known anyone take a split so badly. But musically, if not emotionally, Ant was far ahead of the rest of us: the songs he was writing – such as ‘Let Us Now Make Love’ – were by comparison so grown-up melodically and lyrically. Something changed about Ant after Lucy, although I didn’t see it at the time. I just felt that there was no room in his life for anything apart from music.

* * *

Dad probably felt somewhat alarmed whenever the band had a weekend off and I turned up back at Hill Cottage. I never saw my father without a jacket and he usually wore a tie as well, whereas in 1969 the look I was aiming for was something between a Rastafarian and the Beatles. I’m not sure I got the hairstyle right (it was extremely long and messy) but my wardrobe was spot on: flares and a Second World War military jacket which smelled as though an entire battalion had worn it at one stage or another. That my father could have seen this jacket as an insult never occurred to me – I wasn’t even trying to rebel at this stage, I was just being a typical teenager. With his usual forbearance Dad refrained from ever saying anything – although it was at around this point that he summoned me to his club in London for a talk about my future.

There’d always been an open invitation to meet Dad at his club, the Royal Naval and Military Club in St James’s, and I’d always put it off. I wasn’t sure how well things were going with the band so I had been deliberately keeping him at arm’s length. Now I knew I couldn’t avoid it any longer.

The club was in a very austere building with very austere residents and a very austere code. I’d been told to wear a jacket and tie but decided on an imaginative interpretation and arrived wearing my mauve platforms together with a blue velvet suit I’d bought from Kensington Market. The look of horror on the doorman’s face when I handed him my Afghan coat was absolutely priceless – he couldn’t hold it far enough away from him. The smell never went from those coats. Ever.

I met my father, who was dressed in a Savile Row three-piece suit, in a vast room filled with leather chairs and endless portraits of admirals. Like the other residents of the club, the waiters tried hard to ignore me and carry on as normal. I remember thinking my appearance must have shocked my father but I never sensed for one minute that he was embarrassed. This was extraordinary given that, if roles had been reversed, I would have probably kicked myself straight back outside.

I was expecting a grilling as we sat down for lunch but instead we had a real, proper, grown-up conversation for what felt like the first time. Dad had obviously come to terms with any regret he’d felt over my failure to follow him into the Navy and although he laid the Foreign Office down as an alternative career, he didn’t sell it that hard. I think he’d realized it was a different era and that the Commonwealth was going to shrink. Privately I didn’t consider the civil service for even a second, which might have been why I suggested journalism as a fallback plan.

I wonder now if maybe Dad just wanted to show me his world over luncheon: he always looked right in London with his suit, polished shoes and his umbrella over his arm. In any case, I didn’t come away depressed. In fact, as the doorman handed me back my coat (pinched between the very tips of his fingers), I think I was feeling quite positive.

* * *

By this time, we’d been shut away for a bit too long. You could tell because when we played our first proper gig at Brunel University in January 1970, it took us forever to work out how to set up: who should go on the left, who should go on the right. At one point we had Tony at the front, then Ant behind him, then John and his drums behind that: three deep. I have no idea where Pete and I ended up. The problem was partly that we’d seen so few bands play we had no idea how you were supposed to do it; it was also because we’d always sat round in a circle while we were at the cottage. The idea that you should be facing outwards, towards an audience, was quite a novelty.

Our next gig was at a works do for a company in Wolverhampton that made screws. The audience had wanted a dance band and hadn’t got a clue what we were about. We’d be playing a song in straight 4/4 time and then suddenly go into 7/8, at which point the mood would collapse and everyone would have to stand around awkwardly for a couple of bars, shuffling their feet, until we got back into 4/4 so that they could start dancing again. It didn’t really faze us but we were very conscious it couldn’t have been much fun for anybody else.

After the gig we slept on the floor of the staff changing rooms and I woke up in the middle of the night dripping with sweat because the underfloor heating had come on. It was uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as the next evening when we played at a youth club in Bramhall and spent the night in a squat in Buxton. It was January and half the windows in the place were gone: guys were chopping up furniture to keep the fire going.

Our transportation at this point consisted of a blue-and-white Rank Hovis McDouggal bread van, which was a gift from Rich’s father. He had worked for Hovis until he retired and, given Rich’s parents’ hostility towards the music scene, it was somewhat ironic how in debt to the Macphails Genesis now were. The only problem was that Rich himself couldn’t drive and so I ended up having to teach him. To give him his credit he was a quick learner: he only hit a car once. Fortunately it happened the day after one of our better-paying gigs. We were paid £50 and Rich did exactly £50 of damage.

The bread van wasn’t comfortable. Until John Mayhew put his carpentry skills to use and made some back seats, someone would always have to sit on the battery, and, by the time we’d packed the gear in, it was incredibly cramped. Then, perhaps as a result of the Wolverhampton and Buxton misery, Pete decided he wanted to take his mattress with him to our next gig. We sat and watched him drag it down the steep hill from the cottage and wondered how on earth he thought it was going to fit in the back with the gear. Looking back, maybe we were a bit jealous too. I mean, whoever said that you couldn’t bring your bed on the road?

Pete always did think outside the box. Unlike the rest of us, he also thought about the business side of things. At the cottage he’d sit by the phone for hours with a lists of agents to ring up and then cross them off one by one. He also had perseverance, which was good, because the number of agents who promised to come down and see us but then developed a puncture en route to Dorking was unbelievable.

Finally, at about the time we were thinking of leaving the cottage, Pete got us an agent called Terry King who booked us for some London shows. (He had found Terry by looking through the back pages of
Melody Maker
; we’d look at the listings and find out which enviable bands had five shows in a row, and then try to find out who their agent was.) Although Terry was good at getting us gigs, some would be at nightclubs and Genesis were not a nightclub band.