Genesis in the media

More Hackett media stuff, this time an interview including him apparently saying Tchaikovsky originated heavy metal.

Quote from thewatcher

I don't know if this counts but I thought it was kind of cool.

Episode 3 of Netflix the Night Stalker, documentary about the 1984/1985 serial killer in LA. The killer's friend is wearing a Genesis Abacab t-shirt. This is contemporary footage from the time.

What is with the band and the old serial killer connection?!

Oh, it counts. This is exactly the sort of thing I set up this thread for! Good spot. And a serial killer connection pre-dating the Ellis novel and spin-off film.

Late last year, as ever not just late to the party but arriving well after everyone has left, I watched crime drama The Fall, several years after its acclaimed original run. Officers are trying to come up with a name, 'Operation [...]' for the investigation into serial killings. One of them reads out a list of candidate names to the chief investigating officer played by Gillian Anderson, and she's not happy with any of them, dismissing them all for various reasons, including "Genesis" to which she rolls her eyes and says "My least favourite band..." (I think she then adds, "other than U2").

A very tenuous one, but yet another serial killer connection, sort of.

Didn't want to start another thread so have plonked this in here - cartoon that's an ok-ish PC, but TB and MR... the latter looks like Clapton

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This is better - Hackett's a bit borderline but the others are quite good

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I zeroed in on something else in this Sky News piece that had me chuckling: it's what Robert Hutton, in his writings about journalese, calls 'The Variations Enigma'. This is the syndrome where a news writer must use varying references to the subject if he/she/it is being mentioned several times (he cites an example of a writer who'd already said 'pizza' so then had to say 'the popular Italian bread-based dish'). So in this piece Collins is:

the former Genesis singer

the singer

the former Genesis drummer and frontman

the balding singer-songwriter

- after which he can safely be referred to simply as 'Collins'.

This exemplar of the Variations Enigma is especially good in that it illustrates how the writer runs out of steam and increasingly has to scrabble around for new descriptors, hence the final and most strained one, "the balding singer-songwriter". But there was potential further material that could've have been drawn on - "thrice-married", "the serial divorcee", "the once-ubiquitous vocalist/skinsman", "multi-millionaire 80s songster", "progger-turned-popster", "the now-seated singer" etc etc etc - they could have kept it going but maybe they are saving the others up for other features, or perhaps the newsdesk have to share out the allocation.

Couple of footnotes to the Sky piece. (Is it two footnotes or one feetnote?) It was nice to see Banquet Records featured. It's in Kingston where I lived for ages and still have a flat I use occasionally. The shop was originally Beggars Banquet (also once a label) and I spent a lot of time in there, much of it bent over the Backbreaker. This was a wire bin full of 7" singles being sold off at between 10p - £1. I'd spend ages stooped over it, riffling through the singles and got into quite a few acts new to me that way. I still have a load of cassettes from the 80s compiled from various of those singles.

In recent years the shop has hosted quite a few gigs itself, as well as collaborating with a local club to host some including The Who and Elbow.

The other footnote relates to the 'variations enigma' syndrome which I've since discovered is also known as 'second mentions' and I was delighted to find there are twitter accounts which collect them. From these I've seen examples including ketchup (the tea-time favourite), tahini (the toasted sesame paste), two lobsters (the snappy pair), the Canary Islands (the alluring archipelago), the Joker (Batman's clown-faced nemesis), and one someone unearthed from The Times in 1827 which mentioned water then went on to refer to "the liquid element" and "the life necessity", showing it's not just modern-day journalese.

I used to work in a bit of the BBC that wrote programme billings for listings. In the database were billings for Columbo episodes that variously referred to the dishevelled detective, the crumpled sleuth, and the rumpled cop, whereas Cadfael episodes had the ecclesiastical detective and cowled sleuth. A colleague and I lobbied to include monk dick and monastic gumshoe but they didn't make the cut.

What might Genesis second mentions be?

the pop-progsters

the Invisible Touch trio

the stadium-filling threesome

the veteran rockers

the I Can't Dance hitsters

Mama's boys

the Carpet Crawling combo